Outsourcing State Capacity to Skinheads

You may have come across videos like the one below, where former inmates - usually from California prisons - talk about their time behind bars.

I first discovered this genre in the late 2010s through a channel called Fresh Out, and in the intervening years, it has exploded in popularity. Wes Watson, in particular, has become something of a minor celebrity in degenerate circles, even getting interviewed by No Jumper. The existence and popularity of prison content online isn’t especially surprising, given a couple of factors - America’s entrepreneurial culture and the horrifying conditions of our prisons, especially given our level of development. What has been surprising, though, is the scale of racial segregation in the penitentiary.

I’d guess the average middle-class American assumes prisons have some racial tensions, but that most normal prisoners operate in a colorblind way, as we try to do in daily life. But this simply isn’t true. For decades after the civil rights movement, California (among other states) operated an explicitly race-conscious prison system. It wasn’t declared unconstitutional in the Golden State until Johnson v. California in 2005, but since then, basically nothing has changed. As late as 2014, California was still promising to stop using collective punishment against entire racial groups. And if you listen to anyone talk about prison life, it’s clear that informal racial segregation persists - maintained by both inmates and guards.

In fact, life in prison is so dominated by racial factionalism that day-to-day “law and order” is primarily maintained through a form of ethnic separatism1 where each racial group is governed by a monarchy checked by regicide. This law and order is as brutal as you would expect, but it does much to keep the peace in an institution that is otherwise always one match away from exploding into violence. It can be hard to think about prisons precisely since normal rules don’t really apply. The people behind bars are a selection of the worst, most violent, and least well socialized individuals in this country2, many of whom face decade long terms. When you combine an ethnically heterogeneous population whose only shared trait is a propensity for criminality, it would be hard to keep the place from being anything but a hell on earth. However, the real problem is the sheer scale of the American prison population.

In a country like Japan for example their prisons are an orderly affair, and it is difficult to imagine widespread gang violence taking place there. But Japan has a prison population(40,000) comically smaller than America’s(1,800,000).

We have over half a percent of our population in prison at any given moment and maintaining adequate facilities and guards for them is simply impossible. So our state turns to the low cost enforcement method of “let the gangs run the show”.

Nothing I’ve said is up for empirical debate, but since lawmakers and advocacy groups are caught in the awkward position of being unable to really crack down on the gangs without the system exploding, and unable to defend operating a racially segregated prison system in the year of our Lord 2025, we have, as a society, collectively decided that it simply doesn’t matter. But I think this is bad.

Look, even if I have very little sympathy for criminals, I still believe that they are Human and deserve to live in a system that is not run by organizations like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood.

Maybe if this produced exceptional crime outcomes, like those of a country like Singapore or even what has occurred (for now) in El Salvador, I would be more tolerant of our prison system, but it does not! The problem, as I see it, is our criminal justice system is not dealing with reality as it actually is. From a first principles perspective its purpose should be protecting law abiding citizens from their deranged countrymen.

We are dealing with people who, by the very definition of their behavior, are simply not rational actors. If you are a 22-year-old with a crack habit, the concept of 15 years of prison time is a pure abstraction that is more closely approximated by the fear of death - something you see daily - than by a scaling punishment function designed to motivate you to avoid certain crimes. Once you have crossed the, relatively low, threshold into criminal the distinction mostly disappears and since punishment is, relatively, rare it appears quasi-random.

Clearly we need a system that actually deters potential criminals and also reduces our prison population. I think bringing back canings - like Singapore does - would be a ready improvement. But I’m open to almost any solution that deals with reality as it actually is.

When we think about criminal justice and weigh options like ankle bracelets or corporal punishment, it's worth remembering this: the alternative to designing a system that actually deters crime is the outsourcing of state capacity to skinheads.