this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Omg, this turned out to be a thread with plenty explanations to USians that societies have laws, police, judges...
You can blame the orange guy all you want, but your culture is completely derailed. Murder (under whatever "reasons") can't be a national sport.
Weapon manufacturers really did a good job in the land of the free..
I mean obviously the gun laws are insane but the act of collectively beating the shit out of pickpockets has my respect.
My most American belief is that society fell apart when we got rid of dueling. Assholes need the threat of violent retribution to contain their assholery, and without that, they just shit everywhere.
Of course, that belief falls apart the minute that you realize that assholes can be good at dueling, too…
It also falls apart when dueling did not generally cross classes. If you were a rich guy your “defense of your honor” was either petty or eliminating competition, sometimes both. No poor person was going to take out a “rich asshole” by any other means than being charged with murder. The only violent retribution available to the masses is revolt accompanied by a guillotine.
The public largely supported the abolition of duelling. The reason it disappeared was because it was largely associated with slave owners in the south and it disappeared after they lost the Civil War.
USian checking in, and you're absolutely right. We somehow have the biggest police budget, while simultaneously having the most violent crimes & incarceration rates of all the developed nations.
there's no "somehow" about it. police don't stop crime.
Right, they punish ex post facto & not judicially
The other day, I was learning about the private prison system in the UK. It was grim seeing how that whole process leads to the proliferation of crime. Things are a damn sight better here than in the US, but it's clear that our current trajectory is taking us closer to the US on that front.
It's a self reinforcing cycle, because the rhetoric of crime leads to the proliferation of prisons, and a system that finds it profitable to criminalise people. I'm not even talking about prisons in terms of rehabilitation Vs punitive justice here, but almost the stage before that — people who probably shouldn't be considered criminals at all. I suppose what I am positing is that we should be applying preventative medicine" lens towards crime and criminals. But of course, where's the profit in actually addressing socioeconomic inequities?
When seconds matter, the police are only minutes away.
And now the police (ICE) are disappearing people. Can you blame people for wanting guns?
Watching 60 days in is an absolutely insane thing to watch as a non american. People living like cockroaches in moldy shit stained rooms. People just sleep on the floor because they are over capacity, violence, food that looks just downright like a hazard to eat. And people in there are like: yeah, i've been here 10 times. I can't get a job so i do crime and then i land here again. Or guys like: i grew some weed, so obviously i'm in this slave hole for 10 years.
What I find worse is how many Americans refuse to accept that our society can and should treat prisoners better. Like I'm not advocating for luxury hotels or unrestricted freedoms for them, just humane conditions, reasonable sentence lengths, and a focus on rehabilitation. What we're doing isn't working and is a stain on our collective soul.
Though I will say most Americans have odd understandings of quality of life. Owning a car is seen as so fundamental that people feel attacked at the idea of building cities where it's not a necessity, while the idea that we should provide free meals to schoolchildren or providing medicine to prisoners is seen by many as government waste. Even our fundamental and foundational rights such as state appointed lawyers for the indigent accused of crimes are nickel and dimed to uselessness, and the idea of providing these lawyers for all accused who want them is seen as radical.
This is hardly a bright side to the fucked up cloud that is the modern prison system, but something I have found notable is that some of the most interesting stuff about restorative justice has come from American scholars and activists. It's notable to me because whilst America seems to distill all the things I hate most about how society treats crime and prisoners, I recognise a heckton of these things in the justice systems of other countries too — including my own. However, there does not seem to be as much appetite for digging into these problematic aspects in countries where things are perceived to be on the more moderate side.
Like I say, it's hardly a "bright side", but I think there isn't an easy answer to "how do we respond to people who transgress against society?". Even if we agree that we should focus on rehabilitation, the question of how to do that is a pretty complex one. It would be wrong to say that I'm hopeful when there's so much fucked up stuff deeply entrenched in modern justice systems (especially the American one), but I do feel bolstered by how much I have personally had my perspectives challenged by the aforementioned scholars and activists resisting unjust "justice" in the US.
Yeah I've been seeing a lot of folks act like all Americans are absolute barbarians who revel in our nation's cruelty, but prison abolitionists still operate here and plenty of communities here are actually putting rubber to road for rehabilitative justice.
And as you say, it's fucking hard. You want to give people chances but you need to prioritize victims safety and rights, and the fact is there are bad actors in every group. And that's not even getting into situations where life is a hell of a lot easier when you keep giving one person more and more chances.
I've been fortunate enough to know some folks in the prison ab scene and they're good folks trying to do right by the sorts of folks nobody else is gonna. And I've come to the conclusion that you can judge a society by how it treats its criminals. Who will defend the unsympathetic? Someone's gotta, otherwise you're a hop skip and a jump away from having a role where the worst people can get official sanction to be their worst selves. Round here the prison guards are often just as bad of people as the prisoner.