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Why are there so many people in prison in America? (2017)

73 points by danielvf 5y ago

gnarbarian 5y ago
1) dumb drug laws which create gangs 2) urban gang violence culture 3) effective criminal justice system
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  It's not even a "urban gang violence culture" issue. It's just the natural result of what happens when you can't use courts and threat of state violence to settle disputes that would be civil issues in any other industry. If the people shooting at each other over bad business involving drugs were plumbers they would be arguing with each other in a courtroom.
  - gnarbarian 5y ago
    uhhh see #1
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Its not effective if it does not provide defendant with a proper lawyer and convicts innocent people in 'plea deals' without judicial oversight. It also fails the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio#:~:text=In%20criminal%20law%2C%20Blackstone's%20ratio,than%20that%20one%20innocent%20suffer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio#:~:text....
- dfilppi 5y ago
  Drug laws dont create gangs. People create gangs.
  - gnarbarian 5y ago
    You're right, but the laws create the opportunity. a prohibition creates a black market and cartels or gangs form in order to meet the demand of the market.
hellothere1337 5y ago
Why, its profitable isn't it good sir?
- dfilppi 5y ago
  Far from it
tharne 5y ago
There are a lot of people breaking the law in America. Many of them get caught and go to prison. Few know this.
- cies 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime passing law that criminalizes victimless behavior should be a crime!
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  So if many people are breaking the law, is the law set at a level where many are not able/willing to follow it (like say speed limits in many areas) or are more Americans by nature law breakers?
cies 5y ago
Answer: the law sucks. Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. (this should be a much loved amendment for those true freedom lover in the US, that are all cringing at the incarceration rate)
- tharne 5y ago
  > Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. That's a good idea, but much harder to implement than it sounds. Being a small time drug dealer may be a victimless crime to many people, but it certainly isn't to parents who've had a teenager who's OD'd. And then there are crimes like insurance fraud, that don't hurt any one individual, but do make the cost of living higher for everyone else who's premiums go up as a result. TLDR; it's very hard to determine which crimes are and are not "victimless".
  - tyleo 5y ago
    Idk, maybe I’m not understanding something but I feel like both of those examples are crimes with victims. I’d err on the side of avoiding false positives and say that only actions impacting yourself receive the protections of an amendment. Ex: * not wearing a seatbelt * consuming drugs
    - anovikov 5y ago
      Well, in a country with socialised medicine, which the U.S. is going to become under Biden as it seems, not wearing a seatbelt or consuming drugs will not be victimless anymore.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
        Given that we don't let hospitals or paramedics check if people can pay before they provide emergency care, this is already the case.
    - rticesterp 5y ago
blakesterz 5y ago
This was way more interesting than I thought it would be. (Assuming this is accurate) The answers offered are not what I expected. Well, roughly speaking, the prison population for a given crime is: Occurrence Per Year x Report Rate x Solve Rate x Conviction Rate x Prison Sentence Length. In all of those, American ranks either high or very high.
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  With regard to several of these I feel like a big component is the destruction of community. We used to deal with many petty crimes personally. If Jimmy stole your bike you used to just go to Jimmy’s house and get it back, maybe beat him up, and that was it. Bar fights and the like just resulted in a black eye and getting thrown out. Now we don’t even know our neighbors names and that lack of familiarity tends to lead to impersonal/state/police type responses. Now if Jimmy steals your bike and you go get it back and beat him up you’re the one going to jail instead of Jimmy.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I don't know what kind of community you're advocating, but I'd much prefer one where my neighbors don't play judge, jury, and torturer, attempting to enforce vigilante justice by physical assault against my person because they think I might have committed petty theft against their property.
    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      The current system is we send a Derek Chauvin to your house. Your choice whether you view that as an improvement over the old system.
  - a4isms 5y ago
    We people of colour have a shorthand way to describe this system of yours: Lynching. Communities who think they "know who did it" will bypass the right to legal representation, will bypass courts, will bypass proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and will bypass the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The result, of course, is not justice, but horrific oppression. Encouraging communities to take matters into their own hands is encouraging injustice.
cigaser 5y ago
I was robbed at gunpoint in Colombia. I argued with robber I want to keep my passport and will take my cards from wallet. In US they would shoot me just for good measure.
- tstrimple 5y ago
  I want to make sure I understand your argument. You're suggesting you're more likely to be murdered by a mugger in the US than in Colombia?
  - cigaser 5y ago
