My lord, what a mistake. What a terribly misconceived idea. Horribly timed, inspired by short-term frustration and a genuine, frustrated desire to understand, offered with no consideration of the logistics…. A major undertaking launched on a pure whim, with money attached, meaning that I had a duty to take it seriously and really evaluate the various entries. Here’s some issues that immediately became clear with the (paid!) challenge I issued:
I've seen 'outlaw status needs to make a comeback' making small but insistent inroads on the Right, for what it's worth. It can't happen in our panopticon of a society, not to mention one in which "banishment" doesn't mean what it used to... but it does seem a logical extension of another Rightist idea, namely that America is showing signs of anarcho-tyranny in which certain clients can effectively operate outside the law, while being insulated (and subsidized) by the fact that the law is hyper-enforced against enemies.
Maybe this is a concern of fringe groups but the concern among mainstream conservatives right now is that the justice system is being weaponized against conservatives. For example, the FBI's surveillance of Catholics after Dobbs. Or the charges being leveled against Trump.
Well I guess that's why you've got to brand him on the face, or cut his nose off. That's how they did it in ye olde days.
But one of the tricky things about the Outlaw solution, historically, is figuring out how to "de-outlaw" someone -- whether it's because they've repented of whatever they did to earn the status, or you've later discovered their innocence, or you've changed the law to make whatever they did no longer illegal, etc.
You want there to be a method for outlaws to repair their status -- otherwise, once you're outlawed you've got nothing left to lose, and your only recourse is to link up with some fellow outlaws and form armed bands dedicated to overthrowing the government that outlawed you.
The murder rate would explode. So long as a person is willing to do community service for the rest of their life - not much of a punishment - they can take vengeance on anyone. Bosses and ex-wives look out.
What about blowing up a plane full of kids because you don’t their religion? You have pick up garbage for an hour every weekday for the rest of your life?
The best part is that you probably wouldn't need to. You could sell autographs at conventions, or take up painting and sell your artwork on Ebay for six figures.
Or not doing community service. It's not like "the protection of the law" actually counts for much in this scenario.
I think vigilante justice is the actual enforcement mechanism in this proposal, since there is no mechanism for imposing serious penalties on vigilantes.
And if it does count for something, if doing the community service really does save you from the threat of private violence, how is this less coercive than the present system?
It either doesn't work at all, or it works via threats.
Yeah, the danger would be if enough people did this - basically took on outlaw status prior to becoming outlaws themselves - it may become so unmanagable that they'd have to build some kind of special facility to hold them, or at the very least employ trained individuals with license to detain or incapacitate them.
I would imagine, at minimum, a reversion to something resembling a feudal state with communities organized around those with the means to offer physical protection.
Parts of Mexico operate in this way, with entire communities existing distinct from the coercive apparatus of state and instead governed by a cartel.
Even in towns and areas nominally under the control of the government (be it state or federal) there are plenty of outlaws. They don't recognize the police or army as legitimate organs of the Mexican people and they don't really use state services except for water and maybe schools. Such bills as they have can be paid in cash at a convenience store so they can't really be debanked the way they could in the US.
Your description of all the difficulties you ran into reminds me of whenever I've started new kinds of projects and realized I missed a lot of small simple things that would have made it much easier.
Let’s set aside the community service for a moment, as that is unlikely to be much of a deterrent or much of a hassle for the offender, nor much consolation for the victims or their families.
Vigilante justice is what human society had for thousands of years. The record shows that much higher levels of violence are the result of that approach.
So, this does not seem like a very good answer to me, but I can believe it was the best. There is no real solution to this challenge.
What's to stop Chauvin from rounding up a group of like minded individuals and settling in a remote and heavily armed village in the backwoods of Idaho or Washington?
Instead you now have a rival community. What if they set up in national forest land and start cutting down trees to clear fields in addition to mining for precious minerals?
