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The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.

Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.

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I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.

Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.

What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.

What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.

And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.

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Right now, many places in the US aren’t even “treating the symptoms”.

We can start there, then move to address the more structural, long-term problems that contribute to these issues.

An action that reduces drug use by 5% a decade from now is fine, but taking a criminal off the street today yields far greater present value.

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