More on prison reform

[Gabri Rigotti]

https://dailyfriend.co.za/2024/07/06/priorities-for-the-gnu/ 

... 

"Communities and people, especially children, should not be left unguarded against psychopathic and violent criminals created by a prison system that essentially serves to brutalize and pathologize even essentially harmless people (non-violent criminals). "

This is an interesting voice ... A writer from the black community.

Whilst we should strive for the purity horizons of libertarian individualism, using Trevor's differentiation, we have to deal with the real world ...

Moving towards jailing the violent only, and for longer periods as existing jail space becomes available with the non jailing of the non violent (the latter to directly compensate their victims through a lifetime of Sundays of paid community service if necessary) would be a real world step to take ...

Taking incremental real world steps towards a freer society, essentially gradualism, rather than demanding absolute purity of principle from the get go, may be the only practical path ... ?

Like the Rand Paul way as example, a libertarian senator in the American Congress ...

Stephen and others, and Trevor of course, your thoughts?

(I was a lifelong purity fanatic ... 😅 ... still healing from the life wounds of that approach ... ) ... 

[Stephen vJ]

Prison is a terrible thing. It's barbaric, like slavery gone nationalized, non-profit and sugar-free (puns abound).

In thinking about prison, most people make three huge and fundamental mistakes:

a) they think prison is costless or worth the cost (it is not, the cost is enormous and the ROI is always negative)

b) they think only guilty people get locked up (shocker, the majority of inmates in most countries are very likely innocent)

c) they think somehow the same government who botched everything else from road maintenance, license department, SAA, Eskom, SA Post Office, etc. somehow manage to run a "working" prison system.

In most countries, if you are "caught" or arrested for something, you go to jail until trial, then if you are innocent, they let you go... but this could be months or years after being arrested, meaning even innocent people lose their jobs, custody over children, houses (including any future ability to get a mortgage), other assets, etc. before getting back out on the street. Even those who are found guilty are often not, as recent retrials based on new DNA technology has proven.

I'm not talking isolated cases - I'm talking the vast majority of arrests in most of the world. Just last night there was a story of a couple who spent 3 months in jail waiting for a trial (during which they lost their house & cars) then another 8 years locked up for killing their daughter... turns out, their dogs killed the girl, but because she went to hospital first, doctors cleaned up her wounds before she died, so the coroner wrote "homicide" on the death certificate, because to him the injuries seemed consistent with knife wounds, not dog bites... as you would expect after a doctor got in there with a scalpel to try and save her life.

Sure, they can sue for wrongful arrest and imprisonment, but that won't bring back their house, dogs, cars, jobs, marriage, etc... which is part of why in South Africa, which has a history of violent arrests for reasons little more than your skin colour, changed the law in the 90's so that a person may not be held for more 24 hours without formal charges and a trial. To the rest of the world it seems weird that SA would let violent criminals like Oscar Pistorius walk free pending trial, but I think it is one of those cases where SA got it right and the rest of the world is still living in the dark ages.

If I was going to be arrested, I would much rather it be in SA than in the US or Canada, where being falsely accused will at the very least cost you your job. That's not even talking about how, for the actually guilty, prison is just a more acceptable word for long term public torture chambers.

Stephen.

On Jul 6, 2024, at 02:05, Gabri Rigotti <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Stephen vJ]

Gabri, at the end of your post below you said being a purity fanatic did not work out well for you. I think it is important to have both tools - pure theory as well as practicality - and then know when to apply each i.e. know how and when to make that distinction. It is not one or the other all the time, just in each case.

In the case of prison, the theory and the practical reality are worlds apart. In theory, I would support locking bad people up in prison... in practice, prisons / jails are some of the worst things known to man.

Stephen.

On Jul 6, 2024, at 16:18, Stephen vJ <sjaar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Prison is a terrible thing. It's barbaric, like slavery gone nationalized, non-profit and sugar-free (puns abound).

[Gabri Rigotti]

Yes, Stephen, we should not be sacrificing ourselves solely for the sake of purity in a massively impure world but making choices that even if impure are the smallest possible, least worst departures from purity that enable our survival ...

Art of Life, not easy ... if one seeks to live with integrity ... 😅

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[Gabri Rigotti]

All good points you raise Stephen ...