Thank you for running this challenge. A great concept despite the logistical/administrative headache of implementation. Kind of like the winning response, which is fascinating but opens the doors to competing & vigilante systems. But I won't begrudge anarchists for their dreams, since to dream is to at least imagine an alternative, better world. Well Done and Congratulations to Jonathan Keith!
It's state-sanctioned slavery, for one, and the state incentives are terrible: corrupt judges will produce a cadre of slaves for the state.
While being slavery, amazingly, it's also a free pass for those who don't care if they're slaves. I am not financially wealthy, but since my early forties I found it easy to dedicate full time hours to community service. Under Keith's system, a life sentence of community service would be almost no cost to me. I could murder my chainsaw-sculpture artist neighbour - who disturbs my peace - with little consequence.
While I appreciate approaches which incorporate restorative justice, one of the pieces missing in Keith's scheme is accountability to those most affected proportionate to the effect upon them.
This choice is thought provoking but can't be intended as a serious option to move forward, right? Because this just creates gangland? Commit crime, bail on community service, commit more crimes and band together with other outlaws for group protection.
Which is maybe the point? The best suggested option is brutally flawed?
I lived for 2+ years in rural El Salvador, way up in the mountains, as a Peace Corps volunteer. Zero policing, so vigilante justice was the norm (this was layered on top of the ongoing impacts of the then recent civil war). It was horrific at times. And incredibly stressful and destabilizing for those communities, interfering with all aspects of normal life.
Flash forward to today: after decades as one of the most dangerous, deadly countries in the world, El Salvador's new(ish) president has suspended civil liberties and created a carceral state, enthusiastically abandoning due process, resulting in his astronomically high approval ratings because people just want to feel safe.
I don’t want to read too much into other people’s thoughts here, but maybe that’s the point. What other social regulations do we have as options that are really practical? If we don’t have carceral systems that are developed for large-scale societies, we have what we always had in societies past - tribal social contracts. I’m not a binary option kind of guy, but it seems like the conditions that present themselves based on scale of social organization tend to track consistently.
I think it's hard to imagine how society would work -- in just 500 words -- if the prompt is just focused on how a given case would work. Perhaps you could draw from the entries that weren't focused on Chauvin? There are coherent ways to make the case -- after all, the radicals aren't incorrect when they point out that Anglo societies didn't really create formal institutions for policing until the 1800s (ie there were many weak & somewhat overlapping ways that society would try to police itself in accordance with what judges ordered). Or one could point out that in the 1950s the US institutionalized more than 5 times as many people in mental hospitals as in carceral facilities -- there are nuances to work out in how this could expand to absorb further authorities from the criminal justice system, but it was a real alternative we've basically abolished since.
Well, yes, the point would be to move towards absorbing them, but in 500 words you can't *both* focus on particularities of one edge case *and* describe how normal society would work. After all, you could describe our criminal justice system in terms of how it deals with edge cases too -- but you'd get a very misleading image of our system's intended design by focusing on OJ Simpson or on how SF refuses to prosecute many crimes today. After all, the point of a society is (almost by definition) how it works on average, much more than how it works with exceptions: in other words, I think states are more defined by their cores than by their borders, & by their customs than by their "states of exception."
& in fact we did handle murderers like Ted Bundy or the Unabomber -- or also like whoever gave Floyd the fentanyl that showed up in huge amounts in his autopsy -- before the creation of modern policing institutions in the UK & US in the early 1800s. We did that through rough justice that "anti-police" people today would blanch at, but it was a system that I think had many merits, even if it's unlikely to return & perhaps inapt for our era.
By edge case I mean that the vast majority of the population are law abiding while a relatively tiny criminal minority does all the law breaking. Almost by definition even "ordinary" crime is pretty weird.
I don't find OJ Simpson remarkable: reasonable doubt is a defining characteristic of the US legal system and it applies to everybody, including Casey Anthony.
As for prosecutorial reluctance to file charges, looking at the crime rate across the country (especially in urban cores) I have to wonder how uncommon such approaches really are.
