This was written by the owner of a café in Boston, MA. I am posting it because I think it is interesting and because the Boston Globe and other local papers refused to print it, well within their right.#

Much, if not most of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible borrow from the prevalent lore of the region of ancient Palestine. Whether Samson was an actual character or the hero of a local legend is not at issue; the point of the narrative is the glorification of suicide, along with taking other people's lives, when the protagonist is humiliated and tormented by his enemies, and when all hope for freedom and dignity is lost, thus releasing the nihilistic impulse of the caged animal. Killing of thousands of your enemies while taking your own life is seen as a pious act of desperation in pursuit of salvation on the altar of one's pantheon. When Delilah of Gaza enticed Samson and ascertained that the secret of his strength lies in his hair, the Philistines sent a man to shave off the seven locks of his head. Weakened, he was imprisoned. "Howbeit, the hair of his head began to grow again, after he was shaven." In a public show of humiliation, the Philistines called for Samson so he "may make us sport." In his dying moments, Samson beseeched the Lord God to remember him, strengthen him, one last time, and let him die with his enemies. As recounted in the Old Testament (Judges 13-16), "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." When the two middle pillars upon which the temple stood, and upon which it was borne up, buckled, the building collapsed, killing himself and three thousand "men and women."#

In the narrative Samson was an Israelite, and his "occupiers" were the Philistines. At the time of the narrative, the Philistines were the rulers, because it came to pass that the people of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.#

This Hercules, the hero of the Old Testament, did not come from nowhere. And for that matter, neither did the latter-day suicide bombers of modern Palestine. Ancient legends and modern acts betray the long thread of cultural continuity and collective memory that characterize the ethos of the region. Curiously enough, the story of Samson is not mentioned in the Qur'an, the Holy Book of Islam, despite the fact that Qur'an recognizes the Hebrew mythology as the starting point of the historical continuum leading to Prophet Muhammad. More curiously, the myth of Samson still lives in the Islamic world as folkloric legend.#

When I was a child, I was introduced to Samson in the streets of Rode El Faraj, a poor neighborhood of Cairo, when I was nine years old. A peddler would come to our street about once a week, and we kids would rush to give him trinkets and old newspapers, and in exchange he would let us have a peek at his magic lantern (sandouk al ajjab). The most popular peep show was Shamshoun el Jabbar -- Samson the Mighty. (Shamshoun is the Cannanitish term for Samson.) The legend of Samson in the Islamic Middle East is alive through oral history rather than sacred text. A common Arabic expression in the region, when defeat is imminent and all rays of hope are gone is "Upon me and my enemies, O Lord" ("alai wa ala a'dai ya rab".)#

The most ominous manifestation of this logic, if such a term is justified, is modern-day Israel's Samson Option. In a series of high-level meetings in 1964-65 held in Midrasha, a Mossad retreat outside Tel Aviv to discuss nuclear weapons, the view was not whether to go nuclear or not, but when. With the Dimona reactor under way, the Israeli leadership took the view that the nuclear bomb is their only recourse against an attack from neighboring states; there would be no other Massada, where the besieged resistance would hide behind a fortress against advancing armies.#

Norman Podhoretz in a 1976 essay in Commentary, accurately summarized the pro-nuclear argument in describing what Israel would do if abandoned by the United States and overrun by the Arabs: "The Israelis would fight...with conventional weapons for as long as they could, and if the tide were turning decisively against them, and if help in the form of supplies will not come from the United States or any other guarantors were not forthcoming, it is safe to predict that they would fight with nuclear weapons in the end... It used to be said that the Israelis had a Massada complex.... But if the Israelis are to be understood in term of a 'complex' involving suicide rather than surrender and rooted in a relevant precedent of Jewish history, the example of Samson, whose suicide brought about the destruction of his enemies, would be more appropriate than Massada where in committed suicide the Zealots killed only themselves and took no Romans with them. Seymour Hersh's "The Samson Option" is worth reading for further elaboration on this policy alternative. The Samson Option became Israel's cry of one last time. "Never Again.""#

