But how would that stop crime

An amusing problem with the winning FdB decarceration thought experiment

Unfortunate introduction: I simply cannot take the idea that Derek Chauvin murdered anyone seriously

By which I mean to say, it is not a serious idea. It is like believing in Santa Claus on the basis of seeing a video of a man in a Santa Claus outfit. The fact that in this case so many adults do profess to believe this particular fantasy, just as would be true if similar numbers professed belief in Santa, sometimes can fit within my mental budget for human stupidity, but at other times I wonder whether this interpretation, this narrative about the death of George Floyd, is deliberate mendacity in which the truth does not matter. It only matters that it is a statement that cannot be debated in the press.

The truth, which stems from obvious biological and medical (im)possibility, I will not litigate here; I still intend it as material for a future post.¹

Defund the Police vs. Imprison the Police

I will note however that it is ironic that (perennially un-self-aware) progressive/socialist writer Freddie Deboer chose Chauvin, of all purported murderers, as a foil for his imagined opponents on the left, the defund / decarcerate movement.

To be more explicit, what happened was that in May, Deboer protested that “defund the police” types never provide answers to basic questions about the consequences of their program, and so as a stunt, he asked his readers to explain what they envision a police-less, prison-less society should do with (purported Floyd-murderer) Derek Chauvin in light of what he (purportedly) did before the advent of their new order. Months went by, and now he has published the winning response.

But what is the point of debating the merits of defunding the police if a society criminalizes the act of policing itself?

And criminalization of police-work — in which, select citizens are asked by society to apply force to other citizens according to rules and to their own necessarily imperfect judgement, and often incomplete perception of their own circumstances, day after day — is the only explanation for why Chauvin (who, again, did not murder Floyd, but even if he did, this would still be an important point) is in jail.

Yet DeBoer wonders, in the comments to his recent post, why he is confused for a de-carcerationist himself. “Tell me what we should do without police — who would put all the murdering police in jail without them?” Idiotic. By asking police to put police in jail for policing, America is already inviting a society without police, regardless of whether one supports or laments such an end-result.

The amusing problem with the winning answer (as always, it comes back to Hobbes)

So anyway, it is an amusing accident that the winning response (selected by DeBoer on the grounds of being “straightforward and uncomplicated”) is politically astute² and yet obviously flawed. Here it is, in entirety:

Once Derek Chauvin has been found guilty in a court of law, he is sentenced to a term of community service of a length and type appropriate to the severity of his crime. (So in this case, a lot. Life?) That community service is overseen by agents of the court; I’m thinking more like lawyers or clerks, less like armed bailiffs. Those agents are not charged with forcing him to stick to the community service, but rather just observing whether he does so.

If he forfeits on his community service, as determined by the courts, then he will be considered an “outlaw” - meaning, specifically, someone not protected by the law. Anything done to him that would ordinarily constitute a crime no longer does. No police are necessary; if he refuses to serve his time helping his fellow man, then anybody with a chip on their shoulder can punish him for it. As long as he sticks to his sentence, he’s safe, with his life dedicated to helping others. And if anyone were to commit a crime against him while he was in that situation they would face the same fate he currently faces—an appropriate community service sentence enforced by the threat of being put outside of the protection of the law should he violate that sentence.

Obviously, it’s crucial that the courts are seen as impartial and unimpeachable, since they don’t have a bunch of men with guns to enforce their will. But it’s the best I’ve got. Derek broke the social contract;³ either he makes amends or we’ll put him outside of the protection of that social contract. Simple as that.

Readers familiar with Giorgio Agamben will recognize that the answer is merely borrowing from the concept of homo sacer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben

Agamben’s work and his notion of homo sacer were utilized by critics of the lockdowns and of vaccine mandates from a biopolitics perspective, including myself — typically in the formulations of “unpersoning” and the “unperson.” DeBoer does not indicate any prior familiarity. At all events, lack of originality is not the problem with the answer.

The problem with the answer, hilariously obvious really, is that so long as convicted citizens are performing their allotted community service for prior crimes, what is preventing them from committing any number of further crimes?

As long as he sticks to his sentence, he’s safe, with his life dedicated to helping others [but not by any of the above means prohibited from also harming different others at the same time]

Further, what is preventing an “outlaw” from simply protecting themselves from the violence of other citizens the same way outlaws do today — by armament and association? Nothing about potentially being killed by rivals appears to dissuade those who sentence themselves to gang life. The only difference between having random strangers with “chips on their shoulder” deputized to kill you in this imaginary world, and being considered a bounty by rival gangs at all moments as happens here in the real world, is — well, there isn’t one, actually. And so gangs will commit exactly the same crimes they always do, plus more for lack of consideration of police and jails.

And so in this imaginary world, it isn’t in fact even necessary to serve one’s sentence to evade (at least provisionally) punishment for violating the law. One simply has to take seriously the implication of a state that abdicates its monopoly on violence — war of all against all.

*edit:

Compounding of the basic Weberian-Hobbesian problem of making the state not do what defines a state (have a monopoly on violence), what prevents citizens from deciding that sentences are too lenient, murdering ostensibly lawful criminals, and trusting in the community’s agreement with this decision to obviate any need to pay attention to the court’s retributory sentences (here I have just described lynching with paperwork attached)? Even worse, what is to prevent wanton physical threatening and blackmail of court agents by those undergoing these toothless trials? It’s a bad enough question in mafia contexts in our present reality — imagine if any individual merely had to muster up the antisocial will to threaten a court administrator in order to get their service sentence reduced to a week.

Sheer anarchy, war of all against all.

Closing: But actually, let’s get rid of prisons

With all this said, I think prisons are a cancer on human life, worse perhaps than any other compromise human nature makes to society and effective safety. In providing my own solution to them, I also do not require originality — I endorse the return of pre-industrial legal remedies, namely humiliation via public displays, flogging, and when necessary, the death penalty. (These things are not “just” or “good,” but neither are societies to begin with. They are merely orders of life.) In regards to the first one, I haven’t read Moskos’s In Defense of Flogging (since I do not need any convincing), but he should get the credit for the idea, as far as I know.

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1. Pictured: Biologists and physicians believe this to be the location of the yet-mysterious human “breathing system.”

2. Which is just my way of saying “straightforward and uncomplicated.”

3. He literally didn’t, unless showing up for a job that society asks someone to do is “breaking the social contract.”