So then it's relevant that we did have very different standard mechanisms for dealing with criminals very recently: just as the Warren Court radically reinterpreted criminal justice procedure in the 1960s -- & yet people think this is how it must always be under our constitution -- the 1800s radically reformed how policing & punishment worked for crime *in general*. Prison wasn't really a punishment for crime in England until -- in 1776 -- transportation to the colonies became unviable (though jails of course still detained suspects awaiting their punishments). Police -- as an institution -- didn't really exist in England until 1829, & I think it's worth familiarizing oneself with how their society handled the functions of policing during that era (before dismissing it as unviable). Again: it's the opposite of what BLM activists would like, but it existed, & it created a powerful & dynamic & free society (the British empire & the industrial revolution & the idea of "common law" rights & whatnot). I summarize the basics of the system they used from 1300 to 1800 here: https://cebk.substack.com/p/why-we-will-defund-the-police-and
I agree that our current police/prison system would work better with better mental health infrastructure and support. I also think some form of guaranteed/baseline economic security could eliminate some of the incentives, and hopelessness, that can lead to crime. Maybe improved rehab/training programs would work, although I haven't seen good examples of what that would look like. I'm open to a tech solution: automatic traffic tickets to avoid police interactions? Also, sending non-police to certain emergency calls... sure. Likewise, changing the ramifications for police misconduct appears to be a viable path toward reform.
E.g. the first 500-word take is about the historical alternatives to police in Anglo legal systems 1300-1800, the second 500-word take is about how civil commitment makes more rational sense for dealing with typical criminals, etc.
"Anglo societies didn't really create formal institutions for policing until the 1800s"
Denmark had vigilantes back in the 1600s. I presume it was required for membership in a berg, or a walled city. In Denmark, the berg was responsible for crime against your property, hence the vigilantes were quick to respond. At night, a warden patrolled the town, and watchmen were on the wall watching for intruders. Beyond the wall was lawless lands outside the protection of the berg.
I definitely didn't write this intending it to be a zinger--it was my earnest best attempt at coming up with a noncarceral/violence-free justice system. It's hard to see this actually working well in real life but if eliminating incarceration and policing was our only goal, this is a way that it could conceivably be done!
"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. "
The state has just outsourced the actual doing of the violence to private citizens.
I think it boils down to a commission vs omission distinction that matters to a lot of people.
Generally letting somebody die is seen as less morally blameworthy than killing them. Here the justice system is letting somebody die as an alternative to killing them/locking them up. I think calling that justice system "violence-free" is fair, though it would also be fair to say that that's just because the justice system outsourced the violence--but they outsourced it in terms of letting it happen, not ordering it done, which once again, commission vs omission.
I'm into it! The outlaw thing seems *maybe* more robust in a multipolar society but then also blood feuds, gang warfare, backwoods compounds, etc as argued elsewhere in these comments! Could be the Amish system even at scale would be better than my idea!
The problem with the Amish system though is that it implicitly relies on the existing national, state and local authorities to step in with violence if things get out of hand, so that calls into question it's ability to scale.
I.e. shunning works fine for individuals within the Amish community who violate it's mores, but if say a large enough armed group takes over the community, eventually traditional state sanctioned violence will be employed to restore order.
It must be a surprise to see the feedback on your submission. I read the prompt as being broader than coming up with a noncarceral/violence free justice system, but, if that is the narrow goal, deport any person who commits any of the listed crimes, and beef up our border security.
One side-effect of incarceration that we don’t think about much is that it protects the offender from retaliation (except in extreme cases, eg mob hits).
Additionally, it provides housing, food, medical care, and other services to individuals who might otherwise struggle to care for themselves.
So as much as people might want to treat it as an unmitigated evil, it does serve useful functions that would be difficult to replicate.
That’s a good point. In this scenario, the state would need to pay for food and housing for people who are stuck doing community service all day, and health insurance too. Might be better than a lot of jobs. 🫤
Convict labor used to be much more visible to the mainstream population (though of course it hasn’t exactly disappeared). Unclear how this is different from working on a chain gang (but sans chains?). Admittedly, Cool Hand Luke is a great film.