The dog bite "homicide" example is sickening!

In South Africa the potholes and the load shedding and a myriad other poor service delivery instances are minor relative to violent criminality.

One cannot undo murder and rape, whereas stolen lipstick, stolen bread is mickey mouse in the scheme of things.

Practical real world strategies to reduce violent criminality:

1. Incarcerate only the violent, for longer periods and with higher standards for parole.

2. Everyone else to compensate their victims for the full costs incurred including those of the law enforcement procedures.

This will :

a) disincentivise many from doing violence as the consequences for violence as opposed to non violence are massive in comparison.

b) promote a legal culture of no crime if there is no victim ...

c) maintain breadwinning among the most vulnerable ... for example a working mother shoplifting some triviality like lipstick or perfume or other is not removed from her breadwinning role ... 

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[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Gabri, I think you're making a number of rather generous assumptions. You jump right over the entire law and order straight to the correctional services part. You are assuming, for example;

1. That someone knows that a crime was committed. In reality there are many crimes that go undetected and even more that go unreported... and I'm not talking petty theft, I'm talking rape of prostitutes, murder of homeless people, schemes and scams of all sort, etc.

2. That it is known who committed the crime. In reality there is often not even a suspect... in most murder cases, the spouse is automatically top of the list, but that's only based on probability and the probabilities thin out substantially going down the list from there.

3. That there is evidence available, sufficient to link the suspect to the crime. Most often there is not and even when there is, it is very often disturbed or materially disrupted by police, medical personnel, etc. during the commission of the crime or the discovery of it.

4. That the suspect can be located and arrested. In Africa very few people have formal addresses, but this is no less a problem in the USA where each county does it's own thing and simply driving a few miles will take you out of the jurisdiction where the crime happened.

5. That there is a process, court and judge (or jury) available. Even when they are, they are slow and expensive... but in most of the world, they are not readily available at all.

6. That there is a competent prosecutor who is able to present the case adequately to get a conviction. Keep in mind you only need to score 50% in exams to get a university degree.

7. That there is a competent enough advocate to ensure innocent bystanders are not punished for something they did not do. Keep in mind that many cases do not happen in the big city or are perpetrated by people who cannot afford big-shot defence lawyers.

8. That the compensation can be administered or the criminal imprisoned. I've made my point about prisons, but when I was very young, my grandmother worked for a liquidation & sequestration lawyer... the amount of paperwork and social work that goes into getting people to pay their 10 cents per week on thousands in debts is crazy, to the point where the claimant often just gives up on recovering it.

Those are some big assumptions with substantial costs and implications. If all the costs in terms of money and trouble are considered, most people may well opt for simply getting a shotgun and sorting it out right at the source.

We know rule of law is an important (possibly the most important) ingredient in a prosperous society, so I'm not saying we should trash the entire system... and maybe the best we can do is to try to optimize what we have... but it is far from optimal in areas way upstream from the punishment / restitution part of the process you're talking about below. We will need to also address and reform those, before even considering your suggestions below.

One day when I have more time, I'll share my SA Post Office story... The short version is that I realized at some point around 1998 that the SA Post Office was failing / collapsing and I started to recommend to businesses (especially banks) that they switch to alternative means of delivery, like email. After one (accidentally) spectacular demonstration of how badly the SAPO had already failed, I convinced one of the major banks to switch their statements to being emailed out in PDF (around 2012-ish).

It is very hard for people to recognize when things fail and it is even harder for them to find even the most obvious alternative when they believe that the failed system / organization is still partially functional or think that it can recover. SAPO was already limping and failing to deliver approximately 70% of mail in 2001, but it took the banks another decade to actually switch to a format... one which was already legal, available and cheaper almost two decades earlier.

Some people sit around in the dark when there is loadshedding, while others stop their reliance on Eskom and buy solar panels or generators. Some people believe the DA will fix the pot-holes or that the police will come in time when they dial 10111. That's delusional. The average crime takes 3 minutes from start to finish, while the typical police response time is measured in hours... or days... or never happens. Eskom will not repent and the DA will not fix all the pot-holes. God help us if they do, because then you know where that money would have come from.