It is ironic that a country like Israel that contemplates mass suicide as an act of ultimate defense against defeat fails to take into account the motives of young Palestinians who did no evil in the sight of the Lord but whose whole life is a series of humiliations and unceasing depradation under a brutal and punishing military occupation. They know no other life. The suicide bombers, in their own desperation, and robbed of their dignity, exercise the "Samson Option" because they see no way out, and have no other option. They do not possess the weapons that allow them to wage a symmetrical war against their enemy. Neither do they have the strength of Samson to punch the tanks and armored vehicles that surround them in their daily life. All they have is their bodies -- their ultimate weapon -- nihilism.#

Abu Sultan#

During the Democratic National Convention, Jewish patrons of the café read the article that is available at the counter and reported him to the FBI that was in town. The FBI sent a special team to investigate him but when they read the article and talked to him about it, the leader of the team made sure that "Abu Sultan" knew that if anyone else harassed him about it, the FBI would take care of it.#

If you have any comments, I can bring them to the author.#

Alexander Tabarrok linked to his paper with Eric Helland from the Journal of Law and Economics titled The Fugitive: Evidence of Public versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping the other day and I asked him to email me the PDF, which I just noticed is online, although it might not be the same version.#

I found the introduction and conclusion sections to be the easiest parts to understand because I am not familiar with the technical details of propensity scoring or matching techniques. However, reading the explanations for why certain techniques were used over others is very accessible. I will attempt to highlight what I found most interesting and briefly describe the method, as best I understand it, for the skeptical.#

Introduction#

This thirty page paper deals with the following question: What factors effect whether a defendant for a felony will (a) fail to reappear in court after being released for bail and (b) remain a fugitive for a substantial length of time, over one year in particular. Obviously there are many variables, but this paper focuses on how the bail was paid, rather than the bail level (price) as has been the case in most previous studies. There are a number of methods available: deposit bonds, cash, commercial bail (surety bonds), and release on their own recognizance.#

The dominant forms of release are by surety bond, that is, release on bail that is lent to the accused by a bond dealer, and nonfinancial release. Just over one-quarter of all released defendants are released on surety bond, and a very small percentage pay cash bail or put up their own property with the court (less than 5 percent combined); most of the rest are released on their own recognizance or on some form of public bail (called deposit bond) in which the defendant posts a small fraction, typically 10 percent or less, of the bail amount with the court. [p. 2]

I found the history of the bail system and the powers of private bail bond dealers to be fascinating:#

Although money bail is still the most common form of release, money bail and especially the commercial surety industry have come under increasing and often virulent attack since the 1960s. 7 Bail began as a progressive measure to help defendants get out of jail when the default option was that all defendants would be held until trial. In the twentieth century, however, the default option was more often thought of as release, and thus money bail was reconceived as a factor that kept people in jail. In addition, the greater burden of money bail on the poor elicited growing concern. 8 As a result, significant efforts were made, beginning in the 1960s, to develop alternatives to money bail, and four states—Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, and Wisconsin— have outlawed commercial bail altogether. [p. 3-4]

On the power of the bounty hunters...

If a defendant does fail to appear, the bond dealer is granted some time, typically 90—180 days, to recapture him before the bond dealer's bond is forfeited. Thus, bond dealers have a credible threat to pursue and rearrest any defendant who flees. Bond dealers report that just to break even, 95 percent of their clients must show up in court. 16 Thus, significant incentives exist to pursue and return skips to justice.

Bond dealers and their agents have powerful legal rights over any defendant who fails to appear, rights that exceed those of the public police. Bail enforcement agents, for example, have the right to break into a defendant's home without a warrant, make arrests using all necessary force including deadly force if needed, temporarily imprison defendants, and pursue and return a defendant across state lines without the necessity of entering into an extradition process. 17 [p. 5]

The authors make the case that the bond dealers have both a great incentive to bring their claims to court and have more power to do so. These factors should result in lower rates of failure to appear and lower fugitive rates.#

The Method#

Of course, I am a bit unsure if I can accurately describe the method, so if this is wrong, tell me, or if you disagree with the results and the method, read the paper for yourself.#

Basically, the idea is to take a large sample of data collect by the U.S. Department of Justice on the conditions being studied and try to identify individuals with similar situations but different "treatments." Here, it seems that "treatment" refers to what method of bail was used.#

