Crime and Punishment

The People shall not deprive any individual of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Individuals accused of a crime shall be considered innocent until proven guilty and guaranteed the right to a free, fair, public, and timely trial.

No law or punishment shall be imposed retroactively unless it is to the benefit of the accused.

The People have the right and the obligation to review all criminal trials, and to modify sentencing as needed. Jury selection and the trials themselves will be conducted through The System with no Locality restrictions on the participants.

As punishment has been shown to have at best a very limited deterrent effect and long-term incarceration to have a negative effect on the individual and The People, it shall be the stated goal of The People to rehabilitate and release individuals convicted of crimes to the extent that this is compatible with the goal of ensuring the safety and security of the individual and The People.

The criminal and penal codes, as they exist in all countries but especially in the US, are undoubtedly the poorest examples of behavioral engineering ever foisted on The People. The purpose of these codes should be to ensure the safety of The People by ensuring that other individuals don’t infringe on their freedoms, and do so as cost effectively as possible. Instead, because they were primarily designed and are managed by SDAPs, the system currently functions as a primitive screening tool, simply removing large numbers of individuals from the population and housing them at large expense in facilities that might as well have been designed to increase recidivism (for comparison purposes, recidivism rates in the US are about 60%. In Norway they’re about 20%. But just imagine what would happen if Apple or Ford released a product with even a 20% failure rate). And unfortunately this suits SDAPs just fine because marginalizing and punishing, aggressively and violently if possible, any individual they can is just their raison d’etre (Duckitt 2009). Until we can remove SDAPs from positions of responsibility in this matter, the system will never work properly.

The first step in redesigning the system is to expunge from the criminal code drug use, sodomy, and any other activity judged to be criminal based on “moral” justifications, particularly if these are derived from religious prohibitions. Only activities that can be shown to pose a direct threat to individual freedom or security can be allowed into the criminal code, and all proposed laws and punishments must be subject to a rigorous scrutiny of their legitimacy (again, see Tyler’s Why People Obey The Law). This also rules out laws and policies that attempt to punish selectively based on the assumed motivations for committing crimes, “hate crime” laws being the most common of these: While it is useful to collect statistics (to facilitate social engineering) and to assess individuals to determine if their treatment should include behavioral engineering to correct racial/cultural prejudice, the duration and type of “punishment” imposed has little or no deterrent effect on these behaviors so sentencing itself should not be dependent on this determination.

Secondly we must design the new system with the recognition that there is no sharp dividing line between anti-social behavior caused by mental illness and that caused by criminal intent (nor indeed between either of those things and neurotypical, let alone SDAP, behavior). Once that recognition is made, the concepts of prison and punishment can be cast aside and replaced with the idea that what is required is “treatment”, whether for addiction (which is the cause of most nuisance crimes including panhandling, loitering, disorderly conduct, sleeping in public, etc.), or a more severe mental illness, or merely the fact that an individual (even a psychopath) has been inadequately socialized. Until the necessary corrective technology has been developed maximum security prisons will still be required to permanently house the most dangerous and incorrigible of these individuals, but even this will be but a small fraction of their current populations.

The penal code must be rewritten to ensure that rehabilitation and thereby reducing recidivism rates are the primary goals, with victim restitution being a high secondary priority. To provide the essential benefits of competition, these facilities shall be run by “Treatment Corporations” (TCs), with bonuses and penalties specified contractually and by statute for their effectiveness (e.g., there should be significant bonuses for turning out an individual with a steady well-paying job (enabling them to pay restitution) one year from release, and a penalty if an individual reoffends in that period). Removing the offender from the environment that lead to their crime will be a primary tool in this process, so the rehabilitation facility, any half-way houses, and any parole must be in a different Locality than the one where the crime was committed. Cost for continuing treatment of any mental illness, as always, will be borne by The People as part of the health care system. This treatment will both benefit the individual and reduce recidivism.

To ensure proper compensation for the Corporation and proper treatment and facilities for the individual undergoing rehabilitation, individual cases should be sent out for bid. The most difficult cases will therefore command the highest premiums. These corporations will (and indeed should) supply work for their inmates, working and living conditions to be inspected and regulated just as they would be in any other industry. There would be a variety of incentives to ensure proper work ethic, including payment (which could be saved, or paid as victim compensation), or perhaps tying release not to calendar time but to hours worked or credentials acquired.

Trials will be conducted on-line through The The System to ensure that “a jury of one’s peers” includes people from all walks of life and from all Localities (provided of course that they speak the language used in the trial). The US system of jury selection is horribly inefficient, calling vastly larger numbers of people in for examination than would be needed for the trial and then requiring the selected jury to put their lives on hold for the duration of the trial. This provides a huge incentive for potential jurors to try to game the system by creating scheduling conflicts or devising other reasons why they cannot serve on a jury (having an advanced degree being pretty much a guaranteed get-out-of-jury-duty-free card). The result is that juries consist largely of the very people who are least competent to make the required sophisticated judgments.

As discussed in the section on Managers, in most Localities the police force will be privatized to provide the benefits of accountability and cost effectiveness that municipal-employee-based systems lack. The new system should also provide for a much higher level of integration with outside service providers (private security, private investigators, bounty hunters, repossessors, towing services, the above-mentioned TCs which will act as parole officers, etc.) than is currently available. This will enable them to work with each other to provide enforcement rather than in opposition to each other as is frequently the case in current systems. For example, current local-based police forces usually can’t be bothered to pursue fugitives across locality boundaries or investigate crimes (such as identity and credit card theft) that originate outside their jurisdictions, and federal-level action generally is not triggered unless public safety or large sums of money are involved. When Locality police are able to exchange information with other private corporations which can operate across Locality boundaries but are compensated by victims (individuals/banks/retailers/etc.) it will greatly improve overall enforcement and so decrease the incidence of these types of crime.

Any individual convicted of a crime will have all Credentials revoked, and must retest to regain at least the Standard Adult Set prior to their release, and their conviction shall be included in their Credentials during their parole.

Although correlation between SDAP and organized criminal activity has not been shown yet, there is a high correlation between the behaviors common to both groups. Whether it be a street gang, drug cartel, or the mafia itself, if you were putting an organization like this together, wouldn’t you seek out as many Authoritarians, with their unflinching loyalty, relativistic moral code, and willingness to die for the group? If this relationship is shown to be causal, The People should make special efforts to identify at-risk individuals and begin treatment for any criminal or anti-social behavior starting from a very young age. As is the case with the general criminal element but which may particularly apply to Authoritarians who are particularly responsive to social cues, removing the individual from the environment where the crime was committed would be an important tool in reducing recidivism.

Note that there are a lot of things that have the force of law in many countries that are not specified in this section (e.g., the US Miranda warning) as these should be specified in the penal code rather than in the Matchism Code itself.

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