Small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco

nytimes.com

61 pointsGabrielF0063 comments

It's interesting how the exact same facts can be described in so many different ways, in order to imply vastly different conclusions.

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"This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco"

Implication - the county's law & order apparatus is dysfunctional and is oppressing the local population

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"This small Indiana county has more convicted drug dealers than San Francisco"

Implication - the county has a severe drug problem, and harsh efforts are needed to combat this problem

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"This small Indiana county catches more hard-drug-dealers than San Francisco"

Implication - either other counties are incompetent/indifferent in combating the selling of hardcore drugs, or this county is exceptionally good at achieving this goal.

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"This small Indiana county leads in the nation in narrowing the racial-incarceration-gap"

Implication - the county's law & order system is tough but fair, and should be a role model for others in pursuing White criminals just as vigorously as Minority criminals.

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The phrasing involved in "sending more people to prison" in particular, sweeps under the rug the fact that the people being sent to prison are dealing hard drugs, and spawning/enabling a generation of drug addicts whose lives are going to fall apart as a result. Instead of making the drug dealers the lead actors who initiated the subsequent chain of events, the headline is structured such that the county's justice system is portrayed as the lead actor instead. Neither wording is wrong, but they clearly bias the audience in different directions.

I trust the NYTimes more than any other American media source, but it's hard to deny that they too have their own spin that focuses more on one side of the story, more so than others.

I think it is an appropriate headline. As far as drug crimes are concerned I think it is reasonable to accept the fact that the laws, reality and convictions are all in complete disarray.

"This small Indiana county leads in the nation in narrowing the racial-incarceration-gap"

I will be surprised if the gap narrows it probably means the state is putting random people in jail. Black people are far more prone to drug crimes than whites.

I will be surprised if the gap narrows it probably means the state is putting random people in jail. Black people are far more prone to drug crimes than whites.

That's a very strong claim. The following article says the opposite: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/30/white...

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim, or are you speaking from (biased) assumptions?

Lol what do you think they're speaking from?

Isnt it a widely known fact that more black people end up in jail than white people for drug related crimes? What other evidence do you need ?

Yeah, but they're more likely to be incarcerated for a crime than a white person who commits the same crime - even if both are caught.

Clearly there is a bias, but I don't think it's wrong in this case.

I hate hard drugs because of the damage they cause, but it seems pretty clear to me (as an outside observer) that the United States' strategy of mass incarceration has been spectacularly unsuccessful in combatting the problem...

The US experiment with alcohol prohibition is an ominous precedent to the war on drugs. Prohibition caused organized crime in the US to flourish. When Prohibition was repealed, the machinery was in place, so it refocused on drugs, gambling, and extortion. So the war on drugs is a second wave effect, and we are responding in exactly the same way.

Fair points, but did you read the article? There's more to it than that.

> Donnie Gaddis picked the wrong county to sell 15 oxycodone pills to an undercover officer ... After agreeing to a plea deal, he was sentenced to serve 12 years in prison.

> From 2006 to 2014, annual prison admissions dropped 36 percent in Indianapolis; 37 percent in Brooklyn; 69 percent in Los Angeles County; and 93 percent in San Francisco.

> Prison admissions in counties with fewer than 100,000 people have risen even as crime has fallen

> Just a decade ago, people in rural, suburban and urban areas were all about equally likely to go to prison. But now people in small counties are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than people in populous counties.

> “I am proud of the fact that we send more people to jail than other counties,” Aaron Negangard, the elected prosecutor in Dearborn County, said last year. “That’s how we keep it safe here.”

I think the implication of "Small towns are sending way more people to prison for petty drug crimes (like selling 15 pills to an undercover cop) than big cities" is supported by the article.

I read the entire article yesterday, long before it was posted here. Not sure why you think I haven't read it, or how your quoted snippets contradict what I said in any way.

My previous comment doesn't take a stand in any direction, or make any normative statements. Simply pointing out that there are multiple valid ways of headlining the exact same facts, each of which would bias the audience in very different ways.