    Yes, Colombian guy was polite.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Thats actually a well known phenomenon - in countries where kidnapping is widespread, the kidnapper is a 'businessman', they are not there to kill people and they evade justice and keep low-ish profile. By contrast in US crininals know they will likely spend many years in jail
    - tstrimple 5y ago
      It's factually incorrect and easy to verify by comparing murder rates. Colombia's murder rate is 8x higher than the US. Stating that you're more likely to be murdered in the US than Colombia is ridiculous. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Colombia/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Colombia/U...
- subungual 5y ago
  It's fascinating to me that everywhere that I've traveled and lived in South America (including Colombia), people seem to have this narrative about the locals that they'll "just shoot you and go through your pockets after." I've not seen any evidence that it's based in anything except media-cultivated fear of their own culture. I'm not used to hearing it said about the US, but with the constant pushes here to keep us afraid and willing to give up civil liberties, it makes sense that I'd run into it one day.
pjc50 5y ago
As for the high levels of violent crime feeding in to this system, I would like to evangelize the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit A lot of people, especially Americans, like to think of Americans as a uniquely violent people, but this is really a systemic and cultural problem as well as a failing of individuals. People used to think of Glasgow as uniquely violent but that problem has been greatly reduced thanks to the VRU.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  I think it has more to do with accessibility to guns. Anyone in America can be carrying a gun and it’s incredibly easy for criminals to buy them because they are so abundant. That’s not something people have to worry about in Japan or Europe.
  - tjs8rj 5y ago
    This doesn’t square with the fact that many of the most gun dense states have the lowest violent crime rates. New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries. I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty. I put culture and social cohesion ahead of income because plenty of poorer asian countries do much better than richer european countries.
    - diogenescynic 5y ago
      > New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries.I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty. This sounds like borderline race theory or something Charles Murray would argue... So basically you’re saying that richer white people in homogeneous states are less violent than the states with poor, more diverse populations? I don’t think it’s based on race or culture, but income and class are definitely factors.
      - thesuitonym 5y ago
minikites 5y ago
The text of the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Except as a punishment for crime. America never abolished slavery, we just made up crimes that disproportionately affect people of color and then use them for free labor. We don't sell their offspring like chattel, we just convict them of the same crimes. Private prisons shouldn't exist and prison labor should be fairly compensated. Boiling the cause down to a formula like the article does is an incredibly superficial analysis, there's no examination or even curiosity about why any part of the equation is the way it is.
- hpoe 5y ago
  Note only 8% of prisons in the US are private prisons. By focusing on private prisons we are focusing on a small part of the problem that while emotionally outraging is pragmatically inconsequential.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    That completely ignores that the "public" prisons often contract significant amounts of their running out to private corporations anyway. One of Aramark's big businesses is providing food for prisons
Thaxll 5y ago
USA has a zero-tolerance policy so it might has to do with that, you can go to prison for pretty much anything. On top of that you add inequality, cost of education etc...
- tyingq 5y ago
  There's also quite a lot of "3 strikes" and "your misdemeanor is now a felony due to some prior conviction" type laws in the US. Similarly, fairly minor infractions while on probation/parole result in lengthy sentences via revocation.
  - diogenescynic 5y ago
    And there are many more that reduce felonies like drunk driving or violent crimes to misdemeanors if some anger management or drug rehab program is attended. It goes both way and it’s not clear to me either is working very effectively.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Yes, though I'm surprised that upgrading charges based on past crimes is constitutional. It just seems very odd to me to charge someone with something they didn't actually do.
      - myfavoritedog 5y ago
        to charge someone with something they didn't actually do Not sure how you can frame a previous "strike" as something they didn't actually do. The strikes were actual crimes with convictions. The legal notion of sentence modifications based upon various factors is nothing new. You can get extra time for committing a robbery if you had a gun when committing it, even if the gun wasn't loaded or fired.
        tyingq 5y ago
        "You can get extra time for committing a robbery if you had a gun when committing it" That's something you did, and an actual named charge "Robbery with a Dangerous Weapon" or similar. Charging someone with a felony for repeated petty shoplifting is just odd though. They upgrade the charge to, "felony burglary", for example, when the crime clearly didn't fit the definition of "felony burglary" in the law. They have separate laws for how the "upgrade" occurs.
bluedino 5y ago
