7 ms·

> It is the perfect combination of crap. I think that's being way too charitable. In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of

by p-e-w 3y ago

> It is the perfect combination of crap. I think that's being way too charitable. In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incompetence and misunderstandings.

dang 3y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667150.
WA 3y ago
Source? Incarceration rate seems to be going down in western countries: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096042 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096042
- p-e-w 3y ago
  The scale of incarceration is still unprecedented. A reduction by 27 percent doesn't change that. Imprisonment was an extremely rare phenomenon for much of history (as was police, for that matter). Today's incarceration rates would have to be reduced by 99+% in order to reach pre-modern levels, where large cities often had only a handful of cells in total, and rural areas had none at all.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    > Imprisonment was an extremely rare phenomenon for much of history (as was police, for that matter). And crimes weren't solved, people not prosecuted, criminals not punished For much of history life didn't even exist, that's not an argument for or against anything
    - watwut 3y ago
      Murder clearance rates went DOWN last decades in USA. Less of major crime is solved. Plus majority of it never went through tria, because trial is just too much risk. So, there are not all that many actual checks and balances
      - lm28469 3y ago
        That's a multi faceted problem. Murder rates also were halves since the 80s in the US, it's not necessarily the same type of criminality In other countries the clearance rates are as high as ever. The US is an exception in many aspects in the West, closer to third world countries depending on what metric you look at > overall, findings showed that the clearance rate in Finland and Switzerland in the years of analysis was very high, in some years of the analysis even reaching 100 percent. Internationally, these rates are extraordinary high, even in comparison with other European countries such as Italy (67 percent and, later, 78 percent) , Estonia (80 percent), England & Wales (85 percent) and France (80 percent) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477370818764840 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708187648...
    - b112 3y ago
      Mob justice existed too. And execution for minor crime, with king's justice. Modern western police forces, with all their foibles, are far, far, far better than mob justice. Are people even aware of history, and how absolutely bloody it was, with an immense lack of personal rights? Fixing what's broken now is good. Trying to pretend it is worse than what was before, is absolutely absurd and laughable.
      - the_af 3y ago
        It's not so clear cut. At least admit that a lot of thought has been given to this, none the least by Foucalt's famous essay on this topic, Discipline and Punish. Foucalt has his critics, but it's not immediately obvious that the massive incarceration problem in some Western nations is better than public execution at the whim of monarchs. And some forms of torture, Foucalt argued, have changed from the theatrical and public to the more subdued torture of everyday lives of prison inmates.
  - verinus 3y ago
    well, you were beaten or killed for a lot of crimes- some only perceived. So, one may perceive incarceration as an improvement.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    To be fair, for much of history there weren't enough resources for everyone, much less for keeping people fed for free in a prison for decades. For serious crimes you just got executed as soon as possible.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      We also no longer have exile as a punishment.
- yawpitch 3y ago
  Their source could be your source, which you seem to be very seriously misreading. > As the global population grew 21 per cent, between 2000 and 2019, the number of prisoners worldwide jumped by more than 25 per cent, according to the UNODC data. So, worldwide trend is upward. > While Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have experienced a long-term decrease in imprisonment rates of up to 27 per cent, other regions and countries, such as Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, have seen up to 68 per cent growth over the last two decades, the study revealed. So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand? Overall your own source supports their point and contradicts your own.
  - seszett 3y ago
    > So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand? To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics. The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe). There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers. [0]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/DataMatters1_prison.pdf https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
    - yawpitch 3y ago
      If you exclude Western Europe and simply ignore Australia and New Zealand you’ve abandoned any reasonable conception of “the West” altogether. Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
- NotSuspicious 3y ago
  Unfortunate. It frankly needs to go up in Western countries to get to half-decent crime rates.
lm28469 3y ago
> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense That's a lot of work, a lot of malice, a lot of hate, from a lot of people, for a very meagre result. If that's how you view your government you must live a really painful existence
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > for a very meagre result Power is not a meagre result. For those people who live by it, it is the ultimate goal, and they will use any means to obtain and expand it, no matter the cost to others.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  It's just people "doing their jobs" and trying to get ahead. That's the banality of evil.
  - samtho 3y ago
    Lest we forget the very systems enabling this behavior of banal evil were created and maintained by perhaps the most evil of them all.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - smolder 3y ago
      The word "lest" is meant to come after something else. It means "for fear that" or "or else" or something similar. So it's not clear what you're trying to say. I don't know what "very systems" built by "the most evil" you mean either. Is it supposed to be obvious what you're referring to?
      - Clubber 3y ago
        It's from a poem in 1897. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)
akoboldfrying 3y ago
>designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom "The state" doesn't benefit in any way from locking people up. In fact, it costs them money (both directly and in lost taxes from the lost salaries and wages of those incarcerated). An argument could be made that prosecutors benefit from higher incarceration rates through the incentives you described. And an argument could definitely be made that private corporations paying well-below-market rates for prison labour benefit.
- tikhonj 3y ago
  Politicians benefit from locking people up because it gives them an easily measurable way to look "tough on crime".
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    Good point.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but the prison system has been the premiere, essential job-creation program for these United States ever since Appomattox 1865. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit... We got 800,000 or so right now. Fight unemployment? Lock more people up.
  - JTbane 3y ago
    Yep and there are some specific product that rely heavily on prison labor- license plates come to mind.
- Clubber 3y ago
  Also, keep in mind, it costs the taxpayers money, not the people running the criminal justice system. They're motivated by climbing the ladder and scorekeeping.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense. Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  >Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Not like it hasn't happened before. And you're overestimating the required massiveness of the conspiracy IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
- zackees 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
b112 3y ago
In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common. And of course, many people used to be worked to death. Or sold into slavery. Or die from horrid conditions in jail. Or forced into the foreign legion. While I agree that something may be wrong in the US, there are many regions in the world where the above still happens.
- the_af 3y ago
  > This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common. Hm, sounds like an assertion that ought to be checked by a historian, possibly ACoUP's blog? (Yes, the one who writes about Rome, he is sometimes featured in HN). He specializes in demolishing misconceptions people/Hollywood have about history. For example, many historians have been writing, recently, about how medieval society was far less brutish and cruel than portrayed in pop culture. There were laws, rights the monarch gave their subjects, culture, etc. Lots of what we "know" about the middle ages from Hollywood is simply wrong.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Lots of what we "know" about from Hollywood is simply wrong :)
- NordSteve 3y ago
  If you're interested in how criminal punishment changed from medieval times, Medieval Crime Museum is outstanding. https://www.germany.travel/en/cities-culture/medieval-crime-museum-rothenburg.html https://www.germany.travel/en/cities-culture/medieval-crime-...
circlefavshape 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
suckitsam 3y ago
"Sufficiently advanced ignorance/apathy is indistinguishable from malice"

