Now Do Crime

The last part ended on a worry. A lawn is small. The big problems are real, and people need help now. If no one is forced, how does anything get solved? Fair enough. So take the hardest case there is, and hear the objection at full strength. You cannot talk a man out of your garage at two in the morning.

You cannot pass the hat for every victim in a city. Some problems need the police, the courts and the prison, and everyone has to pay for them, whether they want to or not. Ruth's beans are one thing. A burglary is another. Now do crime. Start with the system the objection trusts. One night in August someone pries open Dan's garage.

In the morning the ladder is still on its hooks, but the tool chest is gone, and a rebuilt engine with it. Dan drives to the station and fills out a report. The officer is polite. He gives Dan a case number. And that is the last Dan ever hears of it. Dan is not unlucky.

He is typical. An earlier part gave one number: of every hundred thefts and break-ins in this country, about four end with anyone caught. Violent crime does better, but not by much: about fifteen in a hundred. Meanwhile the system holds nearly two million people in prisons and jails, at about forty-four thousand dollars a year each in the federal system.

And the person who was robbed? Federal courts order offenders to pay their victims back. At last count a hundred and ten billion dollars of that was unpaid, and a hundred billion of it written off, because the offenders cannot pay. Dan's tool chest is in that pile. Now hold that against something you already know.

Every problem is solved with time, talent and money, and there are three ways to gather them: share your own, persuade others to join you, or force them. Force is not a result. It is a way of gathering. And for crime, this is what forcing everyone to pay has gathered: a system that catches almost no one, cages the few it catches at great expense, and leaves the victim with nothing.

Nobody here is arguing against stopping a burglar. The question is what the method is actually buying. So go back to a line from earlier in this series. Someone who takes by force owes a debt to the person they took from. Not to the public. To Dan. The young man who emptied Dan's garage owes Dan a tool chest, a garage door and a bad month.

The question that matters is not how many years he should sit in a cell at forty-four thousand dollars each. It is how Dan gets made whole, and how the young man stops. This already has a name and a room. The young man is caught. Nineteen, a first offense. Instead of a courtroom, he sits at a table.

His mother is beside him. Dan is across from him, and Ruth, because Dan asked her to come. A trained facilitator runs it. Dan says what it cost him, and not only in dollars. The young man hears it from the person, not from a prosecutor. Then they work out what he owes and how he pays it.

Dan gets his tools, or the money for them. The young man gets a debt he can actually finish paying. Does it hold up past one table? New Zealand has used this for nearly every young offender in the country since 1989, and the person harmed is invited every time. In the first year, nine conferences in ten reached an agreement, and most of those young people never saw a courtroom.

In ten controlled trials, offenders who met the person they harmed went on to commit fewer crimes, and the effect was largest for violent crime. The victims came away more satisfied, less set on revenge, and with fewer symptoms of trauma. The drop in reoffending is modest. What it does for the victim is not.

And notice what the table does that the cell cannot. An earlier part said your greatest protection from other people is the other people's values. A cell holds a man for a term and works on nothing inside him. Two out of three are arrested again within three years. The table works on the value itself.

Now the honest part, because the skeptic has earned it. New Zealand's conferences run inside a government system. Nobody has yet shown the voluntary way at the scale of a nation, and the philosophy does not claim it. What it claims is narrower. Force is a method, and the method should carry the burden of proof.

Where the voluntary way has been tried, measure it. Where it works, use more of it. Where it has not been shown, say so, and prove it before you spread it. Nobody is asked to trade a life for a theory. One last look at Dan. Two years ago he never crossed the road to talk to Ruth.

This fall he sat across a table from the young man who robbed him, and talked, and the tools came back a payment at a time. Which leaves a question that is harder than it sounds. Who decides when the voluntary way is ready? And until then, whose values get enforced: yours, or your neighbor's?

That is next: The Method Is the Message. The whole series, in order, is at humanrespect.app.