Does the article support them catching or convicting more drug dealers? I didn't read it in detail, but it seemed like the point was that the sentencing was different more so than catching or convicting people.

I thought you made a very well-reasoned critique. Always more than one way to interpret the data.

> Not sure why you think I haven't read it, or how your quoted snippets contradict what I said in any way.

You seemed to be saying the article was generic and the slant could be changed by changing superficial aspects of the argument. I'm saying that this is sometimes true but does not apply here. In fact, I thought your comment was so out of place that I wondered if you'd read the article. Apparently you have. Regardless, I didn't want your comment to dissuade people from reading the article and making up their own mind; it's well written and well researched.

The article makes the case that the county has a large drug-abuse problem, and also that the justice system is responding to this problem with very severe policing/sentencing policies, in a way that severely punishes not just Minority offenders, but also White offenders. In this regard, any one of the 4 spins can be reasonably made, given the facts presented in the article.

You seem to think that just because I pointed out the spin in the headline, I'm attacking the article in some way - that's a vast misunderstanding of what I said. Let me clarify this further: there is no concise headline that can possibly describe the article in a spin-free manner. No matter what concise headline anyone comes up with, it will be biased in one direction or another.

I certainly hope people read the article regardless, but I also hope that people will read the article while being mindful of how the wording used will bias them towards certain directions.

> I read the entire article yesterday, long before it was posted here. Not sure why you think I haven't read it, or how your quoted snippets contradict what I said in any way.

I read the article myself, long before it was posted here. But I think you need to read it again, because you're misrepresenting the facts.

Whereas major cities like San Francisco and New York City are taking a different tact to dealing with a drug problem (shorter sentences and treatment instead of jail time), that small Indiana town is doing the opposite thing - longer jail sentences that don't match the crime committed.

That's the gist of the article, but that's not what you seem to have taken from it.

I think you need to read my comment again because you're misrepresenting what it says.

It may be supported but it's certainly not supported enough to be a conclusion. The emotional resonance is powerful but it is not all that is needed to make a case.

Sure, in the philosophical sense. But you're saying what? That people shouldn't talk about it or the article shouldn't have been written?

After reading your first quote, the punishment for this particular crime might appear to be too harsh. But, if you look into it, you will find out that: "Donnie Gaddis has previously been charged with trafficking in controlled substances and heroin, theft, breaking and entering, theft from an elderly person or disabled adult, domestic violence, shoplifting, and unauthorized use of property."

http://eaglecountryonline.com/local-article/couple-charged-d...

Perhaps repeatedly sending this person to jail just makes them a hardened criminal as described in the article.

> I trust the NYTimes more than any other American media source

this is no longer true for me. they no longer even pretend to be unbiased. i have noticed a marked shift to the left in just the last 2-3 years. i'm considering cancelling my digital sub.

i trust the pbs newshour the most, followed by public radio and certain satellite channels (potus, etc.). honestly i find both left-wing and right-wing media to be 'trustworthy' i.e. at least more likely to be honest about their own agenda than someone like the nyt who fancies itself objective in their reporting if not their op/ed.

when i go to huffpo or breitbart, i at least know exactly what the game is. and of course there are still the 'adult' publications with certain identifiable leanings like reason, the review, the nation, mother jones, etc that are still excellent.

The NewsHour absolutely seems the most trustworthy news organization to me, too, and I wish they had the same editors managing a full length daily newspaper.

The Washington Post seems to be improving, and the LA Times wins a lot of awards, though I never find it interesting when I visit the site. With the NY Times, people who like it often say it is great with the exception of any reporting which covers their own field of expertise—which is an awful lot like finding out that the NYT is bad at doing its homework before reporting on most subjects, or doesn't know how to hire domain-specific experts and editors.

I understand your point about organizations being clear about their editorial bias, but the two you mentioned take a lot of mental energy.

