U.S. Incarceration and Crime Rates Continue to Fall in Tandem
reason.com
reason.com
And homicide rates have risen substantially in the last two years (up 10.4% in 2015, and projected for 13.1% this year). These are the biggest increases in a generation.
http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/09/spin-this-biggest-murder...
http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/11/homicide-is-up-and-its-n...
I'm not sure if the de-incarceration is responsible for the rise in crime. From my following, it seems like the police backing off in response to protests, riots, and consent decrees has a bigger impact. And I'm not a fan of prison -- there are better ways to deter crime and to keep violent criminals away from normal people. But I do notice that most times when I see a murder in the news, and the suspect has been apprehended, the suspect has a disturbingly long wrap sheet and I've wondered to myself, "how was this person allowed back out into civilized society."
Now imagine if 800 Chicagoans were killed by radiation leaks from a nuclear plant. "Well, you can't have electricity without plutonium. Do you want to turn everyone's lights off?" Or if 800 African-Americans were lynched Emmett Till style by KKK thugs. "Regrettable, but what are you going to do? And don't white people have legitimate complaints?"
Even murder rates can be fudged -- turn the homicide into a "death investigation":
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-...
Another point to keep in mind when you see these too-good-to-be-true stories is that criminal subcultures are actually quite conservative. When laws and policies change, it takes time for people to collectively figure out what they can get away with. This makes crime rates a lagging indicator -- we're still experiencing the positive effects of the crime crackdown of the '90s, not just in incarceration rates but in cultural behavior.
The mid-'60s were another period when social scientists realized that punishment was a medieval anachronism. It took 10-20 years to see the full effects of these policies, and another 10 for the political backlash to get started. It seems like we're due for another round of this pendulum.
Attributing it solely to crackdowns in the 90's is pretty disingenuous; crime had been falling before Giuliani, and in a broad array of cities which hasn't instituted tough on crime policies.
I fear this too. As someone who now lives in a city that suffered enormously from the 70s crime rise, and benefited greatly from the 2000s decline in crime, the prospect of another crime wave makes me wonder if I should hold off on buying a house.
In 1940, a survey was taken of teachers asking them
to list the five most important problems in school.
They were: (1) talking out of turn; (2) chewing gum;
(3) making noise; (4) running in halls; and (5) cutting
in line.
Fifty years later, the survey was repeated. The 1990
list was substantially revised: (1) drug abuse;
(2) alcohol abuse; (3) pregnancy; (4) suicide;
(5) rape.
Still good reading and still controversial after all these years.
I guess my point is that we need to have a more holistic approach to resolving this issue than to simply be harsher with punishments and policing.
A bit later in the article, Krauthammer really succinctly sums up a major flaw in his own argument:
> As part of this project of moral leveling, whole new areas of deviancy–such as date rape and politically incorrect speech–have been discovered. And old areas–such as child abuse–have been amplified by endless reiteration in the public presses and validated by learned reports of their astonishing frequency.
Yes, perhaps the reason rape seems so much more common is that people in the 1940s didn't understand what rape is. Apparently some people still don't.
I want to order a time machine and send you back to have a conversation with your great-grandparents, for whom you seem to have so little respect.
Sure, the "list" isn't real. People wouldn't have been passing it around in the '70s if it hadn't reflected the actual experience of living in the '40s, which many, many people at that time remembered well.
A time machine is not actually available. Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in. Chronological chauvinism is not a healthy emotion.
My great-grandparents were crossing the Atlantic to flee pogroms. My grandfather did similar, but lost the rest of his family who didn't leave Europe in the 1910s and 1920s when the 1930s and 1940s set in. There was this little thing while my grandmother was young called, "the Holocaust".
Fuck the violence, authoritarianism, and chauvinisms of the past. Today is far better.
And the question I would ask is, "what should have been done to prevent this spiraling into a life of crime, and why wasn't it?"
Peter Moskos has written a lot on this. As part of his PhD, he spent two years as an actual cop in Baltimore. Now he is a professor of criminology in New York. IMO, he does a good job writing in a balanced and truthful perspective about crime.
