Is society getting worse?

[Mugwump]

<Split from George Pell thread>

^ actually what victims want is an abstract consideration, but a minor one. The point of justice is due punishment of responsible individuals as a mark of the boundaries of right. If criminals are to be punished in accordance with the desires of individuals, then the criminal gets pot luck depending on who he assaulted.

But this is still wedded to the framing of criminal justice as punitive, i.e. some getting off lightly and some getting punished too harshly. If we see most forms of restorative justice as being inherently rehabilitative, then the benefits are already there regardless of extent of 'punishment'; the key factor is that the criminal has made amends to the victim in some meaningful way.

Such sentences could of course still be overseen by the courts so that it's not left purely to the victim's discretion and that what is asked is neither too lenient nor too onerous. As an alternative to the more abstract idea of community service, this seems like a more potentially useful approach.

When criminals stopped fearing the law, crime exploded. Murder rates are 3.5x what they were in 1960, GBH rates 8x. Population ca 1.5x. This broadly coincides with the era of rehabilitation. I believe the evidence supports that the price of this liberal niceness is paid in the lives and brutalization of the innocent. The same people who fret about capital punishment seem to feel little connection between their policies and the capital sentence given by hardened criminals to innocent people. I think the evidence, and intuitions about criminal nature, suggest a very close connection. While there are exceptions, I think most criminals are rehabilitated when they again fear the law enough to avoid reoffending.

[think positive]

^ actually what victims want is an abstract consideration, but a minor one. The point of justice is due punishment of responsible individuals as a mark of the boundaries of right. If criminals are to be punished in accordance with the desires of individuals, then the criminal gets pot luck depending on who he assaulted.

But this is still wedded to the framing of criminal justice as punitive, i.e. some getting off lightly and some getting punished too harshly. If we see most forms of restorative justice as being inherently rehabilitative, then the benefits are already there regardless of extent of 'punishment'; the key factor is that the criminal has made amends to the victim in some meaningful way.

Such sentences could of course still be overseen by the courts so that it's not left purely to the victim's discretion and that what is asked is neither too lenient nor too onerous. As an alternative to the more abstract idea of community service, this seems like a more potentially useful approach.

When criminals stopped fearing the law, crime exploded. Murder rates are 3.5x what they were in 1960, GBH rates 8x. Population ca 1.5x. This broadly coincides with the era of rehabilitation. I believe the evidence supports that the price of this liberal niceness is paid in the lives and brutalization of the innocent. The same people who fret about capital punishment seem to feel little connection between their policies and the capital sentence given by hardened criminals to innocent people. I think the evidence, and intuitions about criminal nature, suggest a very close connection. While there are exceptions, I think most criminals are rehabilitated when they again fear the law enough to avoid reoffending.

unfortunately i reckon thats spot on. Also lack of respect. For oneself and others. its a sad sad world, so little empathy for other people, me me me, entitlement. but how do you get the world back on track? scary to think what kind of environment my kids, and hopefully one day, my grand kids will live in.

[Tannin]

^ actually what victims want is an abstract consideration, but a minor one. The point of justice is due punishment of responsible individuals as a mark of the boundaries of right. If criminals are to be punished in accordance with the desires of individuals, then the criminal gets pot luck depending on who he assaulted.

But this is still wedded to the framing of criminal justice as punitive, i.e. some getting off lightly and some getting punished too harshly. If we see most forms of restorative justice as being inherently rehabilitative, then the benefits are already there regardless of extent of 'punishment'; the key factor is that the criminal has made amends to the victim in some meaningful way.

Such sentences could of course still be overseen by the courts so that it's not left purely to the victim's discretion and that what is asked is neither too lenient nor too onerous. As an alternative to the more abstract idea of community service, this seems like a more potentially useful approach.