I suppose all sources of journalism change over time (except maybe The New Yorker). The Atlantic goes through altering waves of insight and coherence, then periods where they have lead articles claiming that torturers are just misunderstood. Or, The Economist over the past few years which seems to me like it is written by well-meaning, enthusiastic, but extremely young students, being replaced by Bloomberg and Bloomberg Business wee when it comes to snippet-length but serious reporting.

The lead actor here is the misdirected war on drugs. You sound like you're all for prohibition though, so I guess that did not occur to you.

> spawning/enabling a generation of drug addicts whose lives are going to fall apart as a result.

Bullshit. Even out of hard drugs like heroin, only 25% or less of users become dependent. Cocaine is much much lower. Heroin is the highest one.

Meanwhile, 32% of tobacco users become dependent and that is perfectly legal.

It's also distorted because an important detail is omitted from the headlines:

Dearborn County, Ind., which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other county in the United States

Per capita. Not absolute numbers.

The rural midwest is being ravaged by meth and opioid addiction and has no real prior experience with it. People find it shocking and support harsh treatment of the dealers bringing these problems to their communities. With a small population to begin with, the per-capita impact is higher.

Places like San Francisco have extensive experience with drug abuse since the sixties at least, the community is accustomed to it, and dealing small quantities is not seen as the biggest part of the problem so it's mostly dismissed, and where it is serious enough to send someone to prison, the impact on per-capita averages is much smaller.

There's another paragraph in the article which confirms that Dearborn does send more people to prison than San Francisco, not just per-capita, but even in absolute numbers. The headline seems to be accurate in that regard.

Make the counties pay for the cost of sending their offenders to (state) prison and you'd see this "overconsumption" of an expensive resource self correct.

People should also know that people go to jail for years for 1 failed drug test in rural communities. Happens everyday, just not on our radar.

You mean the ones on probation? In which case they don't go to jail for the failed drug test, but for the crime they had committed, then were given a chance to be released early, and failed at that chance.

Did they fail that chance, or false positive that chance?

Perhaps all prosecutors and public defender would be chosen randomly from a pool, instead of making prosecutors a political office?

that's not really the problem, though, is it? It would probably be better that have prosecutors spend time in different jurisdictions to learn different ways of applying the law.

It is like saying fill water in gas tank if you are worried about gas pollution.

If prosecutors are chosen randomly they will little incentive to go after anyone. I think we must drastically reduce the tools these people have at their disposal.

I think prosecutors are elected in the US only as far as I know (even in other common law countries, they are not elected).

In most countries, they are appointed.

The whole f*ing USA sends more people to jail than any other normal country in the world.

…than any other country, by both absolute numbers and per capita (with the exception of the Seychelles)

I was not sure about North Korea and China.

It sounds like the article is suggesting defenses under the equal protections clause in the Constitution.

Does anyone know of cases where it's been applied in this way? It seems like this would be a new way of showing bias, and possibly reducing harsh prison sentences.

I find it worse that San Francisco would possibly give 0 years to someone dealing heroin.

Do you believe prison should be used punitively or for rehabilitation?

Prisons currently fail very badly at rehabilitation, and actually tend to make worse criminals. We should be spending less money on punitive unfair sentences and more on trying to make people productive members of society through good rehab and education programs. This would actually make society better. Fixing the root of the problem rather than ignoring it by just locking people away.

We should reserve prison for only those people from which we need to protect the general population, e.g. violent crimes. Though I do have a special place in my heart for locking away fraudsters and con artists.

Are prisons here to punish people or to solve problems in society?

Sometime people's sense of fairness is pitted against the idea of rehabilitation.

Fixing the root of problems mean dealing with the dredge of society, the people who deserved it the least.

Imaging rehabilitating a tinpot dictator who killed million so that he can feel remorse for what he did and find a productive living.

A sentence of something like 20 years + evaluation of suitability for release does a fine job of dealing with the extreme cases you mention without discarding the idea of rehabilitation in less obvious cases.

