This article is very interesting: https://harpers.org/archive/1929/06/whats-wrong-with-the-right-people/ https://harpers.org/archive/1929/06/whats-wrong-with-t

This article is very interesting: https://harpers.org/archive/1929/06/whats-wrong-with-the-right-people/ https://harpers.org/archive/1929/06/whats-wrong-with-the-rig... I think it has been posted before. As an European the "though on crime" spirit in the USA is just the oposite to what we actually have here. Here there are very forgiving laws, short prison sentences, very soft and polite police attitude against criminals (compared with what you experience in the USA). Prissons are well equiped and there it's relatively easy to transition to more open sentences where you only go to sleep to the prison. A lot of money is spent in reabilitation, economic help, free university and courses in the prison, etc... In a way, if you are a law obeying citizen you feel that you are the fish and the criminals have it their way. Very unjust, even dangerous as they are able to roam openly and prey in the innocent. We really wish for harsher laws, policing and prissons. But the reality is that now a days is difficult to find a place in a Spanish city where you can be mugged with a knife or any other weapon. There is almost no perception of danger in the streets. Last week I was in a dinner with a district chief in the police. He says there are some property thieves, mostly youth, but they rarely have to draw the gun, criminals may run or shout to cops, but they usually don't fight them. They know they probably are going out of the jail faster than the cop finish filling the papers, so why bother being violent?. Most criminals are not hardened psicopaths, and with this method the system removes hate and tension from the violence spiral(I don't know if this makes sense). Of course is far from perfect, at the end of the day some very violent killers and rapists get through this very lax system creating victims and social alarm, but the overall results are very very positive for everybody. Felons get a new oportunity, tax payers save money, citicens get to enjoy a safer city. Talking about the gun problem in the USA (somebody was blaming guns for th violence in other comment), it seems to me that the people that is trying to ban guns are just doing the oposite of what they are trying to do, they draw more attention to guns, so more people buy them. This people surely would have ignored them if nobody recalled them the topic. For example in Spain we have a very vigorous antibullfighting movement. But I remember perfectly how in the 80s and early 90s all the bull fighting business men were worried on how the people had stoped going to the corridas. My grandfather loved them (I dont) and he watched all of them in the tv. The plazas were half empty most of the times, and the business was dying (they even were worried about the loss of the race of toros bravos that only gets rised for corridas) Then the antibullfighting movement gained strength and all the people that had been ignoring the corridas, started paying attention and taking a stance, some pro, some against. But the net result was a very healthy increase in the expectator figures of all thing related to bullfighting. In a way I think it is the same reason Trump got to president, way too much free propaganda and attention from everybody even if it was negative.