We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes. In fact, IIRC Singapore is one of the safest places on earth. I'm sure SF (and California, and the country at large) would probably take issue with a sudden step up in policing.
So the way I figure, you spend money on imprisoning (though private prisons make more money and can sell non-violent labor).
Or spend money on housing and social workers and maybe a good chunk of this individuals rejoin the workforce and pay taxes.
Or you spend money on cleaning up after, paying for medical emergencies, and increased private security costs.
The option selected is either the one that the invisible hand found to be the most efficient or a better option was not sold well enough.
This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: Nobody plans to break a leg, so jailing people who do won't reduce the number of people who do. The only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to hide it.
Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting, yet certain governing “civilizing” forces had the audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle choice as problemmatic.
The incarceration rate of the USA is 541/100k:
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
The incarceration rate of Singapore is 164/100k:
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/singapore
The homelessness rate in the USA is 19.5/10k. The homelessness rate in Singapore is 1.9/10k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly works.
And Singapore executes ~3.5 times more of it's population than the US. Singapore is a heavily policed state. They still cane people there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
There is a _huge_ difference between how crime is handled in the US and how it is handled in Singapore.
> If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
I'm not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0 repercussions for it. I knew of someone in the building that was on their 5th DUI somehow. They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
> Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
The problem I was referencing was the problem of trying to get the general populace to live with antisocial types. I don't think that can be "solved" in the US anytime soon.
> If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
I advocate a Singapore-style justice system then thanks to atoav's revelation that they do much better on crime than we do with punishments like caning and execution for most hard drug offenses.
In 2023, Singapore executed 5 people, which is less than one in a million:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/internatio...
You basically have to bring drugs into the country to be executed. So as long as you don’t do that, this statistic doesn’t affect you at all.
> How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
Three quarters of Singaporeans live in these places, and there is no significant police presence. There doesn’t have to be because the crime rate is so low. Criminals aren’t running around.
> Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
I think you read “public housing” and interpreted it as something like you have in America, with high crime and poverty. That’s a misinterpretation. This is the type of place most people live in Singapore. They are nice places to live, they are just massively subsidised by the government.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/place-based-...
https://americaninequality.substack.com/p/violent-crime-and-...
Costs almost nothing compared to prisons, and has a comparable deterrence effect.
Frequently asserted, but not really well substantiated. Plenty of new (or previously) ignored archeological and anthropological evidence that humans moved back and forth fairly seamlessly between hunting, gathering and cultivating in many differents part of the world.
You sound like the kind of person who would have somehow managed to read "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow, but apparently either did not or for some reason disagree with one of their fundamental conclusions.
first perspective is the common american sympathetic or not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of being therapists they are american rulers who want subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at the end).
first perspective is divided into two camps i think. empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal states. then theres the “lazy bum” castigators, like trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience to the homeless. Most states technically have all types of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain states and certain contexts do homelessness get more aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them however the police are instructed and allowed to do, which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally target behavior homeless are more likely to do but everyone does like loitering.
3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on academic documented equivalent cases in french and british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in america must think like cognitive behaviorists specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas. this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its substantiated.
But places in America do penalize homelessness if not intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs, sleep police in new york, and consequences for being, acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities which sometimes results in jail.
Personally in my ideal world, we would distribute life's essentials in such a way as to be free at point of use, and then leave markets to handle things they're actually good at, like televisions and such.
They are a "a paragon of free markets" because their social safeties actually work. Housing probably isn't a stock to hoard like in the US, nor owned by private equity to treat as a business. so you can focus on more than just staying alive and do actual work/passions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singap...
540 ish executions in 35 years. 50 executions last decade. I don't think these are the statistics that make me thing Singapore is a kill happy country.
>m not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
Anecdotes are just that. I've been in a nice neighborhood. I don't think people are naturally evil.
A common meme on both sides of the political aisle is that public spending that they don't like is motivated by someone else's profit, but that's never the why the spending happens. I'd like the government to give me a million bucks to dig a hole in my backyard, but that's not going to happen unless if the voters agree to it.
Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security. There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for example.
> They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
That's what you get when you build a car dependent society. You can't actually prevent people from driving because people can't practically live without driving.
This was a valid perspective in the 1960s - jobs grew on trees, most people who didn't have a job just didn't want a job. Some people built that perspective in the 1960s, and then never updated it despite jobs no longer growing on trees.
The rate of people shot by police in the US is 0.34 per 100k of its population. Who needs capital punishment when you shoot people your police doesn't like even before they have been found guilty?
And your anecdotal evidence is not really valuable in the discussion at hand. Somebody else can say the opposite, I for example live in a country where crime is treated differently and we have less violent crime. You can leave your doors unlocked in a major city, despite living in a red light district with its own share of homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill.
That makes it very far from a free market, even if the preexisting housing units are distributed on a fairly free market to the growing population.
Qualified immunity was made up the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s. It is a buzzword.