When criminals stopped fearing the law, crime exploded. Murder rates are 3.5x what they were in 1960, GBH rates 8x. Population ca 1.5x. This broadly coincides with the era of rehabilitation. I believe the evidence supports that the price of this liberal niceness is paid in the lives and brutalization of the innocent. The same people who fret about capital punishment seem to feel little connection between their policies and the capital sentence given by hardened criminals to innocent people. I think the evidence, and intuitions about criminal nature, suggest a very close connection. While there are exceptions, I think most criminals are rehabilitated when they again fear the law enough to avoid reoffending.

This is all very well. It reads nicely (even if I rather suspect that your statistics are hogwash) and in broad I come far closer to agreeing with the thrust of it than I do with David's literate, nebulous and unrealistic idealism.

However, we have to face two unpleasant facts. First, the results of exactly this kind of policy (notably in the United States) have been spectacularly poor. Imprisonment rates have quadrupled, death sentences have been reintroduced ... and the crime rate has remained static or gone up even further.

Second, consider the circumstances of the offender. If things are bad enough (i.e., if you and your Thatcherite cronies have been allowed to run the country for too long, depressing working-class living standards and life-chances beyond a certain point) punishment becomes meaningless.

My great-something grandfather was transported to Australia for stealing a piece of cloth. What would drive a man to risk a life sentence of transportation to the other side of the world and ten years hard labour in Port Arthur just for a piece of bloody cloth? They tried harsher punishments - ridiculously harsh punishments - for people like my great-something grandfather, and they achieved nothing whatever.

Only when social conditions improved (as a result of poor people coming together to help each other by forming trade unions and defending themselves against the Tories) did the crime rate drop.

I reckon that by the time someone is committing crimes that get serious jail time, it's way, way too late. The time to inspire respect for the law in that person (using punishments as necessary) was ten years previous to the offence he is doing time for,

[watt price tully]

^ Indeed Tannin. The fact that your distant relative purloined the Kings clothes made it tad hard though for a not guilty plea before the court.

The stats need to factor in intervening variables such as:

1. The reporting of crimes stats;
2. Definitions, and but not limited to
2. Population (growth) for the relative times.

Further, why the 1960's? One should compare this with say the 1900's, 1910's. 20's 30's all the way to now to make useful statistical comparisons rather than an arbitrary point in time.

This is where the sociologists have it over the psychologists: They explore this through criminology & the Institute of Criminology (or whatever the current incarnation is called) is a good starting place.

With respect to the wider issue at hand of crime & punishment, I suggest people read or re read Hughes magnum opus: "The Fatal Shore" a rollicking good read which should be mandatory reading in schools.

[Mugwump]

But this is still wedded to the framing of criminal justice as punitive, i.e. some getting off lightly and some getting punished too harshly. If we see most forms of restorative justice as being inherently rehabilitative, then the benefits are already there regardless of extent of 'punishment'; the key factor is that the criminal has made amends to the victim in some meaningful way.

Such sentences could of course still be overseen by the courts so that it's not left purely to the victim's discretion and that what is asked is neither too lenient nor too onerous. As an alternative to the more abstract idea of community service, this seems like a more potentially useful approach.

When criminals stopped fearing the law, crime exploded. Murder rates are 3.5x what they were in 1960, GBH rates 8x. Population ca 1.5x. This broadly coincides with the era of rehabilitation. I believe the evidence supports that the price of this liberal niceness is paid in the lives and brutalization of the innocent. The same people who fret about capital punishment seem to feel little connection between their policies and the capital sentence given by hardened criminals to innocent people. I think the evidence, and intuitions about criminal nature, suggest a very close connection. While there are exceptions, I think most criminals are rehabilitated when they again fear the law enough to avoid reoffending.

This is all very well. It reads nicely (even if I rather suspect that your statistics are hogwash) and in broad I come far closer to agreeing with the thrust of it than I do with David's literate, nebulous and unrealistic idealism.

However, we have to face two unpleasant facts. First, the results of exactly this kind of policy (notably in the United States) have been spectacularly poor. Imprisonment rates have quadrupled, death sentences have been reintroduced ... and the crime rate has remained static or gone up even further.