So as long as I'm confident I can defend myself from retribution I can do whatever I want? Yeah I guess if I'm ostracized from society I can't get a job, but that shouldn't be a problem with all the stealing I'm going to be doing. Plus I bet I can find a few other outlaw friends for my gang, and we should be able to handle all the disorganized vigilante parties of random family members and small business owners pretty handily.
This implies such a weird, soft, naïve perspective on human nature.
A perspective that also hasn't read history, and learned that we have in fact literally tried this solution before, so we can actually know how it has worked out (not well!).
The entire movement consists of conscientious, pro-social people who don't understand that most crimes get committed because the people committing them are not conscientious or pro-social.
So once you're outlawed, you're no longer protected by *any* of the law, or just the laws against violence?
Seems like people are jumping to the assumption that outlaws would mostly get murdered -- but why murder them when you can capture them, enslave them, and extract the value of their labor? Now your Outlaw class is actually a slave class. I'm sure that'll turn out fine.
The rest of the entries must have been really bad if that was the winner.
It seems like the contest implicitly posed a challenge: how to simultaneously offer the level of mercy that decarceral types typically want to see for the incarcerated, while also providing the level of justice they want to see served out for Chauvin's crimes.
The winning entry just seems to have forgotten about the first part of the challenge. No critic of incarceration could accept a system where people who duck out of community service can get lynched with impunity.
I don't think that's correct. There are plenty of philosophical and ideological positions I can think of that would have very different feelings about the state doing violence through cops to people, vs the state simply declining to give the protection of the law to people who refuse to take the (very merciful) punishment offered. I'm not necessarily saying I agree with any of them, but there are tons of options for thinking that police violence is inherently unjust without thinking that *all possible violence* is unjust.
I didn't deny that there are philosophical positions that would take that stance (certain purist libertarians or anarchists being obvious examples). My claim was explicitly about actually existing decarceral types (who for the most part I don't think are motivated by consistent philosophical positions).
you wrote "No critic of incarceration could accept a system where people who duck out of community service can get lynched with impunity." If you meant that statement to only apply to people you already disagreed with, you should have said that!
The statement isn't limited to "people [I] already disagreed with". It's targeted at the same people as the original contest (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-defundderek-chauvin-challenge) where Freddie addresses "those who believe in police/prison/criminal justice abolition", but specifically "well-intentioned left-leaning people."
Sure there may be hardline libertarians or other who are fine with the scenario I described where ordinary criminals who skip community service can get hunted with impunity by lynch mobs, but their position (even if it's coherent) isn't as interesting as what actual activists for the abolition of the carceral state think we should do, and my claim here is that these normal well-meaning anti-carceral advocates would not endorse the winning entry's 'lynching with impunity' solution.
My impatience with the state of this comments section cannot be overstated.
(Sees article is up. Before reading it, checks Venmo.)
Rats
Congratulations to the winner!
I've seen 'outlaw status needs to make a comeback' making small but insistent inroads on the Right, for what it's worth. It can't happen in our panopticon of a society, not to mention one in which "banishment" doesn't mean what it used to... but it does seem a logical extension of another Rightist idea, namely that America is showing signs of anarcho-tyranny in which certain clients can effectively operate outside the law, while being insulated (and subsidized) by the fact that the law is hyper-enforced against enemies.
Yes, a lot of this kind of RETVRN thinking presupposes that we're already living in a lawless dystopia, and so things couldn't possibly get worse.
But in real life, there's a big difference between "things are bad" and "things couldn't get worse." Just ask a Libyan.
Or indeed a lot of Mexicans!
Maybe this is a concern of fringe groups but the concern among mainstream conservatives right now is that the justice system is being weaponized against conservatives. For example, the FBI's surveillance of Catholics after Dobbs. Or the charges being leveled against Trump.
