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Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. The only way in recent history the US managed to lower its violent crime rate was by l

Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. The only way in recent history the US managed to lower its violent crime rate was by locking up more people via the 1994 crime bill, which is now panned as "racist". America has an underincarceration problem, and is seeing double to triple digit increases in murder over the past year following bail reform and prosecutorial discretion putting more future recidivists into the streets instead of jail.

dls2016 5y ago
> Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. I know! Wage thieves, environmental criminals, bankers, the Sacklers...
- spazrunaway 5y ago
  I'd love to lock them up too.
  - pksebben 5y ago
    just get me a tree and some rope
  - effingwewt 5y ago
    This always makes me think the people who scream this have never been to jail/prison. I'm sure solutions exist, I'm sure what we have now doesn't work. We need rehabilitation instead of the 'gladiator schools' we have now.
DiNovi 5y ago
If you believe the us has a more violent population than anywhere else in the world, have you ever bothered to interrogate as to why that is? Or could it be the us has an issue with whay and for How long we allow police and our court systems to punish people? Could it be the us is simply over policed? No shortage of research on this. I ask you take the time to look into this
- splithalf 5y ago
  Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops. Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?
  - dls2016 5y ago
    > Am I mistaken? Yes, we can defund them. Here in Pennsylvania, numerous rural (read: white) communities have disbanded their local police departments. Lack of tax dollars and, as I like to think, it's stupid to pay for overtime, SUVs and army gear so that police can harass people for traffic violations and drug possession. The problem now is that these communities don't pay any extra for state police emergency coverage... so they get to have their cake and eat it, too. (That is, they get to whine about how "defund police" is a communist plot while everyone else pays for their emergency coverage... money which is supposed to be spent on road repairs.)
    - splithalf 5y ago
      Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.
      - dls2016 5y ago
        I would argue that police in inner cities are a bit like the drunken reveler looking for their keys under the street light because they can't see anything elsewhere. Could certainly use a few more detectives poking around Wall Street...
jdmichal 5y ago
You're saying that the US, which is also number one on incarcerated population per capita, doesn't put enough people in jail? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... If recidivism is the issue, then the way the US treats prisons, prisoners, and especially ex-convicts is the source. The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.
- spazrunaway 5y ago
  Yes. >The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues. The problem is, we're not doing that anymore, and crime is returning to its worst levels in history, as bad as the 70s and 80s. A man on parole for killing his mother just beat an Asian woman half to death in NYC. There's currently a manhunt for a man in Texas who raped a 16 year old, spent a little over two weeks in jail before bailing out some paltry sum, then proceeded to shoot 2-3 people. This is a daily reality.
foobiter 5y ago
Incarceration is a total failure to address root causes. To say we should incarcerate more people, as the country that already incarcerates many more people than any other, seems absurd. It’s additionally absurd considering we’re also a total failure at maintaining humane prison conditions... the majority of federal prisoners are non-violent offenders... we imprison disproportionately more people of minority races... It’s incredibly obvious that we’re screwing many things up here.
jnwatson 5y ago
America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The historical reduction in crime started before 1994, so there's not good evidence for a causal connection (controversially, Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics argued it was Roe v Wade that was largely responsible). Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems. It would be much cheaper to tackle the problem at its source: structural racism and poverty.
- spazrunaway 5y ago
  >Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems Agreed. Any chance they're committing more crimes? Or over half of all murders? We can control for poverty, which has been found to have a much weaker correlation with criminality than race. Systemic racism is a meaningless act of circular reasoning, because it seems to be defined only by statistical disparities, which themselves are attributed to systemic racism.
  - bingbong70 5y ago
    American racism is clearly systemic/institutionalized... >And according to exoneration data, innocent African American suspects are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 Unfortunately spreading misleading information without second thought is yet another feature of white supremacist systems, not a bug.
    - spazrunaway 5y ago
      From your source: "Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others." 7x more murders per capita, 7x higher rates of false conviction. It's simple scaling. That means the system is being perfectly equitable.

dls2016 5y ago

> Because an enormous swath of its population is dangerous, unfortunately. I know! Wage thieves, environmental criminals, bankers, the Sacklers...

spazrunaway 5y ago
I'd love to lock them up too.
- pksebben 5y ago
  just get me a tree and some rope
- effingwewt 5y ago
  This always makes me think the people who scream this have never been to jail/prison. I'm sure solutions exist, I'm sure what we have now doesn't work. We need rehabilitation instead of the 'gladiator schools' we have now.

