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by capableweb 1162 days ago
Yeah! Why figure out why crime happens in the first place (it cannot be poverty and unavailability of safety nets for people, impossible!) when you can just put all those p̶e̶a̶s̶a̶n̶t̶s criminals in prison instead, so we don't have to deal with it.
3 comments

I am pretty damn poor but don't commit crimes. Crime happens when people decide that's the route they want to take over other routes. It's as much a cultural thing as it is an economic thing. There are wide swaths of the public now in the US making excuses why crime is the best option for many.
Discussion of why crime happens is multifaceted of course, but there is a significant part of it that is essentially forbidden to address in circles where the discussion matters. You end up with wishy-washy "dogwhistles" that get shouted down as x-ist, or at best, shrugged off and blamed on generational poverty/oppression/trauma. All of which can be true, but that doesn't help solve anything.

There is no solution, other than a vast cultural shift towards a refusal to stop glorifying cultures that glorify criminal behavior. This includes the suicidal grimy juggalos and trailer park meth cowboys, the brand- and status-obsessed inner city wannabe crip, and the fuck you I got mine and the fuck you I want yours mentality prevalent across the country (world?) equally.

I repeat: there is no solution to crime. There is only mitigation and reaction.

I remember that Ben Horowitz includes a lot of rap lyrics in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Don’t a lot of tech bros love music that glorifies criminal behavior?
We can do both.