Ideally, in a treatment evaluation we would like to identify two outcomes: one if the individual is treated, YT, and one if no treatment is administered, YNT . The effect of the treatment is then YT - YNT. But we cannot observe an individual in both states of the world, making a direct computation [...] impossible. 28 All methods of evaluation, therefore, must make some assumptions about "comparable" individuals. An intuitive method is to match each treated individual with a statistically similar untreated individual and compare differences in outcomes across a series of matches. Thus, two statistical doppelgangers would function as the same individual in different treatments. [p. 7]

After codifying the data and matching each individual with their twin, a propensity score is calculate to codify the effect of each different treatment. Certain tests are made on this data to ensure that there have not been significant errors made:#

Matching is a powerful and flexible tool, but it is not a research design that magically guarantees the identification of causal effects. In this section, we test for robustness and attempt to rule out the potentially confounding effects of unobservable characteristics. We focus on two identification strategies; a number of alternative strategies, described briefly below, are developed in the working paper. [p. 22-23]

This should have provided a delicious appetizer for someone interested in where the results come from.#

Conclusion#

I will quote the short conclusion in full:#

When the default was for every criminal defendant to be held until trial, it was easy to support the institution of surety bail. Surety bail increased the number of releases relative to the default and thereby spared the innocent some jail time. Surety release also provided good, albeit not perfect, assurance that the defendant would later appear to stand trial. When the default is that every defendant is released, or at least when many people believe that "innocent until proven guilty" establishes that release before trial is the ideal, support for the surety bail system becomes more complex. How should the probability of failing to appear and all the costs this implies, including higher crime rates, be traded off against the injustice of imprisoning the innocent or even the injustice of imprisoning the not-yet-proven guilty? We cannot provide an answer to this question, but we can provide a necessary input to this important debate.

Defendants released on surety bond are 28 percent less likely to fail to appear than similar defendants released on their own recognizance, and if they do fail to appear, they are 53 percent less likely to remain at large for extended periods of time. Deposit bonds perform only marginally better than release on own recognizance. Requiring defendants to pay their bonds in cash can reduce the FTA rate similar to that for those released on surety bond. Given that a defendant skips town, however, the probability of recapture is much higher for those defendants released on surety bond. As a result, the probability of being a fugitive is 64 percent lower for those released on surety bond compared with those released on cash bond. These finding indicate that bond dealers and bail enforcement agents (bounty hunters) are effective at discouraging flight and at recapturing defendants. Bounty hunters, not public police, appear to be the true long arms of the law. [p. 26]

Further Reading#

Apart from the last sentence of the conclusion, the paper is very free from moralizing or throwing down of the gauntlet with regards to this version of private law enforcement. Outside the paper, however, Prof. Tabarrok has written in this way on the issue.#

Bring on the Bounty Hunters at the site of the Independent Institute:#

It looks impressive when a judge bangs his gavel and orders someone's arrest. Criminals, however, aren't fooled. They know the probability that a warrant will ever be served is minimal.

According to an investigative report by the San Francisco Chronicle, more than 2.5 million arrest warrants are currently outstanding in the State of California. Many of the arrest warrants are for misdemeanors, but thousands of arrest warrants for homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault and other serious crimes also languish unserved.

Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies often don't even try to serve warrants. Instead, they ignore the public's right to safety and simply wait until the suspect is arrested for some other crime. More outrageously, many of these suspects are released on their own recognizance time and time again. As a result, multiple arrest warrants for failure to show up at trial are not uncommon.

At the Marginal Revolution, he wrote about a talk he gave to the California Bail Agents Association.#

Lisa Margonelli mentioned the paper in an article on SFGate.com.#

Prof. Tabarrok has a category here on makeoutcity and has a blog, the Marginal Revolution.#

Gene Healy links to the Atlantic Monthly article about Al Qa'eda's computer.#

Reading the article was very interesting for someone who can read the untranslated Arabic in the background photos. I can't point to a specific thing though, it is not in front of me.

Jason Kottke quotes one of the funniest parts, in my opinion, the bit on "Travel Tips for Terrorists."

