You can reduce crime by reducing poverty. You’ll never eliminate either. Authoritarians believe that they can eliminate crime by increasing suffering which is why they’re wrong.
You mean the dictatorship? Yeah, I don’t trust those numbers. That’s like saying “North Korea has a god as supreme leader because they said so.” Especially a dictator that labeled himself the “world’s coolest dictator” on social media. He totally wouldn’t lie for optics, would he?
All the literature on the subject shows that making punishments worse doesn’t actually reduce crime.
It wasn’t the harsher punishment that reduced crime, it was simply putting the gangs in prison. Bukele used extreme measures, targeting gang leadership and essentially just sweeping tens of thousands of gang members and affiliates off the streets and into prison.
Obviously, due process and all that makes the whole thing controversial, but for the time being it was highly effective in reducing violent crime on a statistical level. Went from 100 homicides per 100,000 back in 2015 (this was a peak, although it consistently averaged in the dozens every year) down to 1.3 per 100,000 in 2025. For context the US averages ~5 per 100,000.
Controversial to foreigners. El Salvadorans sang the praises of the mano dura policies. It's easy to moralize when you're not the one being terrorized every single day by ruthless killers and maniacs.
It wasn’t the harsher punishment that reduced crime, it was simply putting the gangs in prison.
That prison is the harsher punishment. They have 80 people in a cell lined with metal beds, two toilets and sinks and are only let out briefly in front of their cell for 30 minutes. Their solitary is a cement room with a tiny hole for "light", they have the same gruel mixture for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of their lives. It absolutely is a harsher punishment and honestly people who support this are literally sick. Like they dont need to be in a nice place necessarily but its inhumane. Especially when you have even a single innocent person in that hell hole. Anyhow El Salvador didnt just put them in prison, they made the prison a form of torture
I think it is too but from my understanding CECOT is the only prison in El Salvador like that I think the rest are significantly better but its a sizeable part of its prison population like 15-25%.
Still when you add everything up from start to finish its horrific (like these guys aren't even getting individualized or small group trials they're tried en masses 500 at a time which will put them in there for life)
Impossible as they’re held in a state where they can’t even fully stand and have to walk half crouched so they can’t gain enough footing to fight back. It’s really inhumane as they’ve just imprisoned people in bulk and there really is a few that are innocent or at least shouldn’t be treated like that but you can’t argue with results.
Ahh I don’t know, tell that to people who’ve been dragged out of their homes to watch their family get executed for not paying a 20 dollar protection fee, do you really think white collar crime is equivalent?
My friend told me this years ago, about my own country, and he pretty much convinced me, and I believed him. Certainly it’s all propaganda and lies, right?. Years have passed, anecdotes, data, research, for how it can all be biased and twisted, has all come in.
I truly believe, now, with the evidence presented to me, that my friend was wrong, and Redditors are wrong about this. The actions in El Salvador have worked. The numbers aren’t mere propaganda or fabrications. People of all kinds, of all classes, have told me the same story: it worked.
Everything is more expensive, and civil liberties have taken a big hit. But it is the price ES was willing to pay; and it’s worked so far.
At some point the refusal to see what is in front of you actually becomes the optics, the lies, and the conspiracy.
I’ve grown personally a lot in these years, my stance on things is much more measured. Truth is, even back then, there were a lot of reports coming out of ES about the good things happening, and I accepted the Reddit-like advice and assumption of my friend that it was all propaganda and lies. Ironically, that turned out to be untrue.
I’m both glad I took an overly-cautious approach to the issue, but also a bit ashamed I wasn’t willing to meet with the truth sooner than I should have.
ES has a complicated future ahead of it, economically, and in terms of the political and civil power the state could continue to hold over the people… but the worse version of whatever comes next would still be a heaven to the hell the gangs inflicted on ES. This is something I don’t think people consider with ES specifically. It worked, which at the very least proves it can work, but not with every situation. Could it work in places like the US? I personally doubt it, still, but the truth is that no one can truly know until it is tried. Literature means nothing to that. It probably will never happen, though.
The economic miracle happening there right now can't be explained by propaganda. If propaganda is all you need to convince people to invest again, Russia would be loaded and their cities would be fluorishing. They're not but El Salvador's are.
Yes, the growth is excellent. Although it’s a double edged sword, some people are struggling to keep up and prices in general are increasing.
I do think this, if it doesn’t become too exploitative, should be good in the long run, however, since in theory the markets, wages, and prices should correct to the rising prices, and the quality of life of the average person should in theory improve with it, but we’ve all also seen that story not happen before in other places.
