Good luck Sweeden. Gang violence is really hard to solve, and the “tough-on-crime” politics is damaging. Here’s hoping you can thread that needle.
How is tough on crime damaging?
From my (cursory understanding) the “tough” portion only works if you’re utterly draconian. E.g. if you want to stop jaywalking and put a minimum of two to five years in prison on it, you probably will cut jaywalking by more than 99%.
The level of human rights abuses you’d need to get rid of gangs by merely being draconian would simply not be reconcilable with European laws. For reference: They summary executed/murdered thousands in the Philippines and it didn’t work..
If you’re classically tough, you have all the side-effects of prison. Prison essentially teaches people to become criminals. After all they get to network with other criminals and also they get traumatized (yes, Swedes prisons are more humane than others, but a cage is a cage).
Basically, what you want it is to make crime an irrational decision but making sure that it doesn’t pay of. By that you get all rational people. Against the rest deterrence doesn’t work anyway. And in that context it’s more important to make sure no one gets to keep any drug money than to jail people.
For reference: They summary executed/murdered thousands in the Philippines and it didn’t work…
El Salvador shows how it can work, of course what went down there also wouldn’t fly in Europe but crucially they didn’t actually go around and murdered people en masse – they rather humiliated them and dished out long prison sentences left and right not particularly caring whether they put away innocent people.
The primary goal was to make sure that the country isn’t a constant war-zone any more, to get the violence off the streets, and in that the policy succeeded. It was harsh, but not heartless – all those humiliated and locked-up people do still have chances in life, at least in principle. Parents can hope for their kids instead of mourn them. In other areas Bukele is just as much of an idiot as other techbros. But as far as dictators go he’s one of the good ones, so far, whether his long-term legacy will be “tough man who did what he had to do to save the country” or “tough man who tried to save the country and made everything even worse by getting rid of the rule of law” is up in the air. El Salvador might turn into Haiti, into Uruguay, or Singapore. Who knows.
Basically, what you want it is to make crime an irrational decision but making sure that it doesn’t pay of.
That alone isn’t enough, you also need to provide alternatives or people are going to take their chance. In El Salvador the situation was so bad that the government didn’t really have to do anything in that regard – once the daily shootouts on the streets are gone people have the opportunity to sell fast food on the street, again, generally do business. But in a European setting mere cracking down won’t be enough. Or, in other words: Things aren’t nearly bad enough in Sweden to even begin to justify even entertaining the El Salvador solution.
The best criminal policy is social policy.
El Salvador shows how it can work, of course what went down there also wouldn’t fly in Europe but crucially they didn’t actually go around and murdered people en masse – they rather humiliated them and dished out long prison sentences left and right not particularly caring whether they put away innocent people.
Well, in El Salvador it currently looks like it’s working. But, as you said, we haven’t really seen the outcome yet. I’ll give it a few years until I actually admit that it’s working.
That alone isn’t enough, you also need to provide alternatives or people are going to take their chance.
Absolutely.
Before making crime a bad solution you first need a non criminal solution to survival. People don’t choose criminal violence over a well paid job and a peaceful life, never.
People don’t choose criminal violence over a well paid job and a peaceful life, never.
Well, there’s a lot of sociopaths in prison. About a third of the incarcerated population here in Germany iIRc. Those are a little harder to stop since they don’t really care much about the peaceful part. But apart from them, yeah people don’t tend to chose crime for fun.
Yes, they do.
It ends up punishing innocents and has been shown to be counterproductive in combating actual crime rates as well as recidivism.
And your alternative is to be light on crime and forgiving? That’s going to yield better results?
No one suggested that. People talking about what could go wrong is different from people promoting another approach.
Like when it says “mind the gap”, it’s not telling you to not enter the subway.
But maybe you didn’t ask honest questions but made statements disguised as loaded questions. Which is a sad thing to do.
Assuming you’re genuinely interested in learning about this and not being flippant, I would encourage you to look at the corrections system in a country like Denmark: Harsh punishments do not discourage crime though, that’s a fucking fact backed by empirical date that doesn’t give a shit what any of us think or feel about it.
That seems counterintuitive. What do you do? Ask people pretty please not to commit crimes?
People still get in trouble, but punishments don’t need to be very severe to still work. While it might seem counterintuitive, harsh sentences seem to increase recidivism and hurts society at large. This is also true for harsh conditions in prisons.
That depends on the crime and the circumstances… For gang violence social integration, education, good opportunities and guaranteed coverage of basic needs sound promising for me. You can compare different districts and ask yourself, why in some there is gang violence and in some there isnt.
It’s because of people like you that countries are falling into gang violence.
It doesn’t fix the underlying problem of why people resort to crime. Improving the economical situations of poor people, will go a much longer way in reducing crime rates.