Don Boudreaux writes about campaigns pledges:#

Here's a fun exercise during this political season as you listen to news broadcasts and read newspapers and websites: each time you hear or read a statement by a candidate, ask yourself if you can seriously imagine that candidate's opponent publicly expressing the opposite opinion. If you answer "no," then that candidate has pronounced a mere platitude, a banality, and said nothing worthy of attention.

For example, I cannot imagine that the opponent of the above-mentioned candidate for a seat on the county council would have said "My esteemed opponent, Mr. _____ favors more jobs and less crime. I dissent! If elected, I will work for fewer jobs and more crime!"

Russell Roberts writes about Winston Churchill.#

Manchester points out that Winston never drew his own bath, never rode a bus and took the tube only once and had to be rescued because he was lost. But the best story Manchester tells of the rarefied life of the British aristocracy is about a cousin of Winston's. He was traveling without his valet and complained to friends on the trip that his tootbrush was not "frothing properly." The friends explained that a toothbrush needed paste to froth. The cousin was unaware of that crucial step—his valet always took care of it. This makes Bush 41 look like the salt of the earth.

This is surprising considering the many battles that Winston was so close to at the turn of the century, like the Battle of Omdurman and the Boer War.

Don Boudreaux writes about law and legislation. (These go by the names of order and law sometimes, so this is "Order without Law.")#

As I walked from my building to my parked car, keys in hand, a woman driving a car noticed me. She asked me if I was leaving. I immediately knew why she asked.

"Yep," I replied. "But I'm parked down at the far end of the lot."

She followed me slowly. As I neared my parked car, another car approached from the other direction; its driver, too, was clearly looking for a parking space. This second car paused momentarily when its driver saw me. But — and here's the interesting fact — as soon as that second driver noticed the car following slowly behind me, this second car sped up and drove by, realizing that another driver had established a prior claim on the parking space that I was about to abandon.

That is, merely by being the first car to follow a pedestrian walking to his or her car in a crowded parking lot establishes a property right for the "following" car in the parking space about to be abandoned.

Don Boudreaux, on a roll, writes about how "Government brings out the kid in us."#

Suppose the country's government were run by children between the ages of four and eight. Further suppose that this situation is unalterable; protesting against it — advocating that adults be put in charge — is futile.

In this world, all political discussions would be directed at, and by, young kids. All elections would be for the purpose of choosing which particular children will exercise government power for the next few years.

...

This little thought experiment conveys my sense of politics. I don't insist that my sense is correct, but it is truly my sense.

Because this is my sense, I don't vote. Choosing which children will wield political power strikes me as both pointless and comical. True, some children are better than others, but most are brats if they're insufficiently constrained by adult discipline.

In another article he continues...

The idea of democracy is that citizens, by voting, collectively make such decisions.

But citizens have no incentives to make mature decisions in the voting booth.

First, voters are typically asked to decide how to spend other people's money. Just as children have no trouble spending room and dad's money, voters have no trouble voting for pet projects to be financed largely by others.

Second, no single vote counts; no single vote decides the outcome of an election. So, no matter how a voter votes—no matter how absurd, unrealistic, or destructive a voter's wish may prove to be—the fact that no single vote counts means that no single voter incurs any material cost of voting in whatever way strikes his fancy.

E. Frank Stephenson writes about media concentration.#

I was asked if I was concerned about the increasing concentration of media ownership, lack of diversity among media outlets, and the supposed increase in censorship. I respectfully disagreed; here's why:

First, I suspect the censorship bit comes from Disney's declining to distribute Michael Moore's trash (see my previous post and a critique by NPR's Scott Simon here). That's not censorship--it's Disney's right as a private entity. Moreover, censorship is something done by governments not by private parties. Note also that Moore's garbage and other litter box goodies such as "Supersize Me" are playing in a theaters nationwide.

Second, while there may be some large media conglomerates (AOL/Time-Warner comes to mind), there is an incredible array of newspaper, radio, television, and internet sources available; I think there is more, not less, info available today. (One student, apparently not sensing the irony, complained about a lack of news sources then said she read French and German papers via the internet. Would this have even been possible 10 years ago?) Netflix is renowned for making indy films available and Monday's WSJ had an article on bands such as Anti-Flag that are popular for their anti-Bush songs.