"I don't know what's going on everywhere (or even most-where), but I can tell you a bit about Baltimore. And I suspect it holds true in many cities. I looked calls for service, arrest numbers, and crimes. Most dramatic is the drop of arrests in Western District....Now there are good and not so good reasons for this drop in arrests. But leaving that why: it happened. Police were less involved, by choice and necessity, and violence skyrocketed. Just because correlation does prove causing, correlation certainly doesn't mean causation is impossible or even unlikely. I mean, what else changed in the Western except police and crime?...Cops stopped making discretionary arrests and being proactive in clearing corners and frisking subjects. Look, it's no surprise where shootings happens and who gets shot." http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/01/the-baltimore-6-effect.h...
And then read this one about Chicago: http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/11/the-best-of-times-worst-...
And a few other posts http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/02/defining-ferguson-effect... and http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/03/chicago-violence.html
And the question I would ask is, "what should have been done to prevent this spiraling into a life of crime, and why wasn't it?"
My reading is that there is a total breakdown in discipline in many of these families and communities. The kids that end up being problems are not getting discipline at home, and they're not getting it from the school (see http://www.isegoria.net/2014/12/the-monster-factory/ or http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-... )
I also think that when you have open-air drug dealing, and gangs openly controlling the streets, then that turns senior gang members into role models, and it incentivizes young teenagers to join gangs for protection. Then as part of joining, they get involved in beefs and violence. That is my take from reading various ethnographies.
The reason nothing is being done is because prevailing opinion does not agree with me. The emphasis over the past fifty years has been less discipline in schools. ( http://www.city-journal.org/html/who-killed-school-disciplin... ). There was a police crackdown in the 1990s, but it was more targeted at keeping violent people out of the nice neighborhoods, rather than completely eliminating gang violence in the ghetto neighborhoods. I think that is because the liberals see the police as suspect and problematic, and don't want to empower them, and because the conservatives don't really care about the ghetto as long as it doesn't effect them.
You're vouching for him, but so far there's no reason to take your word for it. I'm sorry, but I don't know you from a social media marketer, so "feed the guy some clicks and figure it out for yourself" is not a compelling argument.
I don't know what the solution is, how to prevent so many American youth who would perhaps have been contributing members of society and culture. I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries.
I mostly agree, but I do think the police could do more to crack down on the most brazen instances of gangs being the de facto government of various neighborhoods.
It seems like a lot of criminals, start off rather young charged with crimes like shoplifting etc, and that record haunts them forever, by shutting off a lot of opportunities forever.
That's not my sense from the various ethnographies I have read. Where are you getting that from?
I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries
There is a racial element to this. When I was traveling in Brazil, the black favellas of Brazil had a lot of similarity to the black ghettos of the U.S., and the white areas of Brazil had a lot of similarity to the white areas of the United States or of Europe.
That sounds extremely implausible and requires a whole hell of a lot of citations.
Of course, agreed. However, they're most certainly there to prevent crime and stop/catch criminals. There is a whole lot of overlap between those two goals.
>"I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries."
People aren't allowed to talk about it, frankly. Sweeping generalizations and policies that affect and stop these kinds of conditions from existing are not politically correct, and completely politically unpalatable.
E.g. If you asked me for my politically incorrect answer: It would be to increase policing ten-fold in those areas, maybe even impose martial law and curfews until the criminals have to pretty-much stop their business because it's not viable anymore. High-definition cameras on all street-corners, license-plate scanners to keep decent track of ALL vehicles going through the city and crime hot-spots. Additionally, you have to stop gang-culture from propagating through those neighborhoods. Not just that, but keep it from spreading through the whole society in general via media, especially music that glorifies it.
The unfortunate thing is that it'll probably work, we can probably pay/implement it right now, and we would very quickly start saving lives and helping people out of a crime/poverty cycle. Yet we aren't.
Only you can prevent the grievous misuse of statistics.
It's all about the policy you want to sell. You're seeking to silence legitimate criticism. I'm seeking to reduce the likelihood someone will do something irrational with a loaded weapon.
If you're interested in facts, there's only one side supported by evidence [0] but hey, don't let that deter your campaign. Keep championing the destruction of black bodies.
0. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/
I'm not trying to silence anybody, in fact I'm saying something that mainstream media is unwilling to say. I just pointed out that recent criticism of police is by far the most likely reason crime rates are increasing in big, poor cities.
I'm pointing out that irrational acts of violence - whether homicide or suicide - are made more prevalent and lethal in the presence of cheap, abundant weaponry. As a result of the 37 mass shootings that have occurred during the last administration, gun sales have hit record levels[0], and following from that, homicide rates have increased. I'm connecting the dots in this way, you are connecting the dots in another.
You are making an assertion that there is a negative impact of "recent criticism of police" and that it has directly led to this outbreak of homicide. What criticism, specifically? By which groups, specifically? And what should be done about it, specifically?
These people by vast margin are not legal gun owners, so I think it's a bit premature to connect gun sales to rising crime rates.
The biggest thing on the news radar before the increased crime statistics is recent critisicm of police. Even police chiefs and mayors of many of these cities have gone on record saying that the public backlash against police was going to cause officers to be more cautious and patrol problem areas less. And a year later this is exactly what happened.
Nobody can even prove correlation=cause for anything but the evidence in this case is pretty overwhelming.
Chicago specifically, which is pointed out as one of the largest increases, had it's police chief resign and was under state and federal investigation.
What do you think this does for the public perception of the police dept? The police are fearful of causing the next Freddie Gray and the political machine doesn't want their hands anywhere near anything involving the police dept, which would surely affect the ability for them to operate effectively at least at some level
Anti-gun control people keep making this argument, and fail to take into account the larger economic impact of more inaccessible guns. If they are restricted it makes them more expensive to obtain on both the legal and illegal markets. Like you said
> large, poor cities
If in fact these cities are as poor as you say - which, speaking as a resident of Chicago, is a grave distortion of our reality - then this only bolsters my argument. Guns shouldn't be affordable or accessible to the average everyday criminal. Controlling the supply allows us to control the price.
> a bit premature to connect gun sales to rising crime rates
This is directly addressed by the evidence I provided. Gun deaths are inexorably connected to gun sales.
>What do you think this does for the public perception of the police dept?
CPD is taking steps to address its image, getting rid of the poor leadership that led to this crisis is exactly what they should be doing. They're hiring people from disempowered communities, organizing outreach, building trust. CPD is busy busting its ass demonstrating its ability to operate effectively in this environment. You need to be aware that police departments originated[0] not as public defense organizations, but as union-busting, organizer-murdering hired security. Things have changed, but as recent events[1] have shown, there is still work to do. As someone with family members in the CPD AND as someone with family members of color, I am keenly aware of the tightrope both sides must walk. There is no perfect solution, but burying your head in the right-wing propaganda machine does none of us any good.
At least I'm proposing a solution. Again, you make an assertion that there is a negative impact of "recent critisicm[sic] of police" and that it has directly led to this outbreak of homicide. What criticism, specifically? By which groups, specifically? And what should be done about it, specifically?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Laquan_McDonald
I'm not going to post the obvious glib response, but it's threadbait to say something like this without support. "Probably" doesn't cut it, so consider this a challenge.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt...
> The CSEW, formerly known as the British Crime Survey (BCS), is a face-to-face survey asking people who are resident in households in England and Wales about their experiences of a range of crimes in the past year. The survey interviews both adults and children. The survey started in 1982 (covering crime experienced in 1981) and is conducted on a continuous basis with around 35,000 adults and 3,000 children aged 10 to 15 years old interviewed each year.
Homicides are down in the majority of cities, like NYC, Flint and Detroit. However, they are up in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis which are bucking the national trend of lower homicide rates.
If you pluck out the data a very small number of residents from specific hoods in Detroit, Chicago, DC etc. - the 'rest of America's' homicide rates start to look more sane.
If you pluck Aboriginal crime out of Canadian crime stats, the numbers start to look like those of Northern Europe.
I think this is important because random crimes that happen in 'normal circumstances' may not be a function of the crazy social dysfunction in certain neighbourhoods.
