Rain, Rain

Another rainy winter day in the Seattle suburbs. The place may start floating soon.

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How many who would prove to deserve their freedom should stay locked up to prevent the release of one who would prove undeserving?
Conor Friedersdorf "Why Second Chances for Prisoners Are So Hard to Come By"

That depends. How willing are people to accept a false positive that ends in a serious crime? The answer tends to be: "not very." It's a fairly safe bet that people will be watching Alice Johnson, and if she turns out to commit a serious crime while President Trump is still in office, his campaign's Super Bowl ad featuring her will come back to bite him. A cynical case can be made that this is the very reason why. Ms. Johnson was featured in the ad, and possibly even granted clemency in the first place. Middle-aged women, even those who have few other prospects, rarely go on to become murderers or armed robbers. To a degree, the Trump Administration made a safe choice, and then requests credit for radical reform of the criminal-justice system.

Clemency for prisoners is a form of decision theory that resembles Pascal's wager. If a person is released, and they go on to commit a crime, the public feels the direct harm of that criminal act. But if a person remains incarcerated when they would have avoided recidivism, there is a lot less notice of the unnecessary expense of keeping them behind bars. For many in the public, given that they don't follow the data on the costs of incarceration, keeping people in prison who could be released has no downsides; the money spent on incarceration may as well be a sunk cost, and the human potential has already been written off. In the end, Mr. Friederdorf's question can be considered a corollary to Blackstone's ratio: How many guilty persons should escape, rather than one innocent suffer? Interestingly, according to the Cato Institute(https://www.cato.org/policing-in-america/chapter-4/blackstones-ratio), early core supporters of President Trump said that it's preferable to punish the innocent than to allow the guilty to go free. They were also more likely to support warrentless police stops and other shortcuts of due process.

Generally speaking, I suspect that people are more likely to support protecting innocence over punishing guilty to the degree that they identify with (or fear they may become) the unjustly convicted innocent. Likewise, people who identify with the "deserving" incarcerated are likely to support early release for those who seem harmless than those who don't identify with them. And as there is greater distance between the reformed guilty and the general public than there is between the public and the prosecuted innocent, there is less of a desire to take risks, even small ones, for their sake.

For all that President Trump likes to proclaim that the United States is the best it's ever been, a large part of his message is still about the need to have him protect people from clear and present (not to mention possible) threats. Alice Johnson made a good subject for a commercial specifically because she was non-threatening. Even those people who would use a lapse into recidivism on Ms. Johnson's part as a weapon against President Trump would, I suspect, be surprised to actually see it happen. But for many other people, the idea that if given the chance they'd resort of violence and mayhem is much less of a stretch. And when a society as a whole is risk averse, it's easier to guess which side of the Wager they would come down on.

What would really drive a greater predisposition to seeking out and freeing those who could thrive in society, or at least keep themselves out of further trouble, is need. The public has a certain fear of released criminals going on to commit more criminal acts, and doesn't have any need to see those people as a resource. And so they can eal with their fear by leaving them locked up, and not feel any cost for having done so. Only when there is a need for human capital that has people searching under every stone for more of it will releasing the once-guilty be seen as worth taking a risk for.

... Tock

I think Donald Trump has broken the Democratic Party. They are defined now just by hating him.
Senator Rafael "Ted" Cruz, R - Texas. Quoted in: Ted Cruz: 'Donald Trump has broken the Democratic Party'

At this, the choir raised their hands in the air and shouted "amen." Everyone else went about their regularly-scheduled business.

It makes sense for Senator Cruz to be seen publicly calling out the Democrats as haters who have given up on their former convictions to rail against President Trump. To the degree that being a loyal Republican is to side with the President in all things, making his enemies your enemies is simply good politics. And even people who support President Trump find it so difficult to make the case for him to other people that they've given up. Someone who says that Democrats "are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage," and "want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it," is pretty clearly not looking for any Blue votes this time around.

And in the same way that President Trump casts Democrats as an active threat to his voter base and the nation as a whole, many Democratic voters see President Trump as an active threat to them. And in that sense, Senator Cruz may be correct. President Trump may have, well, "broken" is too strong a word, but he might well have redirected the Democratic Party. If President Trump's election was driven by an idea on the part of the people who voted for him that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have represented the United States turning its back on them and leaving them to fend for themselves, President Trump and a lot of other Republicans appear to be engaged in a campaign to convince core (or even marginal) Democratic constituencies that they mean to have the United States force them to fend for themselves. It's an interesting strategy of demonstrating that the President has the right enemies, while at the same time attempting to avoid frightening those same enemies into turning out en masse to protect themselves. It makes for an interesting dichotomy, because the President's base of support is not broad enough to bring him a victory in the face of heavy opposition turnout, his message of conflict only works if the supposed enemy doesn't actually have it in for him. The President doesn't appear to have substantially grown his base since the 2016 election, where he lost the popular vote. If "swing-state" voters who stayed home in 2016 feel threatened enough to come out this November, President Trump may be our first one-term President in a while.

The pendulum that started swinging with the Reagan or Clinton presidencies, depending on how one looks at it, will swing back. President Trump is too disengaged from the hopes and fears of the population outside of his base for them to stay quiet forever. He may be able to prevent his own voters from becoming complacent, and thus not coming out for him in this next general election, but without actively adding people to his coalition (or finding some way to effectively pseudo-gerrymander the nation as a whole to lock up the Electoral College) Republicans won't be able to maintain their hold on the White House. (Although their current control of large swaths of the federal judiciary may serve as something of a bulwark for a perhaps considerable time.) Senator Cruz calling out the Democrats as deranged isn't going to change that calculus. Eventually, demography looks set to carry the day.

Mountains

One of the things about the Seattle area that strikes me as odd is that the Cascade Mountains are close enough that they're easy to drive to, and through, for that matter within a couple of hours, but far enough away that they're mostly out of sight. And so I commonly forget that they are there. Today, however, I was out driving and wound up in the foothills. I'm not a climber, so I didn't find a trailhead for a trek up the side of anything. But still, it was nice to just spend some time watching them, and taking them in.

Unempathic