And yes, I think you go ahead and let the terrible dictator read books or whatever. That's much easier to accept than society occasionally getting together and executing an innocent.

Rehabilitation? The parent post was about dealing - not using.

Someone who makes money off of the victims of drug dependence is horrible scum, and if you're willing to lock up con artists you should be able to work up the give-a-crap to lock up a heroin dealer.

The vast majority of people arrested for dealing are the equivalent of grocery store clerks. (Really, their job has less prestige than grocery store clerks.)

People are making a lot of money off of this, but not, for the most part, anyone who is at risk of getting arrested and charged with decades in prison.

Furthermore, arresting them has about as much effect on the drug trade as locking up all the clerks in a grocery store. The demand is still there, the distribution networks are still there, all they're missing is people willing to work for minimum wage or less. (And obviously there's no shortage there either.)

You're thinking of rehabilitation in the "recovery from addiction" sense.

The poster you're replying to is using rehabilitation in the "correct this person's future behavior" sense.

> lock up a heroin dealer

The problem is that nearly 3/4 of all prisoners end up back in prison within 5 years [0]. Locking people up isn't changing their behavior. Locking up a heroin dealer isn't keeping them from dealing heroin once they get out.

So, either we need to lock people up indefinitely (which costs $$$ even if you're not swayed by the humanitarian arguments), or we need to figure out something more effective than trying to hammer our square peg (prison) through this round hole (reducing criminal behavior).

0: http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welco...

Precisely.

And since the other post mentioned my comment on fraudsters and con artists, dealers are not lying to people, they're just providing the consumer with what they want.

The ones who should be locked up are the fraudsters, because they mix things like Fentanyl, which may directly lead to someone's death (not to say people don't OD without that, but it is less often).

Honestly, I dislike anyone who takes advantage of other people's ignorance or incompetence. They are the bottom of the barrel of society in my opinion.

Lots of people make money off of the victims of drug dependence, including the entire pharmaceutical industry, Jack Daniels, Starbucks, psychiatrists, social workers, foster parents, and the entire law enforcement industry.

Are all these people horrible scum?

How is this different from beer and liquor companies making money off of dependency? Or taboacco companies? Or pain medicine companies? Or even companies engineering "bliss points" into their food?

Clarence Darrow, in his autobiography, discusses his defense for Loeb and Leopold. L&L were wealthy Chicago teenagers who read Nietzsche and decided they were Ubermensch. They murdered a random boy to prove they could get away with it. Darrow argued that L&L would not consider murder again, and that their crime was something that would happen only once in 1,000 years.

I found this repugnant. Who more deserves prison than those two? But with reflection my views have softened. At least one of the two seems to have wanted to be good. He lived out his life in prison quietly, spending his time writing an ornithology book. I can no longer honestly say I believe that society as a whole was better served by jailing them. Perhaps they should have been given the chance to redeem themselves by becoming productive citizens, and the chance to earn back a measure of dignity. (Certainly repeat offenders should be deemed a menace and incarcerated for the public good.)

I feel the same confusion about Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who raped a woman behind a dumpster. There was a lot of outrage at his early release, but again I'm not sure the greater good is served by keeping him behind bars. I hope he will live in infamy for the rest of his days, as is just. But should he have stayed behind bars for longer, at the public expense? I can't give a really cogent reason why he should (I am not comparing his sentence to that of other rapists, or to that of other convicts by the way).

Locking more and more people up hasn't done much to solve America's drug issues. But if you feel it's a moral necessity, it's hard to discuss alternatives.

But mrits was talking about heroin dealers.

I think the war on drugs is fundamentally flawed, and I don't think drug users should be convicted or sent to prison but I do think that dealing illegal drugs should definitely count orders of magnitude more heavily since the very activity of dealing enables the destruction of a large number of other people.

and dealers should primarily punished for tax avoidance, operating a unlicensed pharmacy, breaking DEA license terms.

which would put them in prison for way longer. and for the right crime.

