(c) by Mark Dempsey
The "liberal" McClatchy newspapers (among them the Sacramento Bee) publish the maunderings of Hoover institute scholar Victor David Hansen, whose latest break from shooing kids off his lawn reminds us that When laws are not enforced, anarchy follows. Hansen's point, replete with classical citations ("as 17th-century British statesman George Savile famously put it: 'Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.'"), is that punishment, not any noble sentiments, is what keeps society from descending into some post-apocalyptic hellhole of stolen horses and assaulted womenfolk.
Unfortunately for Hansen, facts say otherwise. Whether you consult either absolute numbers or per-capita incarceration rates, the U.S. has experimented with punishment as a preventive for decades now, incarcerating and punishing more people than any other nation on earth. The U.S. imprisons people at roughly five times the world's average per-capita incarceration rate, seven times more than demographically identical Canada. So...is the U.S. seven times safer than Canada? No. Canada's crime rate is insignificantly different than the U.S.
So punishment (alone) does not prevent crime. It does not even scare addicts straight. Medical treatment for addiction (i.e. rehab) has a far higher success rate, and is one seventh the cost of imprisoning addicts.
Hansen makes his cult-of-vengeance point to condemn the caravan of "illegal alien" Hondurans walking north through Mexico now. Vengeful punishment is not the only possible response, incidentally, the population of Mexico has welcomed that caravan with food and shelter.
Our Central American neighbors do not want to steal our jobs or devour our grandchildren. Among other things, they are responding to the climate disaster U.S. carbon emissions have imposed on them, and to the military, political and economic attacks we have visited on those south of our borders for literally centuries. Just between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government for those Southern neighbors.
Not only was Iran/Contra a domestic scandal in service to a proxy war in Nicaragua, the World Court convicted the U.S. of state-sponsored terrorism when it illegally mined Nicaraguan harbors. Ronald Reagan famously asked the President of Mexico to endorse overthrowing the elected Nicaraguan government because, despite being in one of the hemisphere's poorest nations, Nicaragua was a threat to the U.S. The Mexican President responded that he would be happy to support his friend Ronald if there was any way he could do so without being laughed out of office.
The U.S. has not only been deporting gangs from its neighborhoods to Honduras, it has tolerated a Honduran military's coup against a democratically-elected government. Foreign aid sanctions are supposed to follow such undemocratic actions, but such sanctions were set aside thanks to then-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, and President Obama.
Perhaps the worst of U.S. refugee-producing actions is the policy embodied in NAFTA. One might suspect sending a lot of subsidized Iowa corn south would put a lot of subsistence Mexican corn farmers out of business. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican farmers were keeping the diversity and disease-resistance of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn it!
In the wake of NAFTA real, inflation adjusted median income in Mexico declined 34%. In U.S. history, the Great Depression produced that kind of decline...and the Okies' migration followed.
In the time-honored tradition of blaming the victim, depraved bigots like Hansen distort this story as something with which we should condemn these refugees. Mexico's example of hospitality is a superior reaction though, and one that makes fewer enemies, and distorts the real story far less.
Meanwhile, law-and-order guys like Hansen seem to reserve punishment only for the poor and vulnerable. The powerful get impunity and arbitration, not strict law enforcement.
The "liberal" McClatchy newspapers (among them the Sacramento Bee) publish the maunderings of Hoover institute scholar Victor David Hansen, whose latest break from shooing kids off his lawn reminds us that When laws are not enforced, anarchy follows. Hansen's point, replete with classical citations ("as 17th-century British statesman George Savile famously put it: 'Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.'"), is that punishment, not any noble sentiments, is what keeps society from descending into some post-apocalyptic hellhole of stolen horses and assaulted womenfolk.
Unfortunately for Hansen, facts say otherwise. Whether you consult either absolute numbers or per-capita incarceration rates, the U.S. has experimented with punishment as a preventive for decades now, incarcerating and punishing more people than any other nation on earth. The U.S. imprisons people at roughly five times the world's average per-capita incarceration rate, seven times more than demographically identical Canada. So...is the U.S. seven times safer than Canada? No. Canada's crime rate is insignificantly different than the U.S.
So punishment (alone) does not prevent crime. It does not even scare addicts straight. Medical treatment for addiction (i.e. rehab) has a far higher success rate, and is one seventh the cost of imprisoning addicts.
Hansen makes his cult-of-vengeance point to condemn the caravan of "illegal alien" Hondurans walking north through Mexico now. Vengeful punishment is not the only possible response, incidentally, the population of Mexico has welcomed that caravan with food and shelter.
Our Central American neighbors do not want to steal our jobs or devour our grandchildren. Among other things, they are responding to the climate disaster U.S. carbon emissions have imposed on them, and to the military, political and economic attacks we have visited on those south of our borders for literally centuries. Just between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government for those Southern neighbors.
Not only was Iran/Contra a domestic scandal in service to a proxy war in Nicaragua, the World Court convicted the U.S. of state-sponsored terrorism when it illegally mined Nicaraguan harbors. Ronald Reagan famously asked the President of Mexico to endorse overthrowing the elected Nicaraguan government because, despite being in one of the hemisphere's poorest nations, Nicaragua was a threat to the U.S. The Mexican President responded that he would be happy to support his friend Ronald if there was any way he could do so without being laughed out of office.
The U.S. has not only been deporting gangs from its neighborhoods to Honduras, it has tolerated a Honduran military's coup against a democratically-elected government. Foreign aid sanctions are supposed to follow such undemocratic actions, but such sanctions were set aside thanks to then-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, and President Obama.
Perhaps the worst of U.S. refugee-producing actions is the policy embodied in NAFTA. One might suspect sending a lot of subsidized Iowa corn south would put a lot of subsistence Mexican corn farmers out of business. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican farmers were keeping the diversity and disease-resistance of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn it!
In the wake of NAFTA real, inflation adjusted median income in Mexico declined 34%. In U.S. history, the Great Depression produced that kind of decline...and the Okies' migration followed.
In the time-honored tradition of blaming the victim, depraved bigots like Hansen distort this story as something with which we should condemn these refugees. Mexico's example of hospitality is a superior reaction though, and one that makes fewer enemies, and distorts the real story far less.
Meanwhile, law-and-order guys like Hansen seem to reserve punishment only for the poor and vulnerable. The powerful get impunity and arbitration, not strict law enforcement.
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