7 ms·

> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family

by janice1999 2y ago

> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.

nickfromseattle 2y ago
As a nerdy, middle class, white guy, I and many of my male friends have been arrested between ages 18 - 25. Usually for drinking underage, public intoxication, or small amounts of marijuana.
tylerflick 2y ago
Meh, we’re a rebellious group. Honestly though I would be more interested in what percentage of this ratio are repeat offenders.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  > Meh, we’re a rebellious group. Definitely not the explanation.
erehweb 2y ago
Really high, and crazy, but apparently legit -see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Brame%2C%20Turner%2C%20Paternoster%2C%20and,nontraffic%20offense%20by%20age%2023 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Br....
- tppiotrowski 2y ago
  The fact that it's self reported makes me wonder how close to the actual number it is. Also, how did they choose their sample. Edit: Link to original paper https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appendix_A_-_2012c-libre.pdf?1393238502=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_Cumulative_Prevalence_of_Arrest_from.pdf&Expires=1736012643&Signature=hGyXSQ-Wog1w6Pwok~cKdqgTPZCM-1JX2tyKnhf14lLkqmlfKnqhp71y-8kBYVTo4QpyEat5wEctau7jD2K8z6fOAYI5aahQ9efDkyjf9JN2Fj60SX2dkGPcCNgnIsA5ECwYIABI-N6WoVtPdLVaZNs8eoNtObCx9OECQ9TAQY6SMMlEjBI~4cZhTcbXaJWLZP0Gb87l9nD0rV26Pw1LkqW5lvofXyE8ClpA~G2NN-0DFUvNfKh4trN1R7gpiIeAMUHgE7dOYtHUZhghg83060Ml9bYkXqnSe1pcX~wn1g68i65xzzMqIp0urOF0QCOL9Qr3ZsEVuQpdWkLgNtvBkg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appe...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - verteu 2y ago
    It's the NLSY, about as good a sample as one could hope for.
blakesterz 2y ago
Looking at the PDF they link to, it doesn't say "has been arrested" it says "has criminal record". Maybe those 2 things are the same, but I'm not so sure.
- sgjohnson 2y ago
  Criminal records would include all misdemeanors. You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
  - bookofjoe 2y ago
    25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent misdemeanor charge on my record.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Same thing in Maryland. Speeding is a criminal charge here.
    - 1over137 2y ago
      Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn’t seem to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be if such records were public, available to potential employers, etc. If the records were private to the courts, that’d be something else. Not sure how it is in USA.
      - profile53 2y ago
        In the USA it is public record which in practice means anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have been convicted once, most employers will see the record and refuse to hire you forever.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
That seems exceptionally high, and I'm assuming the study was mostly (all?) urban subjects, which could skew the results heavily. I can't think of more than 2 people I know that have an arrest history, and I know a LOT of (non-urban dwelling) people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- verteu 2y ago
  No, the sample was the NLSY: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/
thrance 2y ago
It's kind of my experience too, we all live in our (socioeconomic) bubbles. You are much more likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by poor parents. Or rather, you are much less likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by (comparatively) rich parents.
ternnoburn 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
You can figure this for anything, and prepare to be shocked. The variables are the number of incidents per period, the population during that period, and the expected duration an incident could occur. For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; and the life expectancy is high at 83. This gives you 41 years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been involved in your first car injury. It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns, diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has diabetes, etc. Some will be looking for math flaws. It’s an exponential model for time until first event, “constant hazard.” It’s actuarial. Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn’t calculate the durations until events insurance couldn’t work. The biggest factors are numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things… The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it’s crazy, isn’t because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto insurance would be way cheaper. This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter. You cannot be much of a “better” driver. You can’t be a “safer” criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries, it takes 41 years. I didn’t give the figure for causing injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we’re primed to assume it’s all about agency. Consider if there were only ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they’re still going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits everybody: you’re still going to be involved. The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to question their beliefs about agency.
- luckylion 2y ago
  > For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; 800k permanent residents. > In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26 million visitors travelled to San Francisco. That changes your statistics quite a bit.
  - brookst 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rqtwteye 2y ago
When I went to a boxing gym in Maryland there were a lot of young black guys. For them going to prison was totally normal thing. Often they themselves had been to prison or their relatives. Some had scars from gunshots. I can’t even imagine how it is to grow up in that environment.
- ocschwar 2y ago
  I had a surreal experience riding a Greyhound bus where I was the only passenger who hadn't just gotten out of prison. They were comparing conditions in various prisons the way you and I might compare coffee shops.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Having been locked up, I was regularly the only white guy in a whole building. It's completely normalized for Black youth to go to jail. I hesitate to say it, but it's practically considered a rite of passage. It's really sad. Some of these kids are absolutely smart as fuck and could do anything with their lives if their environment hadn't failed them. When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.