Because it rarely really solves the actual problem while creating a lot of spill on damage and possibly furthering violence. See the US war on drugs or Duterte’s mass executions in the Philippines for very drastic examples.
Being tough on violent gangs causes a lot of damage? Can you elaborate on this?
Drugs shouldn’t be considered criminal so I agree with you there. But violence, robbery, absolutely should be incredibly enforced.
Okay, and what would “incredibly enforcing it” look like in your opinion?
You could establish longer criminal sentences. But longer sentences generally don’t have a higher deterent effect and you just end up with people who have been isolated from society longer or are harder to integrate.
You could make it easier to arrest people/have criminal proceedings, but that will also mean more innocent people will be subjected to harsh measures and grow disdainful of the police.
You could increase police presence in general. But that is also likely to harbour mistrust and have more people subject to unfair scrutiny and would probably to little to prevent the crimes we are talking about here.
And mind you, all these measures will be much more likely to target migrants who already might have a not too rosy view of law enforcement and general society, so you’re always risking exacerbating the same societal issues that are also contributing to the crimes.
So what exactly would you suggest?
And if you look at societies in general, those with the harshest most authoritarian rules don’t really tend to be the most peaceful, crime free ones, but rather harsher rules and a harsher society tend to go in lockstep. Because violence and harshness tend to breed more violence and harshness and the fact that one of the sides enacting the violence is the state and the supposed “good guys” doesn’t magically change that.
Of course that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for harsher laws or tougher measures in certain situations ever. But it definitely means that the harder you hit, the more precise you have to be, if you don’t want things to fire back on you. Which is a lot easier said than done.
Can you provide an example?
An example for which part?
Being very hard on crime. Hand out long sentences to offenders.
Longer sentences very generally don’t do much to deter crime. No criminal thinks things through with a calculator and goes “oh well, if doing this might get me into jail for three years, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. But ten years? Ouwie wowie, I better not do this then!” Most people don’t even think, care or know about the possible repercussions or think they will actually get caught.
Well at least they won’t be around to do it again.
Because the urge to just have results tends to lead to scapegoating someone and locking them up without actually addressing any of the root causes of crime, IE the cases where people fall through the cracks of society and have no route to stability except by committing crime.
To truly wage war on crime you need to wage war on desperation, something that is nigh impossible to do for most conservatives who just want to solve the problem by building more jails to throw away any hooligans being too noisy.
It is shocking to me how many explosions Sweden has. They had about 90 in 2022 and they were already at 109 before the end of August this year! Basically one gang or another is blowing something up every 2-3 days!
This statistic had never occurred to me before, so I looked up the US.
In 2019, 14,940 explosive related incidents which include 715 explosions of which 251 were bombings.
Hah thats nothing, Germany has had 414 detonations in 2020 only related to busting ATMs. [0]
Apparently we had 1645 cases of “Herbeiführen einer Sprengstoffexplosion” which is roughly translated as “causing a detonation of explosives”. [1] Many of them were probably not that bad but bad enough that the police got involved. Thats 4.5 cases a day.
On the other hand, sweden is only about 1/8th of the population of germany so that levels these numbers a bit.
Many of them were probably not that bad but bad enough that the police got involved. Thats 4.5 cases a day.
There’s absolutely a fuck-ton more than show up in the statistics. Pretty much each time you thought “why are people firing fireworks it’s not new year” that’s a potential case. Most cases never make it to the police and even then many are probably going to be filed away under “oh that mardy pensioner again, wake us when it’s a regular occurrence and you can actually name suspects”.
“Sweden has never before seen anything like this,”
Sweden has since sharply restricted migration levels, citing rising crime levels and other social problems.
I’m personally very pro immigration and think we need to get better at it as climate refugees become more common.
How did things get so bad in Sweden? Like, did they fail to facilitate integration or was there an abnormally high level of criminals among their immigrant population?
Failure to integrate is the right answer. At some point immigrant children ceased to have proper access to proper socio-economic status and a parallel society developed which, Scandinavians being Scandinavians, the majority ignored. It’s been a difficult time for the prospects of youth in general but that hit the immigrant population way harder as they’re not as embedded in the local social network, no “cousin of a parent owns a repair shop he’ll give you a job and tide you over”.
Active xenophobia isn’t even needed, all that’s need is a failure to see and care. It’s also generally a urban problem, both because not enough care was taken to encourage immigrants to not be urbanites (a common bias with arrivals is that “city is where the jobs are, rural areas are shitholes” which isn’t at all true for Europe in general), as well as urban society generally being ass at reaching out to people, smaller places are way more tight-knit.
Of course, with shit having hit the fan xenophobia then becomes an issue of its own reinforcing the very issues that caused everything, and down the shitchute we go.
Integration should be the responsibility of anyone who enters another country. I wouldn’t go to Japan or Germany and expect them to slice off a chunk of their territory and call it America for me.