Second, consider the circumstances of the offender. If things are bad enough (i.e., if you and your Thatcherite cronies have been allowed to run the country for too long, depressing working-class living standards and life-chances beyond a certain point) punishment becomes meaningless.

My great-something grandfather was transported to Australia for stealing a piece of cloth. What would drive a man to risk a life sentence of transportation to the other side of the world and ten years hard labour in Port Arthur just for a piece of bloody cloth? They tried harsher punishments - ridiculously harsh punishments - for people like my great-something grandfather, and they achieved nothing whatever.

Only when social conditions improved (as a result of poor people coming together to help each other by forming trade unions and defending themselves against the Tories) did the crime rate drop.

I reckon that by the time someone is committing crimes that get serious jail time, it's way, way too late. The time to inspire respect for the law in that person (using punishments as necessary) was ten years previous to the offence he is doing time for,

I don't especially disagree with that, though the condition of the 19th Century poor vs now is really incomparably different. No one in Britain or Australia needs to resort to crime to survive or to live an essentially civilized life. I think the inequality extenuation is simply banked in advance by the criminally inclined. Crime rates ultimately reflect culture, much more than economics. In the Western world (and in the Eastern), eras with similar inequality have had quite different crime rates.

The statistics I quoted are government stats for the U.K. but I am confident they will hold good for Australia. Googling "historical crime rates for the U.K." Will find the detailed tabulation. Murder and GBH are the best benchmark as they tend to be stable as regards definition and reporting.

Regarding the US, inequality certainly plays a role there, but at the cultural level, unique historical and racial issues, its absurd gun laws, plus the effects of 50 more years of pluralism in eroding civic connections, account for its outcomes, I think. It does not have a sensible death penalty when it can take 20 years from crime to execution.

I have real reservations about the effects of Thatcherism. While her fierce revolutionary clarity was absolutely necessary to reverse years of failing statism in Britain, Thatcherism is essentially a libertarian philosophy and not one that I think provides a good model for longer term stability. She did her work and she left, like the great democratic stateswoman she was.

[pietillidie]

The statistics I quoted are government stats for the U.K. but I am confident they will hold good for Australia.

Huh? Really? These things are never simple, but you're the one making the claim; why don't you lay out your data and reasoning?

At a modest glance, I actually can't find any data which supports your claims. For a start, the easier one. Australia's murder rate is apparently at an all-time low:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... per-100000

http://theconversation.com/three-charts ... ates-79654

On the UK rate of violent crime, that apparently reached something like a 20-year low in 2014:

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the 15% fall in the overall rate meant that crime had fallen by 25% since 2007-08 and by 60% since its peak level in 1995.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/databl ... he-decline

On the UK homicide rate, that too is way down. In particular, see the footnotes underneath Figure 2.1 at the link below which indicate the inclusion of Dr. Death's 172 victims in 2003, and the terrorism attack victims in 2007:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... r2homicide

[Mugwump]

The statistics I quoted are government stats for the U.K. but I am confident they will hold good for Australia.

Huh? Really? These things are never simple, but you're the one making the claim; why don't you lay out your data and reasoning?

At a modest glance, I actually can't find any data which supports your claims. For a start, the easier one. Australia's murder rate is apparently at an all-time low:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... per-100000

http://theconversation.com/three-charts ... ates-79654

On the UK rate of violent crime, that apparently reached something like a 20-year low in 2014:

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the 15% fall in the overall rate meant that crime had fallen by 25% since 2007-08 and by 60% since its peak level in 1995.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/databl ... he-decline

On the UK homicide rate, that too is way down. In particular, see the footnotes underneath Figure 2.1 at the link below which indicate the inclusion of Dr. Death's 172 victims in 2003, and the terrorism attack victims in 2007:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... r2homicide

Pffft. Record low since 1989, according to your article, in a period where medical technology has advanced enormously in saving trauma victims. So you have to look at GBH plus murder. The data I quoted is in the U.K.gov ONS series 1900-2002, but as I'm sailing in the Gippsland lakes I am not using bandwidth to locate it for you now. Will put up the link this evening if you remain incapable of finding it.