by p-e-w 3y ago

dang 3y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667150.

WA 3y ago

Source? Incarceration rate seems to be going down in western countries: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096042 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096042

p-e-w 3y ago
The scale of incarceration is still unprecedented. A reduction by 27 percent doesn't change that. Imprisonment was an extremely rare phenomenon for much of history (as was police, for that matter). Today's incarceration rates would have to be reduced by 99+% in order to reach pre-modern levels, where large cities often had only a handful of cells in total, and rural areas had none at all.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > Imprisonment was an extremely rare phenomenon for much of history (as was police, for that matter). And crimes weren't solved, people not prosecuted, criminals not punished For much of history life didn't even exist, that's not an argument for or against anything
  - watwut 3y ago
    Murder clearance rates went DOWN last decades in USA. Less of major crime is solved. Plus majority of it never went through tria, because trial is just too much risk. So, there are not all that many actual checks and balances
    - lm28469 3y ago
      That's a multi faceted problem. Murder rates also were halves since the 80s in the US, it's not necessarily the same type of criminality In other countries the clearance rates are as high as ever. The US is an exception in many aspects in the West, closer to third world countries depending on what metric you look at > overall, findings showed that the clearance rate in Finland and Switzerland in the years of analysis was very high, in some years of the analysis even reaching 100 percent. Internationally, these rates are extraordinary high, even in comparison with other European countries such as Italy (67 percent and, later, 78 percent) , Estonia (80 percent), England & Wales (85 percent) and France (80 percent) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477370818764840 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708187648...
  - b112 3y ago
    Mob justice existed too. And execution for minor crime, with king's justice. Modern western police forces, with all their foibles, are far, far, far better than mob justice. Are people even aware of history, and how absolutely bloody it was, with an immense lack of personal rights? Fixing what's broken now is good. Trying to pretend it is worse than what was before, is absolutely absurd and laughable.
    - the_af 3y ago
      It's not so clear cut. At least admit that a lot of thought has been given to this, none the least by Foucalt's famous essay on this topic, Discipline and Punish. Foucalt has his critics, but it's not immediately obvious that the massive incarceration problem in some Western nations is better than public execution at the whim of monarchs. And some forms of torture, Foucalt argued, have changed from the theatrical and public to the more subdued torture of everyday lives of prison inmates.
- verinus 3y ago
  well, you were beaten or killed for a lot of crimes- some only perceived. So, one may perceive incarceration as an improvement.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  To be fair, for much of history there weren't enough resources for everyone, much less for keeping people fed for free in a prison for decades. For serious crimes you just got executed as soon as possible.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    We also no longer have exile as a punishment.
yawpitch 3y ago
Their source could be your source, which you seem to be very seriously misreading. > As the global population grew 21 per cent, between 2000 and 2019, the number of prisoners worldwide jumped by more than 25 per cent, according to the UNODC data. So, worldwide trend is upward. > While Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have experienced a long-term decrease in imprisonment rates of up to 27 per cent, other regions and countries, such as Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, have seen up to 68 per cent growth over the last two decades, the study revealed. So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand? Overall your own source supports their point and contradicts your own.
- seszett 3y ago
  > So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand? To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics. The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe). There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers. [0]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/DataMatters1_prison.pdf https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
  - yawpitch 3y ago
    If you exclude Western Europe and simply ignore Australia and New Zealand you’ve abandoned any reasonable conception of “the West” altogether. Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
NotSuspicious 3y ago
Unfortunate. It frankly needs to go up in Western countries to get to half-decent crime rates.

