Bro absolutely COOKED with this.
If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.
It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
Having grown up around conservatives, I think many of them simply see crime as a fact of nature like earthquakes, or people who are jerks.
The idea that youâd reduce crime is like saying youâll reduce thunderstorms or droughts, the point is to harshly punish criminals so the law-abiding citizenry feel that they are valued, protected, and are the priority of the state. Similarly, they support harsh penalties not out of a belief that itâll lead to rehabilitation but out of a sort of desire to balance the moral scales of the universe. âTo each what he has sownâ and all that
Iâm not endorsing this idea, Iâm simply trying to explain it, as someone who grew up around these people. For what itâs worth, my red state small town really was âtown of Mayberryâ level safe, at least until the oil boom happened. The rig pigs more than earned their nickname haha, and they were just as, if not more, conservative than my neighbors. Not everyone was on the same page about what conservative values meant.
Yeah, I also grew up in a small town conservative area and I've written a couple of things (like this and this and this) over the years on exactly this.
There certainly was a time at which we didn't really know a lot of these things and/or couldn't measure them, but now we can and the natural conservative resistance to chance has become a resistance to acknowledging reality.
Modern conservativism often feels to me as if it had descended into being a conspiracy theory even before Trump came along.
I'm gonna be real with you: reading those linked posts, for me, was something like reading a carefully written and rigorously logical argument that the vast majority of people who use contraceptives do it specifically to affront God would be for both of us.
It's just obviously incorrect and a simpler motivation is easily apparent.
I also think those contradict both themselves and similar but more typical left wing arguments on similar topics.
(And to be fair, there very much is a certain level of tribalist conceit. A lot of medium-severity crimes are done by people who have done those crimes numerous times in their lives and a lot of "respectable" people have never done any of those crimes. And so there's a distinction, and then tribalism. However, this is more a matter of habit and habits can be changed with enough sustained pressure.)
I think the general conservative view of crime is more very much about a voluntary choice albeit one made under the influence of habit. I think many conservatives have a pretty harsh view about people who do self-destructive things that you and I would never do.
Frequently conservatives accuse *you* of believing what you accuse them of.
Under this concept, draconian penalties are 1. To incapacitate criminals long term and 2. To shock them out of their habits. (Sometimes it's also a bit, uh, eugenic. And that's terrible.)
Social measures, to these right wingers, often resemble danegeld or are (unfairly) presumed ineffective if there's still no harsh cost to doing crimes.
Gun control is hated by conservatives for approximately the same reason you probably wouldn't accept society being a surveillance hellscape with government cameras in every private bedroom under almost any circumstance (obviously, guns being familiar is a big influence.)
So I think you may have missed the point. I don't think that anyone is arguing that societal conditions constitute some form of mind control, obviously anyone who committed a crime makes a choice in that moment to do so and having made that choice in the past makes it easier to do so in the future.
I also understand that conservatives view it in the three ways that you described, but the point is we now have mountains of evidence from decades of studies that show that these ideas don't actually work to reduce crime.
If you read the posts I linked then you saw that I also linked study after study after study that shows that harsh punishment for crime does not deter or reduce it but that materially changing the conditions of society does. It's not that people are mind controlled, it's that the same person under different conditions will make different choices and we can show that this happens consistently.
At this point the differences between how liberals and conservatives think about addressing crime are no longer just a difference of opinion, conservatives are actively denying all the evidence we have about how crime happens and advocating policies that we know don't work. It's one thing to say that harsh punishments will take criminals out of commission or make them rethink their choices when data is lacking, it's another thing to do so in spite of mountains of evidence.
Your "simpler explanation" just doesn't hold up. Either conservatives are holding to their ideas in spite of the evidence or they simply don't care what the evidence is in the first place. In either case, reducing crime cannot be their primary motivation.
Maybe we're wrong about what that motivation truly is, but our explanation fits what we've observed and any competing explanation must do so as well in order to be plausible.
Speculating about how conservatives come to this belief:
The majority of people (and probably the majority of politicians) aren't reading sociological studies about crime. Hence, they derive their beliefs about the causes and proper responses to crime from their own experiences and intuitions. And, since many crimes have no economic gain for their perpetrators (vandalism, most violent crime, the vast majority of sex crime), and we've all known people who seem to enjoy hurting people (physically or emotionally), it makes sense that a lot of people come to the conclusion that criminals commit crimes because they're evil people.