[HAL]

For real.

[pietillidie]

The data I quoted is in the U.K.gov ONS series 1900-2002, but as I'm sailing in the Gippsland lakes I am not using bandwidth to locate it for you now. Will put up the link this evening if you remain incapable of finding it.

First, don't worry about it if you're on holidays, for goodness' sake.

Second, if you were really serious and that wasn't just a flourish, it is after all your responsibility to support the following, explaining why the data I found ought to be disregarded or interpreted a certain way:

When criminals stopped fearing the law, crime exploded. Murder rates are 3.5x what they were in 1960, GBH rates 8x. Population ca 1.5x. This broadly coincides with the era of rehabilitation. I believe the evidence supports that the price of this liberal niceness is paid in the lives and brutalization of the innocent. The same people who fret about capital punishment seem to feel little connection between their policies and the capital sentence given by hardened criminals to innocent people. I think the evidence, and intuitions about criminal nature, suggest a very close connection. While there are exceptions, I think most criminals are rehabilitated when they again fear the law enough to avoid reoffending.

The statistics I quoted are government stats for the U.K. but I am confident they will hold good for Australia.

[Mugwump]

^ the relevant data series for the UK is as follows. Source :

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... crime-data

It is worth producing a chart of the data for Murder, attempted murder and GBH, which are relatively comparably defined and reported across time. I do not know how to post an image (advice gratefully accepted on this), or I would post the chart from 1945 to 2002 based on these figures. This is truly astoundingly shocking and tragic.

There is a data series break from 2002-2016 and post 2003 this data does not seem to be available in a comparable format. The 1898-2002 series shows the 1960s effect. Those who say that liberalism does not support capital or corporal punishment might be technically right ; but it certainly watches over and licenses those punishments, insofar as they are inflicted by law-breakers on the bodies of innocent citizens.

Note that trauma surgery - as any NHS trauma surgeon will attest - has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 50 years and many GBH cases now would have been murder in the 1960s.

I have not seen comparable long series Australian statistics, but having lived in Australia in the 1960s and now, I am very confident they will be directionally the same. In my darker moments, I suspect that they are not available because those in charge of politics and police are liberal children of the 1960s revolution and they do not want the public to recall how ordered and safe a society they helped destroyed to feed their cheap, consumerist personal freedoms.

[David]

The idea that society is getting more violent seems a heavily contested one, and needs more than raw recorded crime statistics to demonstrate it (as the heading of that first graph in the above link states).

But let's say you're right, Mugwump, and violence has been getting progressively more commonplace. Your view is that it must be due to an increase in permissiveness and lack of respect for authority. But society has changed in many ways since the end of the Second World War, not least in its increasing atomisation, transitory living, loss of community and most notably increasing inequality and neo-liberalism. Much of that has to do with economics, not culture (although these things are inevitably intertwined).

Of course, it's dangerous to pinpoint one single cause in these trends; and I'm not sure that anyone's yet conclusively shown that there is a trend. But if there is, we must be careful to acknowledge a) that there may be many factors, and simultaneously b) that this doesn't mean that all correlations in cultural change are necessarily causal.

The question of whether our society is better or worse than it once was is a vastly complex one, and actual crime occurrence - let alone recorded crime rates - is but one aspect of many to consider. Some others: Is social mobility greater? Are inequalities less pervasive than they once were? Do more people have their basic needs met? Are people happier? As with many of these things, the most sensible answer seems to be 'yes and no'. In the meantime, declaring the social liberalism of the 1960s and after a failed experiment would seem to require a very rosy view of the past. Let's consider the actual topic of this thread to begin with: it wasn't liberalism that led to the widespread molestation of children and de facto tolerance of such acts in our churches and institutions. That was surely symptomatic of something very dysfunctional in the way our society was organised before the baby boomers came of age, and of course the further you go back the more insignificant and overlooked the well-being of those children seems to have been.