>> As an approximation, all of the murders from fifteen years ago, back when murder rates were much higher, are still in prison today. The author is unaware of the fact that in recent years, the murder rate in South Carolina has increased to meet or exceed what it was 15 years ago https://www.postandcourier.com/news/north-charleston-among-cities-with-highest-murder-rates-in-first-half-of-2016/article_e66f0f2c-e4ab-11e6-9214-8b3fb631d143.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/north-charleston-among-c...
- mtmickush 5y ago
  I'm not sure the author is unaware of that. The last paragraph explicitly calls this out. >> Secondly, the rate of homicides in the US has been going up quite a bit for the past two years. This is supposedly a localized effect of a few high crime cities, but even in South Carolina the number of people in prison for murder has gone up by about 10% in just the last four years. This is concerning.
henvic 5y ago
There's a perverse incentive to jail people driven by the stupid war on drugs. Besides, if someone steals a bread leaf, they might go to jail at the expense of the whole society. This has to change. Justice should not be punitive, but rather reparative... and people who commit crimeless victims are the victims themselves of improper incarceration (in other words, state sanctioned kidnapping).
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  So what’s the alternative? Tent camps under every freeway overpass and near every park and green space with roaming tweakers and junkies stealing bikes and any other property not locked down? Honestly that seems like the worse option. It seems like the bleeding heart strategy of letting these people just go about their day is just a slow death for those drug users and lowers quality of life for everyone else. Why is there no middle ground like in Europe? America is too extreme. Either we lock people up for a joint or we give them more needles to use heroin and enable their addiction. It is totally bizarre in my opinion. California looks dirtier than most third-world countries I’ve been to. Clearly we can do better.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    I feel like tent camps are a housing problem and homelessness shouldn’t be a crime. We can do better, indeed. (Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics. It’s easy to say, as an addict, that I’m not going to a program recommended by a stranger or a cop. It’s harder to refuse when it’s this friendly receptionist who has never judged me and has told me that they know 5 others like me who have all succeeded breaking the addiction.)
    - diogenescynic 5y ago
      How would a drug addict on meth or heroin afford an apartment at any price? The homeless problem is made worse by the housing problem, but the people we see in the tent camps under freeways were not priced out because their rent got raised. That’s just propaganda the mayors in democrat cities put out to shift blame and responsibly. > Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics. But we don’t give free needles or insulin to people with diabetes? I just think our priorities are fucked. And you look at a city budget like SF where hundreds of millions are spent on the homeless only for the problem to get worse every single year and the money is never spend in an accountable way. I’d just prefer to help people who would actually help themselves so we aren’t just enabling them further in a self-destructive path. I’ve never seen another country with our policies that seems to be a working model. Why can’t we just copy something that actually work? I find it bizarre we just keep spending more and more but won’t look beyond our own paradigm for a better strategy.
diogenescynic 5y ago
Is it odd to think there should be more? I see people stealing, doing hard drugs like heroin or meth, prostitution, and doing other anti-social behavior daily but we all just accept it now. Cops give tickets for heroin or meth and there’s no consequence if they don’t show up to court... I’m kind of ready for the pendulum to swing the other way again, especially before my kid grows up and has to be exposed to it.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Sending someone to jail does not magically cure them of their meth addiction. It probably compounds it as whatever sense of desperation or alienation drove them to drugs is now catalyzed by the inability to find meaningful work with due to a drug conviction / prison time. The solution should be to help these people get off of drugs but that is a society wide effort that needs to occur. Its much easier just to send a a few armed dudes over to rough them up and throw them in a cell. America does love to remove its undesirables from the view of others.
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    Sending to jail is supposed to be a prevention factor, not a cure. That being said, being an addict is not a crime in most countries. Selling drugs is. Is it different in the US?
    - wonderwonder 5y ago
      Being an addict is not a crime in the US but possession of drugs even for personal use is for the most part, exceptions exist for marijuana in some areas. I think history has proven that if you are at the point you are considering using heroin or meth, the threat of incarceration is generally not a deterrent. I don't know that I have the answers, I just don't think that throwing someone in prison is the solution to the drug pandemic. I do agree that dealers should go to jail.
  - diogenescynic 5y ago
    No but the rest of society is no longer victimized or harmed. Why do we just let drug users trash our public spaces and commit so much destruction? Does that not have a toll on society and everyone else’s quality of life? What about all the stuff they steal daily? I don’t see other developed countries bend over so far to accommodate criminals and drug addicts and frankly our strategy isn’t working at all—these populations just get bigger every year....