Let's just hope no one looks like Chauvin and could be mistaken for him during some vigilante outlaw punishment.
Well I guess that's why you've got to brand him on the face, or cut his nose off. That's how they did it in ye olde days.
But one of the tricky things about the Outlaw solution, historically, is figuring out how to "de-outlaw" someone -- whether it's because they've repented of whatever they did to earn the status, or you've later discovered their innocence, or you've changed the law to make whatever they did no longer illegal, etc.
You want there to be a method for outlaws to repair their status -- otherwise, once you're outlawed you've got nothing left to lose, and your only recourse is to link up with some fellow outlaws and form armed bands dedicated to overthrowing the government that outlawed you.
The murder rate would explode. So long as a person is willing to do community service for the rest of their life - not much of a punishment - they can take vengeance on anyone. Bosses and ex-wives look out.
What about blowing up a plane full of kids because you don’t their religion? You have pick up garbage for an hour every weekday for the rest of your life?
The best part is that you probably wouldn't need to. You could sell autographs at conventions, or take up painting and sell your artwork on Ebay for six figures.
What if somebody wanted to pay Chauvin $1 million for his autobiography?
It's called a "side gig"...
What about working as a hit man for the Mafia? Retribution against an assassin would provoke the ire of the organization that employs him.
Come to think of it there's any number of action movies with a similar premise and the body counts are usually astronomical.
Or not doing community service. It's not like "the protection of the law" actually counts for much in this scenario.
I think vigilante justice is the actual enforcement mechanism in this proposal, since there is no mechanism for imposing serious penalties on vigilantes.
And if it does count for something, if doing the community service really does save you from the threat of private violence, how is this less coercive than the present system?
It either doesn't work at all, or it works via threats.
Interesting idea, but seems like it would lead to an enormous amount of vigilantism by people who don't mind doing a lot of community service, no?
Yeah, the danger would be if enough people did this - basically took on outlaw status prior to becoming outlaws themselves - it may become so unmanagable that they'd have to build some kind of special facility to hold them, or at the very least employ trained individuals with license to detain or incapacitate them.
I would imagine, at minimum, a reversion to something resembling a feudal state with communities organized around those with the means to offer physical protection.
Parts of Mexico operate in this way, with entire communities existing distinct from the coercive apparatus of state and instead governed by a cartel.
Even in towns and areas nominally under the control of the government (be it state or federal) there are plenty of outlaws. They don't recognize the police or army as legitimate organs of the Mexican people and they don't really use state services except for water and maybe schools. Such bills as they have can be paid in cash at a convenience store so they can't really be debanked the way they could in the US.
Your description of all the difficulties you ran into reminds me of whenever I've started new kinds of projects and realized I missed a lot of small simple things that would have made it much easier.
This is my life in general. Also the problem with contests is that there's one winner and many losers, so you don't generate any good will.
So, community service and vigilante justice?
Let’s set aside the community service for a moment, as that is unlikely to be much of a deterrent or much of a hassle for the offender, nor much consolation for the victims or their families.
Vigilante justice is what human society had for thousands of years. The record shows that much higher levels of violence are the result of that approach.
So, this does not seem like a very good answer to me, but I can believe it was the best. There is no real solution to this challenge.
What's to stop Chauvin from rounding up a group of like minded individuals and settling in a remote and heavily armed village in the backwoods of Idaho or Washington?
Self exile probably works fine as a solution. At that point, he's no longer part of the community.
Instead you now have a rival community. What if they set up in national forest land and start cutting down trees to clear fields in addition to mining for precious minerals?
Presumably at some point the army goes in to clear them out.
So much for community service.
Yes, under the examples given with no incarceration option or police eventually unlawful behavior will escalate to death as the punishment/result.
Which kind of runs counter to the original premise, which is a society without coercion or cops.
We’ve got enough of those groups up here already, thank you.