[Mugwump]

If you doubt that anyone has shown that there is a trend, I'd urge you to look at the data. I don't see how a trend (or rather, an explosion in murder and GBH taken together) can be seriously contested. Social science is, by its nature, political, and you will never prove anything beyond any doubt to people who have made up their mind already. But the data, which goes back into the 1920s and 1930s explodes the myth that inequality, of itself, causes crime. There has been far greater economic equality in the U.K. since 1945 (NHS, social housing, and the welfare net), yet crime took off with the rise of post-war liberalism, accelerating very quickly in the 1960s and more dramatically again in the 1980s. I'm yet to hear a coherent alternative explanation, encompassing the actual data, of why this happened.

<George Pell-related paragraph moved back into original thread.>

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not think that authority is itself a justification of anything. Any fool knows that authority needs scrutiny, audit and accountability. That is not the same thing as automatically showering all authority in disrespect and derision, as the media and the cod-sociologist Left do today (until they are in power, or unless the authority is a partisan darling). When you do that, you replace institutional solidity based on merit and historical proving with individual arrogance based on selfishness and the impulse of the moment (see one D Trump for an example). That seems to me the root of the sea of sorrow in those crime statistics.

Ps how do you post an image ????

[pietillidie]

^ the relevant data series for the UK is as follows. Source :

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... crime-data

It is worth producing a chart of the data for Murder, attempted murder and GBH, which are relatively comparably defined and reported across time. I do not know how to post an image (advice gratefully accepted on this), or I would post the chart from 1945 to 2002 based on these figures. This is truly astoundingly shocking and tragic.

There is a data series break from 2002-2016 and post 2003 this data does not seem to be available in a comparable format.

Well, why not upgrade with the ONS and use its latest data, which has no time series break? The most recent data should be assumed to be superior unless argued otherwise; it is 2017, no less.

You're right about a rise in crime to 1995 and murder to 2003, but the subsequent dramatic declines make your original claims seem trite, with many other factors to be eliminated first. For all you know, the drop in the murder might be the fruit of rehabilitation and early intervention being taken seriously; the complete opposite of your guess.

What anyone serious would be investigating is this: What was the dramatic rise in the recorded crime rate in the UK from 1960 to 1995 caused by? Or, conversely, What was the dramatic decline in the recorded crime rate in the UK after 1995 caused by? Or, What was the dramatic rise in the murder rate in the UK from 1960 to 2003 caused by? Or, conversely, What was the dramatic decline in the murder rate in the UK after 2003 caused by?

And that means checking all of the usual factors related to the matter, such as changes in rates of social polarisation, changes in rates of poverty, changes in social welfare policy, changes in substance abuse type and rates, changes in domestic violence intervention policy, changes in policing numbers and strategy, changes in rates of crime reporting, changes in crime classification, changes in sentencing, etc.

For example, the most recent ONS report discusses major changes to historical data collection and classification which may provide clues as to why the old time series was abandoned: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ethodology

Once again, here are the actual most recent ONS data everyone else uses. If you want to focus on an historical period, just pick your years.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ingdec2016

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_ ... ed_Kingdom

Image 1 - UK homicide rate to 2015 (including Dr. Death's 172 victims being recorded in 2003, and the 52 terrorism attack victims in 2007, providing an exaggerated peak)

Image 2 - UK crime rate to 2015

[Mugwump]

^ I quoted some statistics to the effect that murder had risen 3.5x and GBH at least 8 times since 1960.
- Tannin doubted the data in passing, but he graciously accepted it and went on to make some useful points. I gave the source via Google and explained that it was Uk data.
- You then demanded I reference it more fully, seemingly being too lazy to look it up, while giving me a pompous lecture about my "responsibilities" to back up my claim. I gave the reference out of politeness.
- You now want to have a urinating contest about a different set of data which does not bear on my point.

Ho hum. Carry on.

[pietillidie]

^I was curious about the UK data myself.

Go and catch some bream; the Gippy Lakes are bream fishing paradise.