If you want to destroy the still-young criminal justice reform movement that has taken hold with the mainstream of this country’s thinking, then just keep doing garbage such as this:
The idea is to provide the small number of San Franciscans who authorities believe are most at risk of shooting someone — or being shot — with an incentive to get help and stay out of trouble. It’s a solution that proponents say already has shown promise preventing gun crimes in other parts of California.
At worst, the program could be called “cash for criminals,” like its predecessors in cities around the Bay Area. At best, it could save lives and tax dollars otherwise spent on incarceration.
The program, which will launch as a pilot in October, is called the Dream Keeper Fellowship. It’s San Francisco’s latest iteration of a guaranteed-income program that will provide high-risk individuals with $300 a month as a start.
I wrote about this extremely stupid idea and its application in New York City last month. When the San Francisco Examiner says that this program “already has shown promise in other parts of California,” it’s actually quite misleading. As Seth Barron wrote in the New York Post, the program has been tried in Stockton, where “only” 29% of the payees were subsequently arrested for new gun crimes. It was also tried in Sacramento, where its promoters boast that “only” 44% of participants were subsequently arrested on new charges — well, as long as you don’t count about one-third of the participants who dropped out or were arrested in its first six months. (D’oh!)
As for this study they reference about the program’s supposed success in Richmond, they are basically arguing that the program’s intervention with 21 people prevented a huge, otherwise-expected spike in gun crimes from occurring in the third quarter of 2010. How do we know? Because the crime spike didn’t occur. In related news, there are zero alligators in my home because I boiled a pot filled with bay leaves. Ah, the miracle of small sample sizes.
Violent criminals need jail. They do not need cash. People who shoot other people need to be walled off in prisons and kept away from the rest of us. No one deserves to be paid for not shooting people.
Beyond that, if you’re seriously thinking about killing someone, you’re also planning on not getting caught. So the possible loss of your monthly check is probably not going to change your mind. After all, they need to catch you before they stop paying you, right?
Wait a minute. I’m rethinking this. If you are a violent criminal in my town and you are reading this now, you should consider relocating to San Francisco, where they will pay you to go talk to a social worker occasionally and do what you are already doing every day — that is, pretend you haven’t been shooting people.
