07 December 2019
The Goal
When you start blaming the victim of a crime for the criminal act, you become blinded to the idea of punishing the criminal.
You focus on ways to make your property less enticing to the criminal.
You inconvenience yourself to make the crime more difficult to carry out, but you do it oh so righteously because you will blame yourself for the crime if you're preyed upon and wearing the hair-shirt atones for your sin of owning something worth stealing.
In short, you ignore the criminal and their agency in the crime.
Without the actions of the criminal it does not matter how valuable the item is, or how well it was secured.
But I don't see much condemnation of the actions of the criminal, it's as if it's been decided that criminals are like the weather; something we have no control over and if you didn't want your seats wet, you should have rolled up your windows.
But we do have control over criminals, control we've given up.
We don't punish them if they're caught.
We don't even look very hard for them.
We have far more laws binding the hands of citizens to prevent burglary and theft than we do to stop the theft in the first place.
The thieves are aware that they're very unlikely to be apprehended and even less likely to have to endure serious punishment even if convicted.
The goal should not be to figure out ways to keep the thieves away, the goal should be to eliminate the thieves.
No more than an hour in a sewage grinder seems appropriate.
We've decided that some crimes don't rate capitol punishment because the amounts stolen are small; but that just encourages the criminals.
Just look at the new shoplifting laws in some places. As long as what was taken is below a certain dollar threshold, no police investigation.
Anarchy without retribution or vendetta.
Soon enough, without enforcement of the small laws, retribution and vendetta return on their own.
To really grasp why this is bad crack open a history book on the mafia and see where they started.
It's eye opening.
5 comments:
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A friend of mine (he used to be the head honcho of West End Games, fyi) tells about how they dealt with this sort of nonsense in Guatemala. People in a neighborhood, sick of endless petty crime, would contract with one of the death squads to deal with it. With Ojo por Ojo, the squad would "disappear" a few of the most blatant offenders, beat up a bunch of the others, and suggest strongly that elsewhere was better. With La Mano Blanca, OTOH, the squad would get a list of poor people who were allowed in the area, with pictures...servants, garbage men, and the like. Anybody not on the list...disappeared.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is EXACTLY what I was talking about when I referred to how the mafia got started.
DeleteYou remember the scene in The Godfather, where Vito Corleone gently chides Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker, for going to the police after his daughter got raped, rather than to him, the Godfather? That's straight out of Sicily. Sicily was ruled by uncaring foreigners for much of its history, and the people internalized that talking to the authorities about anything was a bad idea. That's a lot of what "omerta" means.
DeleteI remember. And it was ancient before the Sicilians were using it.
DeleteAnd there's a touch of Norman (as in 'from Normandy') in the general meanness and directed violence of the Sicilians. Siculo-Normans had a really bad reputation for violence and retribution during the Crusades, in a 'they're so bad we're not gonna fight them or mess with them' way.
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