Thank you for running this challenge. A great concept despite the logistical/administrative headache of implementation. Kind of like the winning response, which is fascinating but opens the doors to competing & vigilante systems. But I won't begrudge anarchists for their dreams, since to dream is to at least imagine an alternative, better world. Well Done and Congratulations to Jonathan Keith!
I find that an ugly, dystopian system.
It's state-sanctioned slavery, for one, and the state incentives are terrible: corrupt judges will produce a cadre of slaves for the state.
While being slavery, amazingly, it's also a free pass for those who don't care if they're slaves. I am not financially wealthy, but since my early forties I found it easy to dedicate full time hours to community service. Under Keith's system, a life sentence of community service would be almost no cost to me. I could murder my chainsaw-sculpture artist neighbour - who disturbs my peace - with little consequence.
While I appreciate approaches which incorporate restorative justice, one of the pieces missing in Keith's scheme is accountability to those most affected proportionate to the effect upon them.
Freddie- any chance we can see the top-10?
This choice is thought provoking but can't be intended as a serious option to move forward, right? Because this just creates gangland? Commit crime, bail on community service, commit more crimes and band together with other outlaws for group protection.
Which is maybe the point? The best suggested option is brutally flawed?
This was among the more grounded responses. It's just really hard to imagine society without some formal security function.
I lived for 2+ years in rural El Salvador, way up in the mountains, as a Peace Corps volunteer. Zero policing, so vigilante justice was the norm (this was layered on top of the ongoing impacts of the then recent civil war). It was horrific at times. And incredibly stressful and destabilizing for those communities, interfering with all aspects of normal life.
Flash forward to today: after decades as one of the most dangerous, deadly countries in the world, El Salvador's new(ish) president has suspended civil liberties and created a carceral state, enthusiastically abandoning due process, resulting in his astronomically high approval ratings because people just want to feel safe.
I don’t want to read too much into other people’s thoughts here, but maybe that’s the point. What other social regulations do we have as options that are really practical? If we don’t have carceral systems that are developed for large-scale societies, we have what we always had in societies past - tribal social contracts. I’m not a binary option kind of guy, but it seems like the conditions that present themselves based on scale of social organization tend to track consistently.
I think it's hard to imagine how society would work -- in just 500 words -- if the prompt is just focused on how a given case would work. Perhaps you could draw from the entries that weren't focused on Chauvin? There are coherent ways to make the case -- after all, the radicals aren't incorrect when they point out that Anglo societies didn't really create formal institutions for policing until the 1800s (ie there were many weak & somewhat overlapping ways that society would try to police itself in accordance with what judges ordered). Or one could point out that in the 1950s the US institutionalized more than 5 times as many people in mental hospitals as in carceral facilities -- there are nuances to work out in how this could expand to absorb further authorities from the criminal justice system, but it was a real alternative we've basically abolished since.
Crime is almost by definition an edge case. If the system can't handle Chauvin, or Ted Bundy, or the Unabomber, what's the point?
Well, yes, the point would be to move towards absorbing them, but in 500 words you can't *both* focus on particularities of one edge case *and* describe how normal society would work. After all, you could describe our criminal justice system in terms of how it deals with edge cases too -- but you'd get a very misleading image of our system's intended design by focusing on OJ Simpson or on how SF refuses to prosecute many crimes today. After all, the point of a society is (almost by definition) how it works on average, much more than how it works with exceptions: in other words, I think states are more defined by their cores than by their borders, & by their customs than by their "states of exception."
& in fact we did handle murderers like Ted Bundy or the Unabomber -- or also like whoever gave Floyd the fentanyl that showed up in huge amounts in his autopsy -- before the creation of modern policing institutions in the UK & US in the early 1800s. We did that through rough justice that "anti-police" people today would blanch at, but it was a system that I think had many merits, even if it's unlikely to return & perhaps inapt for our era.
By edge case I mean that the vast majority of the population are law abiding while a relatively tiny criminal minority does all the law breaking. Almost by definition even "ordinary" crime is pretty weird.
