Will ruthgrace's post "Evaluating large-scale movement building: A better way to critique Open Philanthropy's criminal justice reform" win any prize in the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest?
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Almost every aspect of “criminal justice reform” harms society and the world.
No one associated with this movement has done anything but increase crime, and they’ve been wrong on every promise made about its results.
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There’s basically no evidence that “social welfare gaps that cause barriers for formerly incarcerated people trying to lead a crime-free life” lead to crime.
Certain people commit crime, and are statistically overwhelmingly likely to do it again (and no one has ever shown otherwise, as again the movement is all rhetoric and bait and switch promises, all its remotely testable predictions fail).
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Even giving a dollar to anyone associated with the “movement” is basically terrorism against orderly society—focusing on “optics” is the wrong lens entirely.
To the extent there are reforms of prisons, parole, and the like—this is 0% of what the criminal justice reform movement does, it refuses to prosecute or even detain violent criminals or pushes them out to commit dozens more felonies.
It’s possible OpenPhil has killed more people with this funding than lives saved from other initiatives.
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If there were to be funding of efforts to release non-violent, older criminals or improve parole sorting—these are valid.
But giving to any existing organizations in this field is a recipe for harm.
@Gigacasting i think prison can definitely in theory help set people up for a crime-free life (for example people who invest in education while in prison are less likely to reoffend) and currently doesn't do a good job, and is also really expensive. IMO we should at least try to make the money already being spent do what it's supposed to be doing. Big Prison is probably a part of the problem.
I bet this up to give it more visibility, but I think it's one of the more legit criticisms in the contest in that there's an analysis and actionable results, and the topic materially affects people now. Open philanthropy's work included hoping to get the prosecutors in San Francisco, LA, and Cook County (Illinois) elected, and the DA in San Francisco has been recalled, which I think is a direct result of not being strategic in their work. The TLDR is that they didn't fund enough public safety initiatives to support people they let out of jail to be able to not commit any more crimes, and this has led to public backlash against criminal justice reform as a whole.