How A Person From A Gang Family Would Deal With The Gang Problem

I come from a very rough family. At various points in my life, I have been the son of a gang member, the nephew of a gang member, the brother of a gang member and the cousin of a gang member. Both of my brothers have spent time in prison, both of my mother’s brothers have spent time in prison, and I had been struck in the head or face by four different adults by the time I was five years old. Despite all this, I managed to get a research degree in psychology. This is how I would deal with the gang problem.

Any effective program of behavioural modification has to have two elements: reinforcement of desired behaviours and punishment of undesired behaviours. This is popularly known as “the carrot and the stick approach”. Solving our gang problem requires such an approach.

My proposal for the carrot is universal basic income.

People in the upper and middle classes have great difficulty imagining what life is like in the bottom 5%. Only very rarely do they have the life experience to understand how being raised in an environment of abuse and fear causes a person’s brain to develop differently to normal. As such, they have great difficulty understanding why some people can’t hold down a full-time job.

Being raised in an abusive environment causes the brain to develop in a way that is highly optimised for war, and poorly optimised for peace. One consequence is that mild levels of stress can push a person so damaged into homicide mode. If a person’s brain is wired to react with instant and overwhelming aggression to threatening stimuli, they are very unlikely to be able to deal with the daily challenges of the workplace.

The solution to such mental problems isn’t being stuffed full of sedatives and told to get the fuck back to work, as per standard mental healthcare practice in New Zealand. The only effective treatment for the damaged person is to allow them to rest until they grow out of their condition. This requires time, and that’s where a universal basic income can play a role.

A small but guaranteed income would not only help practically by removing an enormous amount of financial stress, it would help morally by removing resentment. Many young people from difficult family environments deeply resent the fact that work is demanded of them before they’ve had a chance to develop a fully functioning brain. A UBI would take away one of the major reasons for people born into disadvantaged families to rage against the system.

My proposal for the stick is crating.

Psychopaths consider all kindness to be weakness. All. As such, lenient sentencing and political engagement merely encourages them to commit more crimes. Not all gang members are psychopaths, but the gang environment provides an excellent environment for them to hide. With the exception of entering Parliament, joining a gang is the optimal path for a psychopath who wants opportunities to abuse people and get away with it.

The key to solving the gang problem lies in accurately being able to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths. The single biggest flaw of the entire “Justice” system is that it makes no effort to distinguish between sadists and psychotics. As such, the former are penalised too lightly and the latter too harshly.

The non-psychopaths should be treated with patience. If someone is from a gang environment and isn’t a psychopath, despite having ample motive to become one, they must possess some measure of spiritual gold. They must possess the capacity to say ‘No’ to evil. People like this need to be cherished. Mental illness is not a reason to punish someone, as it’s often a good thing, because it’s often an alternative to psychopathy.

The psychopaths should be crated. The first step here is to introduce a new category of crime: those committed with malicious indifference to human suffering. A typical example of such crimes are coward punches like the recent ones in Auckland. Most murders and rapes will naturally fall into this category.

The second step is to subject every convicted criminal to a full psychological examination, with the goal of determining whether they have irreparable brain damage making them sadistic.

Modern psychological science can make such a distinction. The amygdalas of such people are less likely to activate in response to observing human suffering, making them callous, and their pre-frontal cortexes contain less grey matter, making them impulsive. Such unusual brain structures reveal that those people are dangerous.

If a person is found to have irreparable brain damage of the kind characteristic of psychopaths, and is later found guilty of a crime committed with malicious indifference to human suffering, then, upon being found guilty, they are immediately nailed into a crate instead of being taken back to the cells. This crate is then loaded into a helicopter, flown 20 kilometers out over the ocean, and jettisoned from a great height.

This carrot-and-stick approach will succeed because of the twofold benefits it offers.

The first benefit is that a more compassionate approach will neutralise resentment. Most young men who join gangs do so because they learn early in life that society hates them, and they reason that they might as well hate society back. A UBI would take away the most of the financial incentive to join a gang (this incentive is much bigger than most people realise). This will mean fewer gang members.

The second benefit is that, on account of the more compassionate approach, it’s justified to be extremely firm against the intractable criminal elements that remain in the population. People would no longer be forced by economic necessity to join gangs, so those who do can be assumed malicious. The widespread crating of known psychopaths will spread fear among the remainder.

The combination of these two effects would be a drastic reduction in both the number of gang members and the amount of suffering caused by gang activity.

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