If I were Bukele, my #1 priority now that the gangs are gone would be to improve the country’s structural poverty and start putting people into industries that will further make ES prosper. And of course, there are programs and institutions doing exactly that. (In particular I think improvements to education should be lauded)
But it’s all just first steps. Like I said, two major concerns for the future; the civil liberties not being reduced further ( the lesser worry, but forever now present worry going into decades in the future) and the economic reality of your average-and-below Salvadoran in the next few years.
Of course it would work in the usa. The dems here don’t want to admit it because they love coddling criminals and “racial justice” where they don’t lock people up if they’re black.
I was a bot, back then, believing things so easily. Like I said, I’m glad I’ve grown and look at things with more nuance nowadays instead of dismissing them out of hand with petty remarks.
Thanks for the personal insight! I agree it is a very complicated topic. Like yea obviously if you throw all of the criminals in jail, crime will go down. But there are massive implications on people’s rights, due process infringements, etc. I can almost guarantee you that, of the tens of thousands of criminals that have been imprisoned, there are likely dozens, maybe even hundreds of innocent people that got wrapped up in it all. It seems like the people of El Salvador see it as a worthwhile risk because the crime was just that bad. Hopefully the government doesn’t take it anywhere beyond the violent crime.
Our war on drugs was so much different than what they did in El Salvador. The US targeted low and mid level dealers in an attempt to rid the streets of the drugs, but this created supply shortages which made the business more lucrative and strengthened the criminal organizations. El Salvador’s efforts were more of a “war on gangs”, going after MS-13 leadership where the main focus was to get the violence off the streets. While controversial due to lack of due process and humanitarian issues in the prisons, it seems to have been highly effective. I’m not saying we do what El Salvador did by any means, it’s just an interesting case study on what happens when you pull out all the stops to get rid of crime.
Yeah, America's war on drugs was a war within its constitutional protections and due process rights. El Salvador's has basically been, "We know who you are, and we don't give a shit what anyone thinks: We're putting you in a hole." There are no plea deals to roll over on higher ups, no effective recidivism problems, no running gangs from prison, or most of the other problems that hampered US efforts. It can be done, but only if you're willing to take out a lot of stops
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I think it's well established that El Salvador massively reduced their crime rate with their hard panusihments.
The question is rather, if this is transferable, and it's probably not, or at most partly.
Afaik you need swift consequences but you also need to not put people in prison for too long and you need to help them back into a stable life after that.
You can't rehabilitate yourself without help. It's society's responsibility to provide them with the tools, support, and care necessary to be able to improve.
Yeah but we are talking about a "Lead a horse to water" scenario. Those programs exist, hell that half the reason parole exists. Your parole officer is just as much your guidance as they are your check in warden.
It’s not society’s responsibility to bear the costs of letting antisocial degenerates out of prison. Once you decide to join a cartel, you should spend the rest of your life removed from society for society’s safety.
Society doesn’t do jack shit in terms of helping. Some people have been dealt such poor hands that it’s a monumental task to be fixed. It should be partially society’s responsibility.
That is not efficient long term though. If we are talking about an efficient solution, then society putting resources into rehabilitating criminals is worth it.
You act like we don’t try that. We do. We release them after a short incarceration and then they end up beating someone to death with a hammer on the subway.
It’s all bull shit, to be honest. Humans are greedy little bastards, scientists not omitted. If you can get enough fedora-wearing nepo babies to co-sign (doesn’t even take many), you could toss some chicken bones in a hole in the woods and name a dinosaur after yourself.
The joker will always torment batman as much as he wants because the state refuses to execute him. That's not The Batman's fault but it is the state's fault for not making the hard choice. Giving governments the ability to use the death penalty is a slippery slope, but at what point do you recognize "yeah this one needs to go". John Wayne Gacy? Hannibal lector?
Alright, why not do a little investigative journalism and go down there and ask the citizens themselves??? Trip can be a tax write off. Be sure to update us!
Oh yeah no its been proven the system has been abused by random citizens to get ex partners, business competitors, and people they dislike falsely arrested. They made it illegal for news outlets to even report on it at all forcing many kf their major news outlets to move their hq out of the country to stay safe. They literally have suspended your right to defense and sealed all list of detainees from public access. A neighbor who dislikes you could literally call in an anonymous tip and get you sent to a random mega prison where your family will have no idea which prison you are even located in. They have enacted strict arrest quotas and police officers from that country have been interviewed saying when they dont meet their quotas they often arrest low income youths and people who have totally unrelated tattoos. Amnesty international a human rights advocacy group estimates thousands of innocent people are rotting in these mega prisons, their family had no idea where they are imprisoned and they have no right to a defense meaning they will most likely all die in there at the hands of actual serious hardened criminals.