gjm11 2y ago
It'll vary a lot by demographic. It's not that 1/3 of every group of US adults has ever been arrested, it's that there are some groups where hardly ever have and some groups where a huge fraction have, and it averages out to 1/3. In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much. Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.) (I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.) I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police. [1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americans-with-Criminal-Records-Poverty-and-Opportunity-Profile.pdf https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)
- gruez 2y ago
  >[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated, but that's not the same as having a criminal record.
  - gjm11 2y ago
    Yeah, that's one reason why the arithmetic is crude. The PDF says the following things: About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23. About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record. Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US. These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations. It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record. Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.
ternnoburn 2y ago
20% of the world's prisoners are housed in America. Interactions with police and arrests are very common here.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  4.25% of the world's population live in the US.
  - rafram 2y ago
    Right, so the US incarceration rate is almost five times the global average.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Yes but the US is a safer place to live and conduct business than most of the world. And it has a population that’s far more diverse than any other country. Looking at this metric requires context. And it could be that these are great numbers for what you get in return.
      - ternnoburn 2y ago
        The US is not particularly safe. Various indices put it well below other countries -- in the top half, for sure, but it's hardly a safe place. You'll have to supply evidence that the US is safe, as that's not self evident.
kevingadd 2y ago
Policing and imprisonment are very aggressive here. Arrests very often don't turn into convictions because the police are rewarded for wielding force any way they choose regardless of whether it's justified - their right to do this is legally protected via qualified immunity.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  You may already know of Peelian Policing, but if not: Several countries practice a very different model, described as as ‘policing by consent’. Police try to work with and not against citizens, recognising that they are citizens too. Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn’t. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
dragonwriter 2y ago
The US is, by comparison to the rest of the developed world (and much of the rest of the world, besides) a very high police interaction regime, owing in no small part to the institutional and cultural aftereffects of the history of slavery and the use of the criminal justice system as a direct substitute for private chattel slavery when it was abolished.
yuliyp 2y ago
I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record." Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Speeding tickets are not criminal.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    In the 1960s, the Air Force decided that they had too many candidates for pilots, and to winnow it down all candidates with a speeding ticket were disqualified. I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      Yeah, but you don't want them getting caught.
    - anticensor 2y ago
      So they looked at traffic infractions record, too; interesting.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  > Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high. Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction. You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.
  - yuliyp 2y ago
    The U.S. prison population is around 2M people. I'm not sure how that translates to 77M people with criminal records. (I'm serious about wanting to know more about these statistics and how they're generated. My brief searches trying to find where the data claimed in the linked infographics comes from got me nowhere. EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.
rychco 2y ago
The prison-industrial complex in the United States encourages this. While less than 10% of prisoners are in “for-profit” prisons, there’s a large industry of private companies beyond this that profit off federal prisons; in addition to providing cheap prison labor or goods made by prison laborers (AKA modern slavery)
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Many of those private prisons also have clauses with their contracts that the city/county/whatever is required to pay per bed, regardless of occupancy. "If we're paying for it, might as well use it".
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It’s an obviously incorrect figure. It must include things like traffic tickets. The guardian is a highly activist and biased publication by their own admission, and not truly “journalistic”.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  It’s trivial to search and check. The numbers appear to be accurate. However that is misleading, the below link talks about problems with the definition of a ‘criminal record.’ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuomo/yes-one-three-us-adults-have-criminal-record/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
Mistletoe 2y ago
Yes it seems crazy but this map is crazy too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
ocschwar 2y ago
The US isn't one country. When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not Ireland to the US. The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country altogether.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Well arrested doesn't mean thrown in jail. Sometimes you are arrested then just given a citation. Open intoxicant, noise violation, underage drinking, speeding, bonfire in a field, peeing behind the bar, etc. I can see it.