FriedrichN 5y ago
As a non-USA citizen it seems to me that Americans are really into self ownership, if you're successful that's because you pulled yourself up by the bootstraps, if you're not it's because you didn't work hard enough. So the person is held 100% accountable for everything they do. It's like the phrase "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Liberty and Accountability go hand-in-hand. When you try to decouple them, you decrease Liberty and sometimes make it nonviable.
  - syops 5y ago
    What does "Liberty and Accountability" mean in this context? Accountability is quite broad. Can you narrow things down a bit and elaborate? Can you give examples of countries that tried liberty without accountability (as you mean it) and have failed?
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Seems to me like those with the greatest liberties face the least accountability.
    - myfavoritedog 5y ago
      Yeah, that's because of corruption. Lots of societies and forms of government are workable - whether they lean more socialistic, capitalistic, individualist, collectivist... whatever floats your ideological boat. But add corruption to the mix, and they all go to crap.
  - FriedrichN 5y ago
    That seems a false dichotomy to me. As if you have to choose between either radical accountability or absolute dictatorship. Understanding what brings people to do bad things can actually prevent them from happening to a certain degree, simply saying "drugs are bad, m'kay" only condemns the deed and the person. The problem with this way of looking at people is that it assumes we're fully rational beings. This is what neo-liberalism and Christianity share with each other, they assume full free will, the sin belongs to the sinner alone. I get angry just like any other person when someone breaks into my car or my home and I believe they should be punished. But if problems become structural, structural solutions are necessary.
fallingfrog 5y ago
I still favor the lead crime hypothesis for why violent crime was so high between the 70’s and the 90’s. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
djoldman 5y ago
Dead link in the article revived: "I pulled up a breakdown of total inmate population, by most serious offense. Only 16% were there on drug related charges." http://www.doc.sc.gov/research/InmatePopulationStats/ASOF-Most_Serious_Off_6-30-20.pdf http://www.doc.sc.gov/research/InmatePopulationStats/ASOF-Mo...
ryan93 5y ago
Way too much sympathy for criminals in this thread. Most people in prison could have trivially avoided being there by not committing crimes. Many of the people in prison imposed a massive cost on their community and its good they have been removed. Considering how many rapists and murders get away with it the prison population should be even higher.
- Cromation 5y ago
  I dont think anyone will sympathize with murderers or criminals, but that half of the criminals are in for non violent crimes such as drug offenses. Luckily the tides on marijuana are changing. Imagine though if half of our prison population wasnt there and instead were in some time of rehabilitation center to get past the drug use and back to be a productive part of society.
  - baggy_trough 5y ago
    How many of those non violent convictions are the result of plea deals down from violent felonies?
    - Cromation 5y ago
      How many of those violent crime convictions are police officers stating "Stop resisting!" while putting someone in handcuffs and they trip and fall and get a bloody lip and throw assault at the perp? Sadly these are all "what ifs" and not looking at the actual data in front of us.
      - baggy_trough 5y ago
        I don't know, but I think both are reasonable questions.
      - dfilppi 5y ago
        We dont know. But not knowing isnt the same as knowing not.
  - 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
The post has no mention of mandatory minimums, prosecution pressuring innocent people into plea deals without proper oversight by a judge, quality of publically provided lawyers, no mention of re-offence rate and no comparison with countries that focus on rehabilitation. I am sorry but this is vacuuous, it doesnt even scratch the surface of the issue
hyper_reality 5y ago
This is an interesting exploration of the incarceration statistics, but it doesn't go one step further and explain why American prison sentences are so long. I've seen numerous explanations for this, one being that there is a strong incentive for US politicians to look "tough on crime", a greater emphasis on retribution than rehabilitation, historic racial injustice, and a sizeable for-profit private prison industry. But other developed countries also have these factors to some extent, for example the UK's private prisons house 18% of prisoners compared to the USA's housing 8%. In my view, understanding the cause of why these long sentences are considered normal is essential to preventing a lot of pain and suffering. There are several examples of harmless people given life sentences for marijuana possession under three strikes laws, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. A society that is obsessed with freedom yet incarcerates more of its citizens than Cuba or Russia, and hands down disproportionately severe sentences for transgressions that would be viewed much less seriously in other countries, is a bizarre phenomenon with a huge human cost.
yboris 5y ago
A great book on the subject: Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law by Douglas Husak (an academic philosopher who is also a lawyer) https://www.amazon.com/Overcriminalization-Limits-Criminal-Douglas-Husak/dp/0195399013 https://www.amazon.com/Overcriminalization-Limits-Criminal-D...

