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A Modest Proposal Inspired by Books, Movies, and Real Life




Jonathan Swift once satirically proposed something modest to alleviate the problems of the poor Irish - they could simply kill and eat their children. I have a much more modest proposal to alleviate a different problem - crime. While simple, they proposal may seem drastic at first. However, it is my hope that convincing you of the merit of my proposal should not be too difficult. You see, I did not come up with the following ideas myself - I borrowed them from public policy that has already become quite widespread.


Simply put, my crime-prevention proposal is to isolate the most criminally prone into a guarded geographic space. This space could be as small as Los Angeles or as large as the state of Wyoming. Those details can be worked out later. We then build a wall around to population to prevent them from escaping. But do not worry - within their small society, these people can have a good life. They can go to school and even trade with the outside - but they most certainly cannot leave. No doubt, this strategy would come with collateral damage, but there is a group of people who commit the vast majority of crimes - men. While different theories exist, evidence overwhelmingly suggests crime is a men's sport. To give a sense of how great these gender differences are, 85% of people arrested are men and only 5% of the prison population is composed of women. 98% of sexual offenders are men. If we isolated this population, crime would go down drastically, especially heinous crimes like murder and rape.


Of course, this is an extreme measure, and it requires we isolate about half the population. It would also ruin family dynamics and birth rates. To avoid these problems, we need to target the men we isolate. (Un)fortunately, this is an easy thing to do - people in the age range of 15-24 are responsible for 40% of crimes, despite making up only 14% of the population. So, now we only need to isolate men who are 15-24 years old. Isolating this demographic has a number of other benefits - first, we are not isolating those in their prime working ages. Indeed, we could create a boarding school program out of this proposal and just educate all these men in the same place.


Now comes the seemingly difficult part of my proposal - selling it. I admit, it sounds drastic, something a mad scientist may come up with. Novels and movie adaptations have even been created from similar ideas - The Minority Report is a story about a futuristic society that stops crime before it happens by predicting it. Of course, unlike science fiction novels, we do not have access to psychics that can predict specific events in the future with pinpoint accuracy. My proposal would impact many more innocents than crime prevention in The Minority Report. Yet, governments of most countries already are practicing a close, but less accurate, version of my proposal. Indeed, instead of isolating young men in the name of preventing increases in crime, many citizens of countries around the World are quite alright with limiting immigration and isolating immigrants in poor countries. And this isolation is often justified by pointing to crime among immigrants, even though immigration does not lead to more local crime in most countries.


So I find my proposal quite modest. It will not be as effective as futuristic, science fiction inspired efforts, but it will be more effective at crime prevention than blanket immigration restrictions. Indeed, I cannot fathom why one would find my proposal abhorrent but rest easy at the thought of immigration restrictions, at least if crime is the actual concern.

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