I don't find OJ Simpson remarkable: reasonable doubt is a defining characteristic of the US legal system and it applies to everybody, including Casey Anthony.
As for prosecutorial reluctance to file charges, looking at the crime rate across the country (especially in urban cores) I have to wonder how uncommon such approaches really are.
So then it's relevant that we did have very different standard mechanisms for dealing with criminals very recently: just as the Warren Court radically reinterpreted criminal justice procedure in the 1960s -- & yet people think this is how it must always be under our constitution -- the 1800s radically reformed how policing & punishment worked for crime *in general*. Prison wasn't really a punishment for crime in England until -- in 1776 -- transportation to the colonies became unviable (though jails of course still detained suspects awaiting their punishments). Police -- as an institution -- didn't really exist in England until 1829, & I think it's worth familiarizing oneself with how their society handled the functions of policing during that era (before dismissing it as unviable). Again: it's the opposite of what BLM activists would like, but it existed, & it created a powerful & dynamic & free society (the British empire & the industrial revolution & the idea of "common law" rights & whatnot). I summarize the basics of the system they used from 1300 to 1800 here: https://cebk.substack.com/p/why-we-will-defund-the-police-and
What are the "coherent ways to make the case"?
I agree that our current police/prison system would work better with better mental health infrastructure and support. I also think some form of guaranteed/baseline economic security could eliminate some of the incentives, and hopelessness, that can lead to crime. Maybe improved rehab/training programs would work, although I haven't seen good examples of what that would look like. I'm open to a tech solution: automatic traffic tickets to avoid police interactions? Also, sending non-police to certain emergency calls... sure. Likewise, changing the ramifications for police misconduct appears to be a viable path toward reform.
But all of that still retains police and prisons.
I tried to summarize -- without necessarily endorsing -- several versions of the argument here: https://cebk.substack.com/p/why-we-will-defund-the-police-and
E.g. the first 500-word take is about the historical alternatives to police in Anglo legal systems 1300-1800, the second 500-word take is about how civil commitment makes more rational sense for dealing with typical criminals, etc.
I don't find that link to be a "coherent way to make the case".... and now I'm even more confused what argument you're making.
"Anglo societies didn't really create formal institutions for policing until the 1800s"
Denmark had vigilantes back in the 1600s. I presume it was required for membership in a berg, or a walled city. In Denmark, the berg was responsible for crime against your property, hence the vigilantes were quick to respond. At night, a warden patrolled the town, and watchmen were on the wall watching for intruders. Beyond the wall was lawless lands outside the protection of the berg.
I definitely didn't write this intending it to be a zinger--it was my earnest best attempt at coming up with a noncarceral/violence-free justice system. It's hard to see this actually working well in real life but if eliminating incarceration and policing was our only goal, this is a way that it could conceivably be done!
How is this violence free?
"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. "
The state has just outsourced the actual doing of the violence to private citizens.
I think it boils down to a commission vs omission distinction that matters to a lot of people.
Generally letting somebody die is seen as less morally blameworthy than killing them. Here the justice system is letting somebody die as an alternative to killing them/locking them up. I think calling that justice system "violence-free" is fair, though it would also be fair to say that that's just because the justice system outsourced the violence--but they outsourced it in terms of letting it happen, not ordering it done, which once again, commission vs omission.
Fair point.
I think a truly "violence free" solution would look more like the Amish practice of shunning and excommunication vs declaring someone an outlaw.
I'm into it! The outlaw thing seems *maybe* more robust in a multipolar society but then also blood feuds, gang warfare, backwoods compounds, etc as argued elsewhere in these comments! Could be the Amish system even at scale would be better than my idea!
The problem with the Amish system though is that it implicitly relies on the existing national, state and local authorities to step in with violence if things get out of hand, so that calls into question it's ability to scale.
I.e. shunning works fine for individuals within the Amish community who violate it's mores, but if say a large enough armed group takes over the community, eventually traditional state sanctioned violence will be employed to restore order.