73 points by danielvf 5y ago

gnarbarian 5y ago

1) dumb drug laws which create gangs 2) urban gang violence culture 3) effective criminal justice system

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
It's not even a "urban gang violence culture" issue. It's just the natural result of what happens when you can't use courts and threat of state violence to settle disputes that would be civil issues in any other industry. If the people shooting at each other over bad business involving drugs were plumbers they would be arguing with each other in a courtroom.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  uhhh see #1
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Its not effective if it does not provide defendant with a proper lawyer and convicts innocent people in 'plea deals' without judicial oversight. It also fails the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio#:~:text=In%20criminal%20law%2C%20Blackstone's%20ratio,than%20that%20one%20innocent%20suffer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio#:~:text....
dfilppi 5y ago
Drug laws dont create gangs. People create gangs.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  You're right, but the laws create the opportunity. a prohibition creates a black market and cartels or gangs form in order to meet the demand of the market.

hellothere1337 5y ago

Why, its profitable isn't it good sir?

dfilppi 5y ago
Far from it

tharne 5y ago

There are a lot of people breaking the law in America. Many of them get caught and go to prison. Few know this.

cies 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime passing law that criminalizes victimless behavior should be a crime!
Taylor_OD 5y ago
So if many people are breaking the law, is the law set at a level where many are not able/willing to follow it (like say speed limits in many areas) or are more Americans by nature law breakers?

cies 5y ago

Answer: the law sucks. Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. (this should be a much loved amendment for those true freedom lover in the US, that are all cringing at the incarceration rate)

tharne 5y ago
> Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. That's a good idea, but much harder to implement than it sounds. Being a small time drug dealer may be a victimless crime to many people, but it certainly isn't to parents who've had a teenager who's OD'd. And then there are crimes like insurance fraud, that don't hurt any one individual, but do make the cost of living higher for everyone else who's premiums go up as a result. TLDR; it's very hard to determine which crimes are and are not "victimless".
- tyleo 5y ago
  Idk, maybe I’m not understanding something but I feel like both of those examples are crimes with victims. I’d err on the side of avoiding false positives and say that only actions impacting yourself receive the protections of an amendment. Ex: * not wearing a seatbelt * consuming drugs
  - anovikov 5y ago
    Well, in a country with socialised medicine, which the U.S. is going to become under Biden as it seems, not wearing a seatbelt or consuming drugs will not be victimless anymore.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Given that we don't let hospitals or paramedics check if people can pay before they provide emergency care, this is already the case.
  - rticesterp 5y ago

blakesterz 5y ago

This was way more interesting than I thought it would be. (Assuming this is accurate) The answers offered are not what I expected. Well, roughly speaking, the prison population for a given crime is: Occurrence Per Year x Report Rate x Solve Rate x Conviction Rate x Prison Sentence Length. In all of those, American ranks either high or very high.

Consultant32452 5y ago
With regard to several of these I feel like a big component is the destruction of community. We used to deal with many petty crimes personally. If Jimmy stole your bike you used to just go to Jimmy’s house and get it back, maybe beat him up, and that was it. Bar fights and the like just resulted in a black eye and getting thrown out. Now we don’t even know our neighbors names and that lack of familiarity tends to lead to impersonal/state/police type responses. Now if Jimmy steals your bike and you go get it back and beat him up you’re the one going to jail instead of Jimmy.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I don't know what kind of community you're advocating, but I'd much prefer one where my neighbors don't play judge, jury, and torturer, attempting to enforce vigilante justice by physical assault against my person because they think I might have committed petty theft against their property.
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    The current system is we send a Derek Chauvin to your house. Your choice whether you view that as an improvement over the old system.
- a4isms 5y ago
  We people of colour have a shorthand way to describe this system of yours: Lynching. Communities who think they "know who did it" will bypass the right to legal representation, will bypass courts, will bypass proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and will bypass the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The result, of course, is not justice, but horrific oppression. Encouraging communities to take matters into their own hands is encouraging injustice.

cigaser 5y ago

I was robbed at gunpoint in Colombia. I argued with robber I want to keep my passport and will take my cards from wallet. In US they would shoot me just for good measure.