The legal system in RSA shows all the same signs of collapse. In theory we could prevent or discourage crime with a public correctional services system... but the practical person installs burglar bars, gets an alarm and shoots first, then calls ADT and Outsurance. What happens after that is purely academic. In the end, there is only you, the individual. When someone lurks around your house at 2am, there is no-one else but you, for as long as really matters. The rest is an illusion.

S.

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[Trevor Watkins]

This is a superb x exposition of the problems with crime and punishment particularly in South Africa but probably worldwide. I am glad that it is preserved here in Google groups and email for posterity and will probably refer back to it in the future.

Like so much else the services provided by the government,  any government,  are profoundly useless.
Having stayed on a plot for most of my  adult life I have been dealing with petty and major crime in South Africa most of my life.

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[Trevor Watkins]

Dang, the send icon looks just like the new line icon. Sorry.

I think there are many anarchic ways of dealing with the failures of governmental crime and punishment. I have started enjoyed numerous block watches. I helped invent a radio based alarm system called neighbor net. I have written software apps and installed many software apps that allow individuals to rely on each other for their security. As you express so well the

Vast majority of crimes are not caught or prosecuted or punished. Of literally dozens of crimes committed against me over the years I have only had the pleasure of catching the criminal in two or three cases. The problem is what do you do then. Now you must rely on the whole lumbering state apparatus to incarcerate and accuse and take to court and imprison the criminal. This is what gabri is talking about when he suggests better systems. 

[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Someone I knew (now passed away) was once attacked in their garage in Mpumalanga just as they got home from work. There was a fight with the robbers in which several scratches from a hand saw and a blow with a hammer resulted, those being things near at hand and still unstolen in the garage at the time. Two of the criminals jumped the wall, empty-handed, and one was detained in the garage. Of the two who jumped the fence, one was apprehended by their security company about a block down the street and the third got away. The security company asked only one question; do the authorities know i.e. has anyone called the police yet ? The answer being no, the security company then removed the two robbers from the property... and as far as I know, that was the last anyone ever said about the matter. I'm not making any value judgement, just saying that this is one way in which crime is actually being addressed in some places... and the customer feedback seems mostly positive.

S.

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[Gabri Rigotti]

Recently my time is being consumed by Life demands so no offence Stephen if I respond belatedly … 😅

One of the principles I have embraced as much as I could, especially in my data processing career, is the nominal 80/20 rule …

Basically that much of an outcome, desired or undesired, is caused by a minority of the circumstances causing it …

By incarcerating only the violent this would be a real world step towards a reduction of violence, a desired outcome.

More prison space becomes available without the lengthy procedure of tendering and then the building thereof.

A mere database query can identify all the inmates who are not and have not previously been incarcerated for violent crime.

They should be released asap subject to a verification process to ensure no violent inmates slip out, with the requirement to stand by for any alternative sentencing be it community service or house arrest or other form of geographical restriction like only home and journey to work permissions.

The latter is relatively low cost and technologically easy to implement via GPS anklets etcetera.

The alternative sentencing still needs to be further developed hence the stand by requirement.

Real world actions that will cost very little relative to say building more prisons and employing more prison staff …

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" It is not the water in the fields that brings true development, rather, it is water in the eyes, or compassion for fellow beings, that brings about real development. "

—Anna Hazare

[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

Gabri, I accuse you of stealing Trevor's beloved cat Felix. For this heinous crime involving the taking of nine lives, you are hereby sentenced to wearing an ankle bracelet, even in the shower, and having your name on a database which will cause any and all take-way / fast-food restaurants to refuse to serve you for all eternity plus 10 months. [gavel strikes]

Do you see the problem here ?

S.

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[Gabri Rigotti]

😅 ... if there was sufficient proof that I did steal Trevor's cat and I am guilty beyond reasonable doubt then yes I need to compensate Trevor for having stolen his cat, for any costs that incurred damage like having to see a therapist for counselling, and the costs of the law enforcement to apprehend me.

An anklet gps-ing me everywhere seems an overkill ... but rather that, than sharing a cell with dozens of 26s or 28s ... 😱

As we are not living in a genuinely free society the next best real world option is that the justice is of a restitution nature, and being non violent and a lover of animals, that I not be incarcerated among beasts as "punishment".