What part of “children” did you not understand, those were generally born and raised Swedes. But more generally speaking: The appeal to individual responsibility is a cop-out. It’s literally the bootstrap argument. What are people to do when there’s no fucking bootstraps?
Then they should have no problem if they are going to the same public schools.
What part of “not as embedded in the local social network” did you not understand? Am I speaking Klingon?
You’re trying very hard to not understand the underlying issues and mechanics, aren’t you.
It’s classic fascist troll.
You don’t want immigrant children going to school with the same kids as the local population?
You got terribly lost. Go back and re-read what I wrote. What did I say about the cousin who owned a repair shop? How many children of immigrants have that kind of connection into the local economy?
You can’t integrate yourself when you face racism. When the locals put you and all people vaguely your skin color in the same place, it’s not them taking the place, it’s you giving them the place and abandoning them there.
At some point immigrant children ceased to have proper access to proper socio-economic status and a parallel society developed which, Scandinavians being Scandinavians, the majority ignored
Where is your support for such a claim? All Swedish citizens, regardless of ethnicity or any other factor, have free access to and abundance of social support:
- Free Healthcare
- Free education, including university (you get paid to study)
- Free work coaching and multitude of enrollment programs
- Free financial support for unemployed
- Favorable loans and cheap student housing
In Sweden, you do not get forced into the life of a criminal, it’s a choice you make. But in order to integrate, you must be willing, and therein lies the root of the problem.
In Sweden, you do not get forced into the life of a criminal, it’s a choice you make.
No but you might get forced into the life of a perpetually unemployed, be looked down on by nearly everyone the whole of your life. Note how I said “status”, not just “money”. Noone lives for money alone.
But in order to integrate, you must be willing, and therein lies the root of the problem.
Again these cop-outs. What you say doesn’t even begin to make sense. How is someone willing or not willing the root of the problem? That people are or are not willing has causes! Find your root there, continue to investigate, don’t cut off you interest at the exact point where you can blame everything on someone else.
Immigrants have the same possibilities as everyone else in Sweden.
So if it’s not their willingness to integrate, what is it then?
My god. I live in the country I was born in and even I can see that the odds are not stacked equally for immigrants. Sorry, but it’s hard to take your comment in good faith, hence the downvote.
Do you live in Sweden? Or how do you know that?
I already explained why the possibilities are not the same. Are you going to address that directly, or just assume I don’t remember what I said?
You said:
At some point immigrant children ceased to have proper access to proper socio-economic status
What does that even mean, give us an example is what I’m saying.
Do you want me to explain what socio-economic status means? Because I already explained the access part. I also explained, elsewhere in this thread, that it doesn’t simply mean money.
But long story short: It’s what long-term unemployed don’t have. At least not in current European societies.
It’s hard to even know what to say to this… Everything you’ve been saying has been pretty disingenuous, I think it’s called virtue signalling.
Lol, Ok thats funny. And what virtue would that be?
It’s equal opportunity bro, everyone has exactly the same opportunities, foreigners are treated just as well as Swedes, the only reason they’re not succeeding is because they’re lazy immigrants ofc… So fucking whack.
I think you’re making a very good point with the big city/rural areas argument. I’m sure most people, that have lived abroad would agree that surrounding yourself with people from similar origin is so incredibly easy. And to avoid that in big cities, where such societies are already established, someone has to purposely work on it. And that in itself is much more difficult and much lonelier than the alternative. And if your motivation for moving is solely economical, why would you do that?
Missinformation is how you get a case like Sweden, for the most part. They elected a far right party into government, blaming everything on immigrants and surprise surprise, the far right government has no real solutions to real problems as things worsen further.
Im moving to sweden and from what ive seen and heard its not the immigrants that cause the problem.
Some people come from different cultures with higher levels of crime. They come to Sweden and they aren’t automatically going to be model Swedes, just keeping doing what they do at home but now in another country. Or it gets worse because they don’t see it as their country.
They shouldn’t have to become “Swedes” to be considered acceptable. Do we have good data on certain countries having higher crime rates than others? Because often with these measurements, they are done differently in each country, making comparisons difficult.
If they moving to Sweden then yea they kinda should become swedes at least the following generations.
Funny you should say that Sweden used to keep data on things like skin colour and nationality but the data that came out if it gave fuel to people saying certain nationalities cause more crime. Now it’s unreported.
I didn’t mention skin colour, you did. Nice try.
Yea I did.
They used to keep information on that now they don’t. Same as nationality. They got rid of them at the same time.
You can only be pro immigration between countries of the same cultural background. Immigration from the Arab world and other Muslim countries should be banned.
So your answer to systematic bigotry is institutional bigotry? Get the fuck out of here! No seriously, leave. Be ashamed of your hate and keep it to yourself if your unwilling to work towards being a decent human being.
The only one with hate here is you.
Can you give me a list of these cultural backgrounds?