tstrimple 5y ago
I want to make sure I understand your argument. You're suggesting you're more likely to be murdered by a mugger in the US than in Colombia?
- cigaser 5y ago
  Yes, Colombian guy was polite.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Thats actually a well known phenomenon - in countries where kidnapping is widespread, the kidnapper is a 'businessman', they are not there to kill people and they evade justice and keep low-ish profile. By contrast in US crininals know they will likely spend many years in jail
  - tstrimple 5y ago
    It's factually incorrect and easy to verify by comparing murder rates. Colombia's murder rate is 8x higher than the US. Stating that you're more likely to be murdered in the US than Colombia is ridiculous. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Colombia/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Colombia/U...
subungual 5y ago
It's fascinating to me that everywhere that I've traveled and lived in South America (including Colombia), people seem to have this narrative about the locals that they'll "just shoot you and go through your pockets after." I've not seen any evidence that it's based in anything except media-cultivated fear of their own culture. I'm not used to hearing it said about the US, but with the constant pushes here to keep us afraid and willing to give up civil liberties, it makes sense that I'd run into it one day.

pjc50 5y ago

As for the high levels of violent crime feeding in to this system, I would like to evangelize the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit A lot of people, especially Americans, like to think of Americans as a uniquely violent people, but this is really a systemic and cultural problem as well as a failing of individuals. People used to think of Glasgow as uniquely violent but that problem has been greatly reduced thanks to the VRU.

diogenescynic 5y ago
I think it has more to do with accessibility to guns. Anyone in America can be carrying a gun and it’s incredibly easy for criminals to buy them because they are so abundant. That’s not something people have to worry about in Japan or Europe.
- tjs8rj 5y ago
  This doesn’t square with the fact that many of the most gun dense states have the lowest violent crime rates. New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries. I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty. I put culture and social cohesion ahead of income because plenty of poorer asian countries do much better than richer european countries.
  - diogenescynic 5y ago
    > New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries.I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty. This sounds like borderline race theory or something Charles Murray would argue... So basically you’re saying that richer white people in homogeneous states are less violent than the states with poor, more diverse populations? I don’t think it’s based on race or culture, but income and class are definitely factors.
    - thesuitonym 5y ago

minikites 5y ago

The text of the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Except as a punishment for crime. America never abolished slavery, we just made up crimes that disproportionately affect people of color and then use them for free labor. We don't sell their offspring like chattel, we just convict them of the same crimes. Private prisons shouldn't exist and prison labor should be fairly compensated. Boiling the cause down to a formula like the article does is an incredibly superficial analysis, there's no examination or even curiosity about why any part of the equation is the way it is.

hpoe 5y ago
Note only 8% of prisons in the US are private prisons. By focusing on private prisons we are focusing on a small part of the problem that while emotionally outraging is pragmatically inconsequential.
- mrguyorama 5y ago
  That completely ignores that the "public" prisons often contract significant amounts of their running out to private corporations anyway. One of Aramark's big businesses is providing food for prisons

Thaxll 5y ago

USA has a zero-tolerance policy so it might has to do with that, you can go to prison for pretty much anything. On top of that you add inequality, cost of education etc...

tyingq 5y ago
There's also quite a lot of "3 strikes" and "your misdemeanor is now a felony due to some prior conviction" type laws in the US. Similarly, fairly minor infractions while on probation/parole result in lengthy sentences via revocation.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  And there are many more that reduce felonies like drunk driving or violent crimes to misdemeanors if some anger management or drug rehab program is attended. It goes both way and it’s not clear to me either is working very effectively.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Yes, though I'm surprised that upgrading charges based on past crimes is constitutional. It just seems very odd to me to charge someone with something they didn't actually do.
    - myfavoritedog 5y ago
      to charge someone with something they didn't actually do Not sure how you can frame a previous "strike" as something they didn't actually do. The strikes were actual crimes with convictions. The legal notion of sentence modifications based upon various factors is nothing new. You can get extra time for committing a robbery if you had a gun when committing it, even if the gun wasn't loaded or fired.
      - tyingq 5y ago
        "You can get extra time for committing a robbery if you had a gun when committing it" That's something you did, and an actual named charge "Robbery with a Dangerous Weapon" or similar. Charging someone with a felony for repeated petty shoplifting is just odd though. They upgrade the charge to, "felony burglary", for example, when the crime clearly didn't fit the definition of "felony burglary" in the law. They have separate laws for how the "upgrade" occurs.