DiNovi 5y ago

If you believe the us has a more violent population than anywhere else in the world, have you ever bothered to interrogate as to why that is? Or could it be the us has an issue with whay and for How long we allow police and our court systems to punish people? Could it be the us is simply over policed? No shortage of research on this. I ask you take the time to look into this

splithalf 5y ago
Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops. Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?
- dls2016 5y ago
  > Am I mistaken? Yes, we can defund them. Here in Pennsylvania, numerous rural (read: white) communities have disbanded their local police departments. Lack of tax dollars and, as I like to think, it's stupid to pay for overtime, SUVs and army gear so that police can harass people for traffic violations and drug possession. The problem now is that these communities don't pay any extra for state police emergency coverage... so they get to have their cake and eat it, too. (That is, they get to whine about how "defund police" is a communist plot while everyone else pays for their emergency coverage... money which is supposed to be spent on road repairs.)
  - splithalf 5y ago
    Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.
    - dls2016 5y ago
      I would argue that police in inner cities are a bit like the drunken reveler looking for their keys under the street light because they can't see anything elsewhere. Could certainly use a few more detectives poking around Wall Street...

jdmichal 5y ago

You're saying that the US, which is also number one on incarcerated population per capita, doesn't put enough people in jail? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... If recidivism is the issue, then the way the US treats prisons, prisoners, and especially ex-convicts is the source. The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues.

spazrunaway 5y ago
Yes. >The entire system is built around punishing people for the rest of their lives, after having placed them in facilities with a social structure that encourages repeated issues. The problem is, we're not doing that anymore, and crime is returning to its worst levels in history, as bad as the 70s and 80s. A man on parole for killing his mother just beat an Asian woman half to death in NYC. There's currently a manhunt for a man in Texas who raped a 16 year old, spent a little over two weeks in jail before bailing out some paltry sum, then proceeded to shoot 2-3 people. This is a daily reality.

foobiter 5y ago

Incarceration is a total failure to address root causes. To say we should incarcerate more people, as the country that already incarcerates many more people than any other, seems absurd. It’s additionally absurd considering we’re also a total failure at maintaining humane prison conditions... the majority of federal prisoners are non-violent offenders... we imprison disproportionately more people of minority races... It’s incredibly obvious that we’re screwing many things up here.

jnwatson 5y ago

America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The historical reduction in crime started before 1994, so there's not good evidence for a causal connection (controversially, Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics argued it was Roe v Wade that was largely responsible). Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems. It would be much cheaper to tackle the problem at its source: structural racism and poverty.

spazrunaway 5y ago
>Regardless, any system by which 8 percent of adult black men are in prison clearly has bigger problems Agreed. Any chance they're committing more crimes? Or over half of all murders? We can control for poverty, which has been found to have a much weaker correlation with criminality than race. Systemic racism is a meaningless act of circular reasoning, because it seems to be defined only by statistical disparities, which themselves are attributed to systemic racism.
- bingbong70 5y ago
  American racism is clearly systemic/institutionalized... >And according to exoneration data, innocent African American suspects are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than innocent white suspects. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840501 Unfortunately spreading misleading information without second thought is yet another feature of white supremacist systems, not a bug.
  - spazrunaway 5y ago
    From your source: "Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others." 7x more murders per capita, 7x higher rates of false conviction. It's simple scaling. That means the system is being perfectly equitable.