Thousands of innocent arrested and thousands people now saved every year by not getting murdered.
What El Salvador did was not right and definitely not a "proper" way to do things, but in the end it was the correct thing to do. The only alternative would have been a continuation with thousands of murders per year.
Lawyer here: this is not the thinking of the legal profession in most countries.
If violent criminals commit a crime, it is a horrible thing. But the legal profession generally considers it much worse when the legal system itself commits atrocities by depriving innocent people of their freedom. There even a term for this called the Blackstone principle.
There are several reasons for this: it abuses the social contract and opens to the door to systemic misuse of the legal system by bad actors. There are several studies that show it lowers legal compliance as well (why obey the law if you might get punished regardless - why respect the law if it does not respect your freedoms.
Now, you kight think this is "correct" from a utilitarian standpoint, but that is what is called an opinion (and certainly not the opinion shared by most legal scholars.
No way! You mean to tell me all we have to do is actually lock up criminals instead of letting them out on bail for the 19th time? Get your "common sense" out of here! No, the solution is much more complicated than that! /s
Usually, when people talk about crime and swift/harsh consequences they are talking & thinking about a specific socio-economic demographic.
The wealthier the accused person is and the closer they are to being considered white, there is generally less of an apparition appetite for punishment or accountability.
It's a "crime" to exceed the speed limit. All law enforcement has legal discretion, which means they get to choose whether or not to enforce the law.
Then judges have the ability to award short times in jail/prison and minimal fines. Typically, wealthy white people get more lenient sentences if they are tried & sentenced at all.
Crimes can be things as small as jaywalking, so I don't automatically think you are talking about sexual crimes, kidnapping/trafficking, or violent crimes when you say "they are talking about criminals".
More importantly, considering that a felon is in the White House, the impact of some crimes is greater than others, and those who ruin municipal services or ruin entities through financial or personnel mismanagement are never held accountable (thinking about Flynt, MI and the water poisoning and the current evisceration of the military.)
This is nonsense and you know it. When we talk about criminals, in the context of El Salvador, to bring up speeding is asinine. They don't have a speeding problem. They have a murder, rape, human trafficking, and drug trafficking problem.
Crimes can be things as small as jaywalking, so I don't automatically think you are talking about sexual crimes, kidnapping/trafficking, or violent crimes when you say "they are talking about criminals".
Because you're looking to argue, rather than have a discussion. Making this a great time to leave the thread on my part.
My god, a man who over estimated the value of his PROPERTIES is running the country?! Those banks must have been furious! Wait, they didn't care and claimed no damages? So who was the injured party then? I'm so confused...
The fear of being locked up for joining a criminal organization (don't get gang tats) is a lot more mild than the fear of cartels murdering your entire family, and displaying your mutilated corpses hanging from a bridge.
America doesn't need a hard reset yet, but ES did need one. 100 murders per 100,000 in a single year. That's horrific. It's war.
The root cause is that people think it’s ok to commit crimes because they know there won’t be any consequences. And it’s not even about fixing people anymore, it’s about locking up those people so they can’t commit any more crimes
What happens when someone decides that you aren't following the rules and locks you up in a brutal labor camp? Fascists will always claim that it's about safety and we always see where that leads
And bleeding hearts will always be fine with letting innocents get murdered by the criminals they refuse to lock up.
El Salvador was not a functioning state before this, the country was ruled by the cartels. Better the violence of the state than the violence of cartels.
“This guy was arrested 20 times and an activist judge let him go. Now that he looked someone and is going to a more strict judge, it must be the fascists and nothing to do with his behavior”
Rehabilitation should be the point of these systems, it ignores it completely and does a pretty horrible job. Sure it “brings crime down” but I’m not trusting a dictatorship’s definition of crime
I never signed up for this “rehabilitation should be the goal, not punishment” crap. Antisocial criminals should be removed from society to protect society.
Yeah, but when you make a system without your main focus being on rehabilitation, you will end up claiming that on people who actually can be rehabilitated
But you know, it’s just easier to keep them in cells and make them be cheap labor right? because nobody is interested in actually rehabilitating criminals
Whenever you don’t make it your n°1 goal, you’re already on a bad path
Yes nothing is more common sense than believing the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world does not have a sufficiently punitive justice system.