bluedino 5y ago

>> As an approximation, all of the murders from fifteen years ago, back when murder rates were much higher, are still in prison today. The author is unaware of the fact that in recent years, the murder rate in South Carolina has increased to meet or exceed what it was 15 years ago https://www.postandcourier.com/news/north-charleston-among-cities-with-highest-murder-rates-in-first-half-of-2016/article_e66f0f2c-e4ab-11e6-9214-8b3fb631d143.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/north-charleston-among-c...

mtmickush 5y ago
I'm not sure the author is unaware of that. The last paragraph explicitly calls this out. >> Secondly, the rate of homicides in the US has been going up quite a bit for the past two years. This is supposedly a localized effect of a few high crime cities, but even in South Carolina the number of people in prison for murder has gone up by about 10% in just the last four years. This is concerning.

henvic 5y ago

There's a perverse incentive to jail people driven by the stupid war on drugs. Besides, if someone steals a bread leaf, they might go to jail at the expense of the whole society. This has to change. Justice should not be punitive, but rather reparative... and people who commit crimeless victims are the victims themselves of improper incarceration (in other words, state sanctioned kidnapping).

diogenescynic 5y ago
So what’s the alternative? Tent camps under every freeway overpass and near every park and green space with roaming tweakers and junkies stealing bikes and any other property not locked down? Honestly that seems like the worse option. It seems like the bleeding heart strategy of letting these people just go about their day is just a slow death for those drug users and lowers quality of life for everyone else. Why is there no middle ground like in Europe? America is too extreme. Either we lock people up for a joint or we give them more needles to use heroin and enable their addiction. It is totally bizarre in my opinion. California looks dirtier than most third-world countries I’ve been to. Clearly we can do better.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I feel like tent camps are a housing problem and homelessness shouldn’t be a crime. We can do better, indeed. (Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics. It’s easy to say, as an addict, that I’m not going to a program recommended by a stranger or a cop. It’s harder to refuse when it’s this friendly receptionist who has never judged me and has told me that they know 5 others like me who have all succeeded breaking the addiction.)
  - diogenescynic 5y ago
    How would a drug addict on meth or heroin afford an apartment at any price? The homeless problem is made worse by the housing problem, but the people we see in the tent camps under freeways were not priced out because their rent got raised. That’s just propaganda the mayors in democrat cities put out to shift blame and responsibly. > Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics. But we don’t give free needles or insulin to people with diabetes? I just think our priorities are fucked. And you look at a city budget like SF where hundreds of millions are spent on the homeless only for the problem to get worse every single year and the money is never spend in an accountable way. I’d just prefer to help people who would actually help themselves so we aren’t just enabling them further in a self-destructive path. I’ve never seen another country with our policies that seems to be a working model. Why can’t we just copy something that actually work? I find it bizarre we just keep spending more and more but won’t look beyond our own paradigm for a better strategy.

diogenescynic 5y ago

Is it odd to think there should be more? I see people stealing, doing hard drugs like heroin or meth, prostitution, and doing other anti-social behavior daily but we all just accept it now. Cops give tickets for heroin or meth and there’s no consequence if they don’t show up to court... I’m kind of ready for the pendulum to swing the other way again, especially before my kid grows up and has to be exposed to it.

wonderwonder 5y ago
Sending someone to jail does not magically cure them of their meth addiction. It probably compounds it as whatever sense of desperation or alienation drove them to drugs is now catalyzed by the inability to find meaningful work with due to a drug conviction / prison time. The solution should be to help these people get off of drugs but that is a society wide effort that needs to occur. Its much easier just to send a a few armed dudes over to rough them up and throw them in a cell. America does love to remove its undesirables from the view of others.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Sending to jail is supposed to be a prevention factor, not a cure. That being said, being an addict is not a crime in most countries. Selling drugs is. Is it different in the US?
  - wonderwonder 5y ago
    Being an addict is not a crime in the US but possession of drugs even for personal use is for the most part, exceptions exist for marijuana in some areas. I think history has proven that if you are at the point you are considering using heroin or meth, the threat of incarceration is generally not a deterrent. I don't know that I have the answers, I just don't think that throwing someone in prison is the solution to the drug pandemic. I do agree that dealers should go to jail.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  No but the rest of society is no longer victimized or harmed. Why do we just let drug users trash our public spaces and commit so much destruction? Does that not have a toll on society and everyone else’s quality of life? What about all the stuff they steal daily? I don’t see other developed countries bend over so far to accommodate criminals and drug addicts and frankly our strategy isn’t working at all—these populations just get bigger every year....