I'm not saying anything political here, I do believe anyone murdering anyone else is 'responsible' for it and can't just blame the fact that their dad was in jail, mom absent, schools sucked etc. - however - those are obviously massively correlating factors in some areas, much more than others.
If I were pres, I would basically have a 'national crime / social reconstruction strategy' focused on those 'bad areas' that comprised of a bunch of things.
Most of America is within the range of 'normal' for homicide - but still considerably more violent than other advanced nations.
Do you believe Northern Europe does not have minorities with higher crime rates?
Inner city Detroit, and Aboriginal reserves are war zones compared to a 'minority are of Manchester'.
Pretending a 49% drop over 20 years is sustainable continuously with no outliers is...absurd. There is a reason these sorts of trendlines are generally drawn over 5-10 years of data, not 1 or 2.
Please, just stop pushing your agenda on HN.
https://mises.org/blog/fbi-us-homicide-rate-51-year-low
> Homicide rates were considerably higher in the United States during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but over the past 25 years, have fallen nearly continuously:
> As Pew has reported in recent years, in fact, the American public is "unaware" that the homicide rate in the United States has fallen by 49 percent over the past twenty years. And while Pew doesn't report on it, it's also a safe bet that the public is also unaware that homicide rates have collapsed as total gun ownership in the United States has increased significantly.
Pretending a 49% drop over 20 years is sustainable continuously with no outliers is...absurd. ... As Pew has reported in recent years, in fact, the American public is "unaware" that the homicide rate in the United States has fallen by 49 percent over the past twenty years.
In my city, the homicide rate is still 5X higher than it was in 1950s. That's hundreds of people dead each year, unnecessarily. And that's after dramatic improvements in medical technology! I have a lot higher standards than a 50% decline since the 1990 peak. Let's get it back down to the 1950s level.
Yet you repeatedly, blatantly cherry pick data that is just more lies of omission like this one where you try to defend yourself. Now you move the goal posts and show complete ignorance of the way population densities have changed since the 1950s and the relationship between such density and crime rates.
> I am not arguing about the crime changes over the past 20 years. The original article was about crime changes in the past few years, based on changes to policy in the last few years. I think the changes to crime policy implemented twenty years ago were good, and good impacts on crime. But the changes in the past few years are bad, and will result in an increase in crime.
Nothing substantial has changed unless you are truly and genuinely ignorant of history. You think BLM is new?
The LA riots and numerous similar events have been caused by killing unarmed civilians by police, regardless of justification. Stop being a sheep and actually read the history of the past 50 years. BLM and other protests are pretty fucking peaceful compared to the LA riots and other events in the past with similar causes. Get back to me when these "riots" and "policy changes" involved 10+ deaths on a regular basis.
The only people claiming it is getting worse are salesman peddling fear and ignorance. Stop being so easily persuaded and actually educate yourself.
It's also basically the only thing you can compare between nations as well. About ten years ago I saw a New Zealand-based study that took crimes from NZ, Australia, and the US, and rated them using the other countries' parameters. I've sadly been unable to find this study again, but it was very interesting in its results - the way crime is reported, the same event in Australia and NZ will show up about five times more than in the US. If two blokes have a fight outside a bar and it involves weapons, in the US, usually just one charge will be brought. But in Aus/NZ, the way the law works, about five charges are brought, eg from simple assault to attempted murder, and only the most severe successful charge would be used for sentencing. However, when the stats are aggregated, it's done by charges brought, not convictions (for some odd reason).
I agree with you, it is true that the homicide rate is the most fair statistic to use. But even that can be manipulated. For example, it is often hard to distinguish between arson and accidental fires. Some types of murder can appear to be suicides at first glance and vice versa. Another twist is disappearances where the body hasn't been found yet. This is why you'll never find an exact number of murders for a specific year, just an estimate.
So different reporting routines or an overworked police force could definitely impact the number of murders reported each year. For example suppose a junkie falls from a balcony and dies, if the police department have spare resources maybe they'll investigate and find out it's a murder, if they don't maybe they'll be happy to close the case as an accident.