nickfromseattle 2y ago

As a nerdy, middle class, white guy, I and many of my male friends have been arrested between ages 18 - 25. Usually for drinking underage, public intoxication, or small amounts of marijuana.

tylerflick 2y ago

Meh, we’re a rebellious group. Honestly though I would be more interested in what percentage of this ratio are repeat offenders.

threatofrain 2y ago
> Meh, we’re a rebellious group. Definitely not the explanation.

erehweb 2y ago

Really high, and crazy, but apparently legit -see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Brame%2C%20Turner%2C%20Paternoster%2C%20and,nontraffic%20offense%20by%20age%2023 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Br....

tppiotrowski 2y ago
The fact that it's self reported makes me wonder how close to the actual number it is. Also, how did they choose their sample. Edit: Link to original paper https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appendix_A_-_2012c-libre.pdf?1393238502=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_Cumulative_Prevalence_of_Arrest_from.pdf&Expires=1736012643&Signature=hGyXSQ-Wog1w6Pwok~cKdqgTPZCM-1JX2tyKnhf14lLkqmlfKnqhp71y-8kBYVTo4QpyEat5wEctau7jD2K8z6fOAYI5aahQ9efDkyjf9JN2Fj60SX2dkGPcCNgnIsA5ECwYIABI-N6WoVtPdLVaZNs8eoNtObCx9OECQ9TAQY6SMMlEjBI~4cZhTcbXaJWLZP0Gb87l9nD0rV26Pw1LkqW5lvofXyE8ClpA~G2NN-0DFUvNfKh4trN1R7gpiIeAMUHgE7dOYtHUZhghg83060Ml9bYkXqnSe1pcX~wn1g68i65xzzMqIp0urOF0QCOL9Qr3ZsEVuQpdWkLgNtvBkg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appe...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- verteu 2y ago
  It's the NLSY, about as good a sample as one could hope for.

blakesterz 2y ago

Looking at the PDF they link to, it doesn't say "has been arrested" it says "has criminal record". Maybe those 2 things are the same, but I'm not so sure.

sgjohnson 2y ago
Criminal records would include all misdemeanors. You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
- bookofjoe 2y ago
  25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent misdemeanor charge on my record.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Same thing in Maryland. Speeding is a criminal charge here.
  - 1over137 2y ago
    Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn’t seem to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be if such records were public, available to potential employers, etc. If the records were private to the courts, that’d be something else. Not sure how it is in USA.
    - profile53 2y ago
      In the USA it is public record which in practice means anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have been convicted once, most employers will see the record and refuse to hire you forever.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago

That seems exceptionally high, and I'm assuming the study was mostly (all?) urban subjects, which could skew the results heavily. I can't think of more than 2 people I know that have an arrest history, and I know a LOT of (non-urban dwelling) people.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
verteu 2y ago
No, the sample was the NLSY: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/

thrance 2y ago

It's kind of my experience too, we all live in our (socioeconomic) bubbles. You are much more likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by poor parents. Or rather, you are much less likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by (comparatively) rich parents.

ternnoburn 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss 2y ago

You can figure this for anything, and prepare to be shocked. The variables are the number of incidents per period, the population during that period, and the expected duration an incident could occur. For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; and the life expectancy is high at 83. This gives you 41 years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been involved in your first car injury. It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns, diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has diabetes, etc. Some will be looking for math flaws. It’s an exponential model for time until first event, “constant hazard.” It’s actuarial. Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn’t calculate the durations until events insurance couldn’t work. The biggest factors are numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things… The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it’s crazy, isn’t because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto insurance would be way cheaper. This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter. You cannot be much of a “better” driver. You can’t be a “safer” criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries, it takes 41 years. I didn’t give the figure for causing injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we’re primed to assume it’s all about agency. Consider if there were only ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they’re still going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits everybody: you’re still going to be involved. The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to question their beliefs about agency.

luckylion 2y ago
> For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; 800k permanent residents. > In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26 million visitors travelled to San Francisco. That changes your statistics quite a bit.
- brookst 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rqtwteye 2y ago

When I went to a boxing gym in Maryland there were a lot of young black guys. For them going to prison was totally normal thing. Often they themselves had been to prison or their relatives. Some had scars from gunshots. I can’t even imagine how it is to grow up in that environment.

