Originally published at: San Francisco will start paying people $300/month not to shoot anyone (or get shot) | Boing Boing
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As a designer, I admire this kind of thinking.
Also as a designer, I’m routinely wrong and regularly get schooled by the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I wish this program every success and look forward to seeing how it turns out.
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How will they know they didn’t shoot anyone?
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That’s the beauty of pilot programs. If they don’t work out the way you hope they will you can shut them down, but if they do work you can scale them up.
The problem is that even if the program succeeds beyond its proponents’ wildest dreams conservatives will still lose their shit over it because they’re far more interested in treating gang members like animals than they are in either saving money or reducing violent crime.
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So I guess the $300 payments are basically the foot in the door… it’s impossible to prove, but joining the program gives you access to a life coach and you have to keep the relationship up if you want to earn more money through the various milestones.
The “pay people to not shoot each other” line is basically clickbait because “pay someone to have a life coach” is less interesting.
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the Dream Keeper Fellowship
Ah, the new American Dream of not shooting anyone with readily available firearms.
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Yeah, which is why I expect it will work, but be canceled anyways. Because this is what happens with a lot of other pilot programs that turned out to the most successful approaches we have to dealing with various problems - they conflict with conservative ideology/feelings and are non-starters as a result.
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Do not leave out the right’s ability to craft a narrative/build a frame around any issue and have that POV propagated in no time flat.
The left has no similar message discipline, probably because nuance is hard to communicate in sound bites designed to boil the blood.
tl;dr: Frank Luntz is a monster.
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“neighborhood clique”
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It intuitively seems as if that money should go to an educational fund for that person, but
$300/month is still orders of magnitude less than the $220/DAY it takes to incarcerate someone.
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Cheaper to bribe them than to house them in any type of facility, and the living life part is a nice bonus, if you ask me.
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The ER bills/physical therapy/potentially lifelong disability payments to gunshot wound survivors aren’t cheap either. Preventing a single act of gun violence can easily save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.
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Saving money for the government and society maybe. But it would cost money for private prison operators. Although I don’t actually think that is terribly high on the average conservative priority list. Cruelty is the point, the grift is a happy accident.
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Their whole deal is that the need people to look down on…
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Funnily enough, it’s because the left believes in freedom of speech.
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Yeah, imagine how little gang crime there’d be if we just provided for everyone’s basic needs.
A UBI is essentially making an investment in human prosperity.
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Soooo, while this certainly beats incarceration, I can’t but help think that if this gets rolled out it will basically turn into a “join a gang, get $300/month!” recruitment drive. I’m also reminded of a bit of Kipling:
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
I support the concept of GBI, Guaranteed Basic Income, but I can’t help but wonder that if the government is paying the gangs to not shoot anyone, when (inevitably) the money stops, should there be an expectation of an explosion of people getting shot?
It’s not “get paid $300/mo to just do whatever and not shoot people”
It’s get paid $300/mo to participate in a diversion program that requires you not to be in the gang anymore anyway.
It’s just funding for social work, and you should be happy about it.
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I think it is horribly framed, but I don’t actually have a problem focusing on high risk individuals and helping them find other options, including direct financial support.
And, the way I look at it, if it reduces violent crime rates, that is a good thing. I remember hearing about this in the past - how well are these programs doing?
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