I think in 100 years, more evolved humans will look back on the THC incarcerations the same way we now look upon the Salem Witch trials, or prohibition, etc. You know, one of those times where mankind just massively screwed up 'en mass' on sort of a societal level, and was unable to correct itself because the majority of people are brainwashed into believing whatever their parents told them about things. Sort of as a feed-back loop also, parents were unwilling to teach their children things that conflicted with societal norms. So society as a whole can fall into this kind of a 'rut' where getting out of it takes a long process of evolution of thought.
I wonder if jail time has the opposite effect of rehabilitation for many, especially considering how much harder life can be with jail time on your record, or even just the black hole in your resume that you have to explain.
Not to mention that you spent the last however many years being told and treated like criminal scum, I imagine that would have a fairly significant impact on your mental health and self image, as well as your relationships with friends and family.
Decriminalisation isn't necessarily retroactive, that it's now legal or less illegal doesn't mean it was at the time of conviction.
For instance despite the Labouchere Amendment ("gross indencency") having been mostly repealed in 1967, Turing legally remained a criminal until his pardon in 2013.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518
> Gay and bisexual men convicted of now-abolished sexual offences in England and Wales are to receive posthumous pardons, the government has announced.
> Thousands of living men convicted over consensual same-sex relationships will also be eligible for the pardon.
There's about 95,000 people in federal prison with a drug offense as their most serious charge. About 11,500 of those charges involved primarily marijuana. (The overwhelming majority of that is for trafficking, not possession.)
Rolling Stone estimated about 40,000 people in prison for convictions primarily involving marijuana, with about half of those involving marijuana alone: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m....
That is of course not to say that justice, for a few tens of thousands of people isn't an important thing! Though I hesitate a little bit to put trafficking in the same "justice" category as using. It's generally accepted that the government has much more leeway to control what is sold in the market than to control what people do with their bodies.
Edit: here's a handy infographic: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html
"There's about 95,000 people in federal prison with a drug offense as their most serious charge. About 11,500 of those charges involved primarily marijuana. (The overwhelming majority of that is for trafficking, not possession.)"
So no, your statement is not correct. If we take 'overwhelming majority' of 11,500 as 60%, that would leave ~5000 prisoners whose 'most serious charge' is possession of marijuana. Or about 2.5% of the federal inmate population (all this assuming that the figures quoted are correct, I didn't source them myself).
Note that while only a small proportion of the overall prison population is in federal prison, a much larger proportion of drug convicts are in federal prison.
Millions? Millions??
Where on Earth are you getting "millions" from? And why is this completely absurd and unsubstantiated claim the top voted comment?
The idea that millions, or even hundreds of thousands of people are in jail for simply smoking a joint is a myth:
"Less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court in 2014 were convicted for simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and most of those convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges. Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are relatively rare. In 2013, only 3.6 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession, often the result of a plea bargain, compared with 12 percent of prisoners convicted for trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records. The meth users that Tustin, California, police officer Mark Turner encountered in his undercover narcotics days were sentenced to drug classes. “Then they would skip out of the classes and always re-offend,” he says." (Source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-... )
Also read: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-10/the-smart...
What counts as trafficking in the US? In England merely handing your friend a joint can be seen as dealing.
The war on drugs is now about a century old, and going strong.
Hopefully, future people will look on both as some kind of collective self-delusion. But the comparison is otherwise unfair to Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, and the rest of those Puritan ghouls responsible for that episode. And I can't believe I'm defending them.
I would expand that and decriminalize almost all forms of drug use (not selling/distribution). The number of people incarcerated for drug use is much higher than just those there on drug charges. A fair amount of property and public order laws are broken by drug users as well.
Getting them into a real treatment plan, with real job placement, housing assistance, etc, would stem more of that crime than throwing them in jail/prison.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...
Americans aren't very generous when it comes to crime. In many European countries, even murder carries only about a 10-15 year sentence. On the other hand, I wonder if that's a product of our situation. The United States is fantastically violent in comparison to Europe, and always has been: http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicid....
E.g. Berlin is slightly bigger than Chicago. In a typical year, it might have 60-70 murders. Chicago in comparison had well over 700 this year. You can't look at the criminal justice system in the U.S. relative to our more enlightened European counterparts without keeping in mind that difference.