ocschwar 2y ago
I had a surreal experience riding a Greyhound bus where I was the only passenger who hadn't just gotten out of prison. They were comparing conditions in various prisons the way you and I might compare coffee shops.
qingcharles 2y ago
Having been locked up, I was regularly the only white guy in a whole building. It's completely normalized for Black youth to go to jail. I hesitate to say it, but it's practically considered a rite of passage. It's really sad. Some of these kids are absolutely smart as fuck and could do anything with their lives if their environment hadn't failed them. When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.

gjm11 2y ago

It'll vary a lot by demographic. It's not that 1/3 of every group of US adults has ever been arrested, it's that there are some groups where hardly ever have and some groups where a huge fraction have, and it averages out to 1/3. In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much. Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.) (I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.) I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police. [1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americans-with-Criminal-Records-Poverty-and-Opportunity-Profile.pdf https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)

gruez 2y ago
>[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated, but that's not the same as having a criminal record.
- gjm11 2y ago
  Yeah, that's one reason why the arithmetic is crude. The PDF says the following things: About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23. About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record. Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US. These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations. It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record. Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.

ternnoburn 2y ago

20% of the world's prisoners are housed in America. Interactions with police and arrests are very common here.

guerrilla 2y ago
4.25% of the world's population live in the US.
- rafram 2y ago
  Right, so the US incarceration rate is almost five times the global average.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Yes but the US is a safer place to live and conduct business than most of the world. And it has a population that’s far more diverse than any other country. Looking at this metric requires context. And it could be that these are great numbers for what you get in return.
    - ternnoburn 2y ago
      The US is not particularly safe. Various indices put it well below other countries -- in the top half, for sure, but it's hardly a safe place. You'll have to supply evidence that the US is safe, as that's not self evident.

kevingadd 2y ago

Policing and imprisonment are very aggressive here. Arrests very often don't turn into convictions because the police are rewarded for wielding force any way they choose regardless of whether it's justified - their right to do this is legally protected via qualified immunity.

lostlogin 2y ago
You may already know of Peelian Policing, but if not: Several countries practice a very different model, described as as ‘policing by consent’. Police try to work with and not against citizens, recognising that they are citizens too. Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn’t. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

dragonwriter 2y ago

The US is, by comparison to the rest of the developed world (and much of the rest of the world, besides) a very high police interaction regime, owing in no small part to the institutional and cultural aftereffects of the history of slavery and the use of the criminal justice system as a direct substitute for private chattel slavery when it was abolished.

yuliyp 2y ago

I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record." Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.

datavirtue 2y ago
Speeding tickets are not criminal.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  In the 1960s, the Air Force decided that they had too many candidates for pilots, and to winnow it down all candidates with a speeding ticket were disqualified. I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Yeah, but you don't want them getting caught.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    So they looked at traffic infractions record, too; interesting.
UncleEntity 2y ago
> Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high. Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction. You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.
- yuliyp 2y ago
  The U.S. prison population is around 2M people. I'm not sure how that translates to 77M people with criminal records. (I'm serious about wanting to know more about these statistics and how they're generated. My brief searches trying to find where the data claimed in the linked infographics comes from got me nowhere. EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.

rychco 2y ago

The prison-industrial complex in the United States encourages this. While less than 10% of prisoners are in “for-profit” prisons, there’s a large industry of private companies beyond this that profit off federal prisons; in addition to providing cheap prison labor or goods made by prison laborers (AKA modern slavery)

FireBeyond 2y ago
Many of those private prisons also have clauses with their contracts that the city/county/whatever is required to pay per bed, regardless of occupancy. "If we're paying for it, might as well use it".

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

It’s an obviously incorrect figure. It must include things like traffic tickets. The guardian is a highly activist and biased publication by their own admission, and not truly “journalistic”.

lostlogin 2y ago
It’s trivial to search and check. The numbers appear to be accurate. However that is misleading, the below link talks about problems with the definition of a ‘criminal record.’ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuomo/yes-one-three-us-adults-have-criminal-record/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...

Mistletoe 2y ago

Yes it seems crazy but this map is crazy too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

ocschwar 2y ago

The US isn't one country. When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not Ireland to the US. The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country altogether.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Well arrested doesn't mean thrown in jail. Sometimes you are arrested then just given a citation. Open intoxicant, noise violation, underage drinking, speeding, bonfire in a field, peeing behind the bar, etc. I can see it.