...which surely depends on the circumenstances. It could just as well be 3 years or more (for instance if you're part of a gang) and I think this is reasonably since you want that person to change (i.e. stop dealing) and not destroy his/her entire life, right?

So the new face of mass incarceration is white rural conservatives, the same demographic that is largely responsible for the "tough on crime" push that led to disproportionate incarceration of poor people of color. Now that their fortunes are shifting, I wonder if the rural white conservatives will still be so gung-ho for harsh criminal penalties.

FWIW, it was Democrats who pushed for severe mandatory sentences to create a hot button electoral issue:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/t...

> Eric Sterling: The Speaker convened the Democratic leadership, the Steering and Policy Committee, the chairs of the committees, and says we're going to put together an anti-drug bill. It is going to be a Democratic initiative and I want everybody involved. We're going to have a comprehensive anti-drug provision. And I want it out of committees before we go on our August recess, August 14 or 15. And this set off about a four week stampede. They were told, look, you've got one month to put together your anti-drug agenda and then you're going to go home in the middle of August and you're going to campaign the hell out of that agenda. And we're going to come back in September, we're going to take it to the floor, and we're going to vote on it. And this is what we're going to ride to electoral victory in November. That's the plan.

"Tough on crime" has always been incredibly popular. But Nixon was the "law and order" candidate. Reagan was the "tough on crime" guy. Center-right Bill Clinton continued and expanded Reagan's policies. So yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around. But I think you're being disingenuous if you think liberals support mass incarceration policies to the same extent that conservatives do. I don't think urban liberals are the ones clamoring for harsher law enforcement.

> I don't think urban liberals are the ones clamoring for harsher law enforcement.

In the 90s it was urban blacks clamouring for harsher law enforcement, since it was their neighbourhoods which were suffering the effects of drug-related violence and other crimes.

Blacks aren't really liberal or leftist on the whole, but they consistently support the left-wing party.

blacks are actually surprisingly conservative in a lot of ways. I remember seeing that some protester at a black rights matter rally was also protesting for lgbt rights and was turned against by the reallt anti gay black crowd

> blacks are actually surprisingly conservative in a lot of ways.

> I remember [this one anecdote]

I think it's more accurate to say that blacks are surprisingly diverse, as they are too often perceived as a hivemind/bloc. This could be said about any group of course, but as an Asian, I would agree that blacks* have it worse in this regard.

* even referring to them all as "blacks" blurs the significant difference between African-Americans who trace their heritage to American slavery, and contemporary immigrant/refugee communities from Somalia, etc.

Substitute whites or men for blacks here, and you'll see the problem in assuming blacks are a monolithic voting block. We saw the same lazy thinking in the (false) claim that blacks made Prop 8 fail in CA.

I disagree that I'm being disingenuous but I could be a moron. Are you disputing the claim that congressional Democrats initiated the tough-on-crime laws that are responsible to this day for harsh mandatory minimums for low-level drug crimes? The piece I linked to is from 1999 and it refers to bills initiated by Democrats in the 80s which are still largely in effect today, and for which we can plausibly argue a correlation with a 700% increase in the prison population and Bureau of Prisons's budget [0].

I agree Democrats are pushing for reform today (and some sentencing reform was passed when they controlled Congress in 2010). Republicans [1] and conservative think-tanks [2] today are also actively fighting for sentencing reform. Tt's one of the few issues that are bi-partisan today. You can make a judgment based on how you've ascertained the composition of political cockwalking, but in the end, it's the actual laws that get passed that put people in prison.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/04/08/addressing-...

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s2123

[2] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/228145-charles-k...

There is a difference between your average liberal and what the politicians did. it's widely known that liberals have always been against mass incarceration. However I don't dispute that Democratic politicians did that to gain votes in a center right country. (at that time)

I don't disagree with you that Democrats pushed some of these bad laws. I just disagree with the characterization of Democrats as not-conservative, especially during and after the Reagan years. Certainly there are some Democrats who are not conservative, but as an aggregate I would consider the Democrats to be a center-right or simply right party.

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