The solution would be a least worst one as an increment towards a free society horizon ... 

You have a point in your echo chamber discourse that you posted elsewhere, are we really here to make a difference?

One can hardly fault you for your cynicism, there is lots of evidence that supports that cynicism ... but like Trevor, rightly or wrongly, I think that any success in securing a step closer towards a free society is useful.

I like the Rand Paul approach, the sole genuine libertarian minded Senator in the USA Congress.

He could have joined the clown show that is the Libertarian Party there, a confused motley crowd that applies NAP (Non Aggression Principle) in whatever way the moment inspires them to ... but he chose a more practical/pragmatic role, fighting for any real life inch of liberty that he can secure.

Violent crime in SA is in a horrible, horrific way an opportunity for people to clear their minds of dogmatic gumff about justice and get the desired outcome.

Our daughter lost a dear school friend as a result of four beasts that took her life in the worst kind of way, they were caught and are behind bars hopefully for most of their lives ... but they are probably feasting off soft non violent prey that stole some bread or did not pay a traffic fine ... 

Heuristic progress towards a free society, messy and imperfect, albeit painfully slow seems an option ... for me at least ... 😊

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[Stephen van Jaarsveldt]

No, sorry Gabri, you have been found guilty of gatocide. The sentence has been passed. Save your "sufficient proof" and "reasonable doubt" for your appeal, which you can ask your lawyer to schedule any time after October 2026. In the meantime;

Do you see the problem yet ?

S.

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[Gabri Rigotti]

Fortunately gatto is cat in Italian, my first language until I started primary school and as half or more of English is literally rooted in Latin it is easy to understand gatocide 😊 ...

Yes, lawyers might do lip service to Logics 101 but mostly they then forget all about that and use words instead of mathematical logic to prove or disprove an argument.

Judges should be using Phd level logics but do not.

AI should be parsing and highlighting all the inconsistencies in the words of law, that if law was say a database to support the sustainability of say a food retailer that retailer would soon be bankrupt as there is poor data integrity in the words of law ...

It is all still in the epoca di Pietra (Stone Age) no matter the robes and wigs and pomp and ceremony rituals ...

Nonetheless there is no way out but to inch forward wherever one can out of the morassic gumff.

The Argentinian Milei is an extraordinary lifter of hope but if potholes and load shedding were the main problems in Cape Town, and its homicide rate per 100k was 7 as in Naples the most "dangerous" city of Italy and not 70 then that would be a tenfold improvement in safety and security which may be the 99% of everything?

By locking up only those believed to have performed violent crimes only is worth trying out so that potholes and loadshedding prevail as the greater challenges to surmount ... it will cost a lot less and the mistakes made by judges and jurys because they cannot even grasp Logics 101 will be far less consequential ... 

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[Stephen vJ]

Ok, cool, so you probably got why I called Trevor's cat Felix too - look at those Latin lessons paying off at last. Now, Gabri, good news ! Parliament just passed a bill to put your restitution proposal into law. The court will amend your sentence accordingly with immediate effect.

It has been determined that you owe Trevor R1trillion in damages. Now, we get how your employment contract ended automagically as soon as you became a convicted felon - that is very typical of a South African employment contract - so the State will offer you a job removing the staples from credit card slips which have been stapled to receipts.

At 1c for every 5 staples removed, that pays about 1c/minute or R4.80 per day and the knowledge that you are doing a great public service. We are not inhumane - you need to live and eat, so we will restrict work to 8 hours per day and you can keep R4.79 of the R4.80 per day, we'll give Trevor the remaining 1c in an annual cheque for R3.65, for the rest of your or his life, whichever comes first.

Administration of all this will be for taxpayer expense, but at least they're not feeding & housing you. We hope that you'll take this job, seeing as very few employers will hire someone with a conviction of any kind. Oh, and so sorry to hear about the bank revoking your credit card, line of credit and mortgage by the way. That's a shame.

The other bad news is that Felix the cat was not Siamese... and black cat lives matter, so your crime is considered a hate crime. In accordance with the new law you will be added to the pet haters database, which means you are not allowed to own a pet, visit anyone with a pet or come within 12 dog leash lengths of any pet store.

