Eugenics by Incarceration is Not Criminal Justice

Picture your family is starving. You have an impulse to feed them. You follow an elk. Just as you are about to make the kill, a stranger comes over the hill and kills and takes the elk. Your survival instinct, is to kill that stranger. It is almost too obvious to need to write, that many men, and man in general, have an impulse to kill strangers. Without or before trade or common intermarriage, neighbors or neighboring tribes are of no use to you, and threaten your survival.

With the advent of transportation and specialization and storage and trade, strangers and strange foreigners become valuable and useful to survival. Someone who arrives on a boat will have an easier time delivering goods, than invading and taking your farmland. But it becomes impossible to calculate exactly the extent to which that stranger is a threat or benefit to you. Some say the teachings of Jesus are beneficial, because they teach people to not automatically follow an impulse to kill that stranger.

In Ancient Greece, trade was forbidden to Spartans. Competing states had little use for one another, and seem to have done their best to wipe out or enslave their neighbors. Even in present times, in nations that rely on oil or mineral resources, it is more useful to wipe out your neighbor and take his oil well. Just like any other impulse, whether it be to eat salty food, watch movies, or ride roller coasters, man has an impulse to wipe out members of strange tribes and cultures. Serving that impulse, becomes an economic product, just like puppies or pet rocks.

When I was in Spain, there was a camp of gypsies in the empty lot next to my apartment. It seems safe to say if lightening struck them, or the ground opened up and swallowed them, the majority of people in the world would be better off, or at least not worse off. Outside from perhaps their immediate relatives. When I was in Hungary, I heard a popular belief that “we need our Jews back.” They believed that Jewish people had certain traits that could increase the prosperity of Hungary, which prosperity was lost when Jews emigrated to avoid extermination. Man will pursue his genocidal impulse, regardless of whether it is actually beneficial to him, or even possible to calculate.

In China, the government calculates that the habits of certain tribes or cultures such as muslims or Uyghurs, are not useful. They can afford to wipe them out, or at least try to reeducate them in camps. In the United States also, there is a belief that various groups of people are not useful, and will only commit crimes and/or take jobs. But in the United States, the Constitution prevents simply rounding up these people and putting them in camps, or making them work without pay. So the criminal justice system is utilized, as a means to wipe these people out within the Constitution. They say these people have committed crimes, or might commit crimes – and the typical voter is perfectly happy if such statements are lies – and need to be incarcerated.

A recent Breitbart.com article read “San Francisco: Half of People Released Before Trial Committed Crimes”. A recent Spectator.org headline declared “”America has an under-incarceration problem”. Clearly the first article advocates incarcerating people who have not been convicted of, or even committed a crime, and none of them as a sentence for a crime. It is similar to a social credit system in China, where police in the USA label certain people as undesirable, and that is sufficient for incarceration. The criminal justice system becomes a system not for punishing crime, but for eugenics and perceived gentrification of the population and culture. The product is not at all different from Nazi Germany.

The argument that people who have committed violent crimes might commit additional violent crimes, as a justification to lock up a much larger population of people, is suspect on its face. It is not pretending to be an attempt to lock up people as punishment and deterrent for violent crimes. It is boasting what it really is, a system to incarcerate large numbers of people who are considered not useful to the majority, regardless of whether they have committed a crime.

But the calculation behind the intended purpose is suspect.

First, locking up a whole bunch of people, is likely to increase violent crime just by overloading the system. There are not unlimited judges and lawyers and jails. If a violent criminal is out on bond for a long time before trial and being proved guilty, it is likely because the system has been slowed down by processing so many people. If a violent criminal then receives a plea bargain, it may also be because there are so many people to take to trial and to incarcerate. A system that is under stress with so many people and crimes, and is designed to lock up large numbers of undesirable people using lies, is not able to discover and single out who is actually guilty of violent crimes, and who is actually a threat to commit more violent crimes in the future.

Then there are secondary effects. The larger the number of people who are incarcerated, the larger the number of individuals whose incarceration is not justified by any calculation of usefulness, and the larger number of people working to get those people out. If it is useful to get some people out of prison, then tools and institutions and mechanisms are produced to get people out of prison. Crazy judges are elected. Crazy rules and tricks are put in place. These tools to get people out of prison then function perhaps even better to get actual dangerous convicts with long sentences out, than to free the larger population of general undesirables, intentionally captured in a net of bad lawyers and lies.

Finally, specifically in the democracy of the United States, a large amount of incarceration produces a large population of people who vote as nihilists to destroy the nation, from among those incarcerated and their families and sympathizers. The election outcomes, resulting from the incarceration program, result in policies that do not serve those who genuinely wish to be protected from violent crime, and thought declaring war on their neighbors would produce such a victory. But this adverse election outcome does not lead to a reconsideration and change of course. It creates a feedback loop to even worse policies and more crime and more conflict and polarization and hatred of neighbors, each election cycle.

The problem is a program which incarcerates people based on a system of lies and hacks, to round up undesirables, does not efficiently discriminate for race and culture. The lack of discrimination is designed to round up a larger population of undesirables, rather than specifically criminals. But it then does not restrict itself to Jews or blacks or immigrants or members of a political party or culture. It indiscriminately rounds up people who are not even undesirable, and ultimately rounds up members of the majority party and chips into their majority support. If Hitler started rounding up purebred Germans among the Jews and Roma, in a few years he would have lost the sympathies of the majority, and the communists would have won in Germany.

In “The Road to Serfdom”, Friedrich Hayek spoke of an “abandoned road” of classical liberalism, meaning freedom and tolerance. Hayek said that while fascism and communism and other ideologies appeared to compete, they were competing for the same members, by offering products to appeal to the same impulses. Those impulses were collectivist, tribal, moral, genocidal, anything but freedom and tolerance. Because man does not have an impulse to leave his neighbor alone, and expect to benefit from it. And a government not designed specifically to deescalate a war between neighbors, will allow the impulses of man to escalate.

Today in the United States there is no party of freedom. The Republican Party which claims to promote freedom, is obsessed with eugenics by incarceration. The primary freedom which they use as a shibboleth to say they are for freedom, the right to own guns pursuant to the Second Amendment, is really just a manifestation of their desire to shoot undesirables. They consider shooting undesirables their most important right. And rather than really being for the rights and freedom of the individual, they have redefined “criminal justice” in a tribal collective way, to justify using lies to round up undesirables rather than punish individuals.

In United States democracy, these policies drive votes for the competing party and are self destructive. It will probably lead to marxism, which is confirmed today by empirical observation. The United States circles the drain into which all nations in human history fall. A political platform of “supporting police” in a war against your neighbors, will not stop it but only accelerate it.