FriedrichN 5y ago

As a non-USA citizen it seems to me that Americans are really into self ownership, if you're successful that's because you pulled yourself up by the bootstraps, if you're not it's because you didn't work hard enough. So the person is held 100% accountable for everything they do. It's like the phrase "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

myfavoritedog 5y ago
Liberty and Accountability go hand-in-hand. When you try to decouple them, you decrease Liberty and sometimes make it nonviable.
- syops 5y ago
  What does "Liberty and Accountability" mean in this context? Accountability is quite broad. Can you narrow things down a bit and elaborate? Can you give examples of countries that tried liberty without accountability (as you mean it) and have failed?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Seems to me like those with the greatest liberties face the least accountability.
  - myfavoritedog 5y ago
    Yeah, that's because of corruption. Lots of societies and forms of government are workable - whether they lean more socialistic, capitalistic, individualist, collectivist... whatever floats your ideological boat. But add corruption to the mix, and they all go to crap.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  That seems a false dichotomy to me. As if you have to choose between either radical accountability or absolute dictatorship. Understanding what brings people to do bad things can actually prevent them from happening to a certain degree, simply saying "drugs are bad, m'kay" only condemns the deed and the person. The problem with this way of looking at people is that it assumes we're fully rational beings. This is what neo-liberalism and Christianity share with each other, they assume full free will, the sin belongs to the sinner alone. I get angry just like any other person when someone breaks into my car or my home and I believe they should be punished. But if problems become structural, structural solutions are necessary.

fallingfrog 5y ago

I still favor the lead crime hypothesis for why violent crime was so high between the 70’s and the 90’s. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

djoldman 5y ago

Dead link in the article revived: "I pulled up a breakdown of total inmate population, by most serious offense. Only 16% were there on drug related charges." http://www.doc.sc.gov/research/InmatePopulationStats/ASOF-Most_Serious_Off_6-30-20.pdf http://www.doc.sc.gov/research/InmatePopulationStats/ASOF-Mo...

ryan93 5y ago

Way too much sympathy for criminals in this thread. Most people in prison could have trivially avoided being there by not committing crimes. Many of the people in prison imposed a massive cost on their community and its good they have been removed. Considering how many rapists and murders get away with it the prison population should be even higher.

Cromation 5y ago
I dont think anyone will sympathize with murderers or criminals, but that half of the criminals are in for non violent crimes such as drug offenses. Luckily the tides on marijuana are changing. Imagine though if half of our prison population wasnt there and instead were in some time of rehabilitation center to get past the drug use and back to be a productive part of society.
- baggy_trough 5y ago
  How many of those non violent convictions are the result of plea deals down from violent felonies?
  - Cromation 5y ago
    How many of those violent crime convictions are police officers stating "Stop resisting!" while putting someone in handcuffs and they trip and fall and get a bloody lip and throw assault at the perp? Sadly these are all "what ifs" and not looking at the actual data in front of us.
    - baggy_trough 5y ago
      I don't know, but I think both are reasonable questions.
    - dfilppi 5y ago
      We dont know. But not knowing isnt the same as knowing not.
- 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

The post has no mention of mandatory minimums, prosecution pressuring innocent people into plea deals without proper oversight by a judge, quality of publically provided lawyers, no mention of re-offence rate and no comparison with countries that focus on rehabilitation. I am sorry but this is vacuuous, it doesnt even scratch the surface of the issue

hyper_reality 5y ago

This is an interesting exploration of the incarceration statistics, but it doesn't go one step further and explain why American prison sentences are so long. I've seen numerous explanations for this, one being that there is a strong incentive for US politicians to look "tough on crime", a greater emphasis on retribution than rehabilitation, historic racial injustice, and a sizeable for-profit private prison industry. But other developed countries also have these factors to some extent, for example the UK's private prisons house 18% of prisoners compared to the USA's housing 8%. In my view, understanding the cause of why these long sentences are considered normal is essential to preventing a lot of pain and suffering. There are several examples of harmless people given life sentences for marijuana possession under three strikes laws, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. A society that is obsessed with freedom yet incarcerates more of its citizens than Cuba or Russia, and hands down disproportionately severe sentences for transgressions that would be viewed much less seriously in other countries, is a bizarre phenomenon with a huge human cost.

yboris 5y ago

A great book on the subject: Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law by Douglas Husak (an academic philosopher who is also a lawyer) https://www.amazon.com/Overcriminalization-Limits-Criminal-Douglas-Husak/dp/0195399013 https://www.amazon.com/Overcriminalization-Limits-Criminal-D...