You know, you really shouldn't have killed that cat.

S.

On Jul 13, 2024, at 00:18, Gabri Rigotti <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:



Fortunately gatto is cat in Italian, my first language until I started primary school and as half or more of English is literally rooted in Latin it is easy to understand gatocide 😊 ...

Yes, lawyers might do lip service to Logics 101 but mostly they then forget all about that and use words instead of mathematical logic to prove or disprove an argument.

Judges should be using Phd level logics but do not.

AI should be parsing and highlighting all the inconsistencies in the words of law, that if law was say a database to support the sustainability of say a food retailer that retailer would soon be bankrupt as there is poor data integrity in the words of law ...

It is all still in the epoca di Pietra (Stone Age) no matter the robes and wigs and pomp and ceremony rituals ...

Nonetheless there is no way out but to inch forward wherever one can out of the morassic gumff.

The Argentinian Milei is an extraordinary lifter of hope but if potholes and load shedding were the main problems in Cape Town, and its homicide rate per 100k was 7 as in Naples the most "dangerous" city of Italy and not 70 then that would be a tenfold improvement in safety and security which may be the 99% of everything?

By locking up only those believed to have performed violent crimes only is worth trying out so that potholes and loadshedding prevail as the greater challenges to surmount ... it will cost a lot less and the mistakes made by judges and jurys because they cannot even grasp Logics 101 will be far less consequential ... 

On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 1:15 AM Stephen van Jaarsveldt <sjaar...@gmail.com> wrote:

No, sorry Gabri, you have been found guilty of gatocide. The sentence has been passed. Save your "sufficient proof" and "reasonable doubt" for your appeal, which you can ask your lawyer to schedule any time after October 2026. In the meantime;

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[Stephen vJ]

This is where you say; "But I didn't kill the cat - I'm innocent."... and I say; "EXACTLY !". The problem is not the punishment / restitution, but the 8 steps leading up to it. You don't prevent crime by punishing innocent people in a different way, you do it by creating sense of justice and a fear of being caught in the first place.

Furthermore, when the likelihood of having your life destroyed by false accusations is high, people tend to react in seemingly stupid ways, like high speed chases, having loads of guns, fixating on certain very specific bits of law like "the 5th amendment"... or buying cops a cold drink. The punishment or restitution process is actually almost irrelevant.

What we need to do is find a system which focuses on connecting the criminal to the crime in a more reliable way. We need to know about the crime, know who did it and catch them... without that, any of what we want to do with / to them is just daydreaming.

There is an official publicly run mechanism, but it is tragic (as all public solutions necessarily are). The market tends to step into any gap left by public failure... and the market solutions seem to point mostly to solutions right at the source; burglar bars, alarms, guns, security guards... once the Order bit is done, it seems to prefer the death penalty, but that may be a symptom of the broken system.

S.

On Jul 13, 2024, at 00:30, Stephen vJ <sjaar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, cool, so you probably got why I called Trevor's cat Felix too - look at those Latin lessons paying off at last. Now, Gabri, good news ! Parliament just passed a bill to put your restitution proposal into law. The court will amend your sentence accordingly with immediate effect.

[Gabri Rigotti]

But I did not kill the cat, in fact not even ants until my wife made me do it or else ... 

And she is the vegetarian although I started that in the family Taliban like ...

In this imperfect world I would rather remove staples than be sleeping in a cell with tattoos all around me ...

The Madam Poppy on the bench did not like geometry and it's fundamental axioms so she did an LLB after her BA in Humanities and I would prefer to not be in the hands of her painted finger nails if she is going to sentence me to sodomy because I forgot to pay my traffic fine for 69 Kms in a 60 Kms zone and I did not open my summons hence I was inadvertently in contempt of court by not knowing I was to appear before the Madam ...

So rather staples than being stapled ...

I think we are in agreement that other than for violence, the officials who will sentence you for some victimless "crime" are just framed useless but very dangerous pieces of paper on their office walls ... 😅

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[Stephen vJ]

Exactly.

S.

On Jul 13, 2024, at 01:28, Gabri Rigotti <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Gabri Rigotti]

😊👍👌

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