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.
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.
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.
Costs almost nothing compared to prisons, and has a comparable deterrence effect.
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.
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.
> 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.