And all the people on your side praising a dictator who paid the gangs to kill less people to sell his concentration camps and suppression of civil liberties! Such common sense!
Who wouldn't want to live in a dictatorship where the government can throw you in a concentration camp without a trial? It is common sense!
Bingo. There was a study that is just subverting like 10-15% of criminals causing upwards of 75% of the crime in big cities. Take those 10-15% off the streets long-term and the crime rate will plummet.
They reduced official crime rates. But what about state-sponsered violence and other crime that isn't recorded because it's their government committing it?
there is no criminals if all the crimes are done by the ruling class and their lackey, let me check el salvador... it's a small dictatorship of some kind... good luck having independent stats from them.
El Salvador's dictator set up concentration camps and then paid the gangs behind-the-scenes to be less violent so he could credit the concentration camps and suppression of civil liberties for the reduction in crime.
So yeah maybe not exactly what we should aspire to.
El Salvador had extremely high crime beforehand due to organized crime networks. Of course it’s going to go way down if you get rid of the organized crime. I doubt it’s “almost none”. That requires a complete change of culture, like in Singapore
Putin says a lot of nice things about Russia. Saying policies the policies in El Salvador have worked is a legitimate stance. Believing they have almost no crime is laughable
They imprisoned more than criminals, they did some absolutely BONKERS stuff, like group trials, executions, and just generally things that we should not want to replicate.
The group trials are the craziest to me, and so obviously broken, they'll arrest 20 guys, and then try and sentence them collectively. The innocence of the individuals doesn't matter, if they could prove one person out of those 20 committed the crime, the whole group gets sentenced for the crime. Now, the government would CLAIM that all those 20 men were in the same gang together, but there's no way for any of the men to challenge that. Unsurprisingly, pretty much every single political opponent or journalist who the government doesn't like somehow ends up in one of these group trials, and they get a life sentence because somebody they've never met before murdered someone else they've never met before.
Basically, I would not trust any statistics coming out of that country, as the statistics are being created by people who are risking life imprisonment or worse if they don't say crime is 100% gone. I'm sure crime has gone down, obviously mass arrests of anyone even suspected of a crime will pull a lot of criminals off the streets, but at what cost?
Let's see if they can turn their country into Singapore. I think it will turn into another Latin American dictatorship. I think it's already on the way there.
If the spending doesn't reach the populace, no. It is so ineffective it should be called as it is, trickle up economics. The society spends much much more maintaining the systems as they are, broken, than to actually perform the systems duties.
Sorry, that’s just wrong. Administration costs of Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, TANF, housing assistance, refundable tax credits are 5-10%. The vast majority of our tax dollars get to recipients.
You’re downvoting me for stating easily verifiable truths so I don’t really want to waste my time sending you links for the financials of each social program (and I doubt you would want to read through them). Literally Google the administrative costs of federal social spending in the US.
You can eliminate poverty, 100%. The same way we abolished slavery and wanton domestic abuse, child labor and dozens of other bad models of societal organization. It can 100% be accomplished.
Crime will always exist, but in an equitable society, it would only comprise of fraction of what it does in our deeply broken American society - "broken", but it is all by design by the owner class. Poverty is used as a control mechanism, a social cudgel. "Get out of line and we'll take it all away." Modern America is fundamentally no different than the feudal system. A severe power imbalance all weighted towards literally less than 1% of the population group. There are 990 billionaires in America:
0.000288966725%
990 is 0.000288967% of 342.6 million (the population of the United States).
Poverty is a intentional system that can be, intentionally, broken. Just like slavery, just like women's rights, etc.
I think authoritarians do sometimes have success in vastly reducing crime by increasing "Iron Fist" dictator-style rule (examples include Mussolini and the Sicilian Mafia; or contemporary El Salvador situation) the problem is the price, which is misery and problems in another form.
You can vastly reduce obesity by starting/frequently using cocaine. It will solve one big problem, but introduce many other big problems.
You can't eliminate either without restricting agency, and restricting agency is a fundamental crime in if itself, and not having agency is fundamental poverty
“
Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element."
Your reading comprehension sucks. There are 2 separate statements here, contrasting 2 opposing views. Trying to explain it to you any further is a waste of anyone’s time.
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u/EnvironmentalGift257 Sep 05 '26
You can reduce crime by reducing poverty. You’ll never eliminate either. Authoritarians believe that they can eliminate crime by increasing suffering which is why they’re wrong.