lm28469 3y ago

> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense That's a lot of work, a lot of malice, a lot of hate, from a lot of people, for a very meagre result. If that's how you view your government you must live a really painful existence

p-e-w 3y ago
> for a very meagre result Power is not a meagre result. For those people who live by it, it is the ultimate goal, and they will use any means to obtain and expand it, no matter the cost to others.
heavyset_go 3y ago
It's just people "doing their jobs" and trying to get ahead. That's the banality of evil.
- samtho 3y ago
  Lest we forget the very systems enabling this behavior of banal evil were created and maintained by perhaps the most evil of them all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - smolder 3y ago
    The word "lest" is meant to come after something else. It means "for fear that" or "or else" or something similar. So it's not clear what you're trying to say. I don't know what "very systems" built by "the most evil" you mean either. Is it supposed to be obvious what you're referring to?
    - Clubber 3y ago
      It's from a poem in 1897. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)

akoboldfrying 3y ago

>designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom "The state" doesn't benefit in any way from locking people up. In fact, it costs them money (both directly and in lost taxes from the lost salaries and wages of those incarcerated). An argument could be made that prosecutors benefit from higher incarceration rates through the incentives you described. And an argument could definitely be made that private corporations paying well-below-market rates for prison labour benefit.

tikhonj 3y ago
Politicians benefit from locking people up because it gives them an easily measurable way to look "tough on crime".
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  Good point.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I hate to break it to you, but the prison system has been the premiere, essential job-creation program for these United States ever since Appomattox 1865. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit... We got 800,000 or so right now. Fight unemployment? Lock more people up.
- JTbane 3y ago
  Yep and there are some specific product that rely heavily on prison labor- license plates come to mind.
Clubber 3y ago
Also, keep in mind, it costs the taxpayers money, not the people running the criminal justice system. They're motivated by climbing the ladder and scorekeeping.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense. Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.

bondarchuk 3y ago
>Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Not like it hasn't happened before. And you're overestimating the required massiveness of the conspiracy IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
zackees 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

b112 3y ago

In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common. And of course, many people used to be worked to death. Or sold into slavery. Or die from horrid conditions in jail. Or forced into the foreign legion. While I agree that something may be wrong in the US, there are many regions in the world where the above still happens.

the_af 3y ago
> This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common. Hm, sounds like an assertion that ought to be checked by a historian, possibly ACoUP's blog? (Yes, the one who writes about Rome, he is sometimes featured in HN). He specializes in demolishing misconceptions people/Hollywood have about history. For example, many historians have been writing, recently, about how medieval society was far less brutish and cruel than portrayed in pop culture. There were laws, rights the monarch gave their subjects, culture, etc. Lots of what we "know" about the middle ages from Hollywood is simply wrong.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  Lots of what we "know" about from Hollywood is simply wrong :)
NordSteve 3y ago
If you're interested in how criminal punishment changed from medieval times, Medieval Crime Museum is outstanding. https://www.germany.travel/en/cities-culture/medieval-crime-museum-rothenburg.html https://www.germany.travel/en/cities-culture/medieval-crime-...

circlefavshape 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

suckitsam 3y ago

"Sufficiently advanced ignorance/apathy is indistinguishable from malice"