It must be a surprise to see the feedback on your submission. I read the prompt as being broader than coming up with a noncarceral/violence free justice system, but, if that is the narrow goal, deport any person who commits any of the listed crimes, and beef up our border security.
One side-effect of incarceration that we don’t think about much is that it protects the offender from retaliation (except in extreme cases, eg mob hits).
Additionally, it provides housing, food, medical care, and other services to individuals who might otherwise struggle to care for themselves.
So as much as people might want to treat it as an unmitigated evil, it does serve useful functions that would be difficult to replicate.
That’s a good point. In this scenario, the state would need to pay for food and housing for people who are stuck doing community service all day, and health insurance too. Might be better than a lot of jobs. 🫤
Convict labor used to be much more visible to the mainstream population (though of course it hasn’t exactly disappeared). Unclear how this is different from working on a chain gang (but sans chains?). Admittedly, Cool Hand Luke is a great film.
So as long as I'm confident I can defend myself from retribution I can do whatever I want? Yeah I guess if I'm ostracized from society I can't get a job, but that shouldn't be a problem with all the stealing I'm going to be doing. Plus I bet I can find a few other outlaw friends for my gang, and we should be able to handle all the disorganized vigilante parties of random family members and small business owners pretty handily.
This implies such a weird, soft, naïve perspective on human nature.
A perspective that also hasn't read history, and learned that we have in fact literally tried this solution before, so we can actually know how it has worked out (not well!).
I'm not sure the winner actually believes in his proposal. That "Best I can do" thrown in there is pretty suggestive.
The entire movement consists of conscientious, pro-social people who don't understand that most crimes get committed because the people committing them are not conscientious or pro-social.
So once you're outlawed, you're no longer protected by *any* of the law, or just the laws against violence?
Seems like people are jumping to the assumption that outlaws would mostly get murdered -- but why murder them when you can capture them, enslave them, and extract the value of their labor? Now your Outlaw class is actually a slave class. I'm sure that'll turn out fine.
I'm picturing a bounty hunter/involuntary organ donor business model.
Why wait until they're outlawed? What's the worst they can do to slave lords, sentence them to voluntary community service?
The rest of the entries must have been really bad if that was the winner.
It seems like the contest implicitly posed a challenge: how to simultaneously offer the level of mercy that decarceral types typically want to see for the incarcerated, while also providing the level of justice they want to see served out for Chauvin's crimes.
The winning entry just seems to have forgotten about the first part of the challenge. No critic of incarceration could accept a system where people who duck out of community service can get lynched with impunity.
The game was rigged. Every society needs cops and prisons because the alternative is always much, much worse.
I don't think that's correct. There are plenty of philosophical and ideological positions I can think of that would have very different feelings about the state doing violence through cops to people, vs the state simply declining to give the protection of the law to people who refuse to take the (very merciful) punishment offered. I'm not necessarily saying I agree with any of them, but there are tons of options for thinking that police violence is inherently unjust without thinking that *all possible violence* is unjust.
I didn't deny that there are philosophical positions that would take that stance (certain purist libertarians or anarchists being obvious examples). My claim was explicitly about actually existing decarceral types (who for the most part I don't think are motivated by consistent philosophical positions).
you wrote "No critic of incarceration could accept a system where people who duck out of community service can get lynched with impunity." If you meant that statement to only apply to people you already disagreed with, you should have said that!
The statement isn't limited to "people [I] already disagreed with". It's targeted at the same people as the original contest (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-defundderek-chauvin-challenge) where Freddie addresses "those who believe in police/prison/criminal justice abolition", but specifically "well-intentioned left-leaning people."
Sure there may be hardline libertarians or other who are fine with the scenario I described where ordinary criminals who skip community service can get hunted with impunity by lynch mobs, but their position (even if it's coherent) isn't as interesting as what actual activists for the abolition of the carceral state think we should do, and my claim here is that these normal well-meaning anti-carceral advocates would not endorse the winning entry's 'lynching with impunity' solution.