Did the incarceration rate for violent crime go up, or was it the total incarceration rate due to e.g. increased prosecution of drug arrests? If it's the former, then it's great that more violent criminals are being caught and sentenced, but if it's the latter then it's just compounding the problem.
It's not necessarily "great" that more violent criminals are being caught and sentenced. Many European countries manage just fine having e.g. 10-15 years maximum even for murder. Which is why I find the drug thing to be so frustrating. Drugs are not the major issue in the prison system. The real issue is whether just locking people up as a response to high crime rates actually works or not.
Homicide != all violence. The US in fact is not fantastically more violent than Europe outside of the murder rate, which is primarily made possible by the mass distribution of guns. Europe today has twice the non-homicide crime rate that the US does. Europe's largest nation - Russia - has a homicide rate over three times that of the US.
"Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true thirty years ago."
"In 1970 the aggregate crime rate in the seven European countries we consider was 63% of the corresponding US figure, but by 2007 it was 85% higher than in the United States."
Because that would skew the stats significantly.
If you're sitting on your driveway in a chair with a beer and your neighbor backs his car into you, it's an alcohol related accident.
I wonder how many cases of 'drug related crime' are just defendants who were arrested for another crime while they had small time possession?
I had a passenger who got fined $1000 for letting his medical marijuana card expire. In the future, this fellow has it on his record that he is a political criminal who didn't hurt anyone, and a zealous brain-dead prosecutor might use this prior conviction to advocate for prison.
Another passenger had recently been released from a 2-year prison sentence. Her crime was sharing a single opiate pill with a friend. The cop was chuckling as he wrote her up. This one had gotten fat on prison food, which is not very nutritious. Several of her fellow inmates died from the neglect. (I guess police officers have to be rather disconnected from the consequences of their job. "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them" is a cop-out.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, etc) recently had this to say:
Being nice counts the most when
you are nice to people ignored
by others, deprived of attention,
or devoid of friends. The rest is
largely theater.
This one had tried (really hard) to stay sober after almost 2-years in prison for her 3rd DUI. But life happened, and she hadn't learned how to cope in minimum-security prison.
I worked with her regularly over the course of about two years. She'd sober up, get a job, have a bad day at work, relapse... Finally I turned her over to her family (who previously had tried the "maybe mom will stop drinking if we ignore her" strategy), and she has really turned the corner now that she knows her kids are there to support her. Her son recently trusted her to watch her grandkids overnight. Prison didn't enable this transformation. (she originally fell into the alcoholic's pit when she found that vodka helped her anxiety better than the Xanax prescription. Benzodiazepines only work for about 4 weeks, before the patient's anxiety levels become worse than before.)
I'm still thinking about whether I should say more about this passenger. The Difference Between Boys and Girls [1] is about another passenger who did quite well after meeting me.
[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-...
> (who previously had tried the "mom will stop drinking if we ignore her" strategy)
As someone who's been the child in that situation, sometimes you really just need an extended break from dealing with a parent's addiction.
It's extremely stressful and really hard to get over the resentment stemming from a childhood destroyed by a parent's addiction.
Some people are more resilient and can be there for their addicted parents as adults, but I think it's a little unfair to fault people for needing to distance themselves from their often traumatic childhoods. It's a bit like blaming soldiers for not continuing their military service after suffering a PTSD-inducing event (which hopefully we can agree is not behavior we should encourage).
Sorry if you weren't trying to imply blame or fault on the children, but that does happen fairly regularly.
Addictions are rather hard; society's efforts to punish addiction makes them harder still.
2% down since the peak. Who cares. Look at that chart. Its not even noticeable.
I'm really interested in Lead poisoning cases from the past decade graphed against this correlative coincidence that likely has some external variables, affecting both.
Why does America have such a greater drug fascination than perhaps every other country?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-...
Just to throw out some random thoughts on this:
-Historically a lot more expendable income, especially in the middle and working classes. The opportunity was there, especially during the 60s and 70s when a lot of countries were still rebuilding in an economic sense.
-Our culture seems to put a lot more into individualism, especially in regards to an individuals right to the 'pursuit of happiness'. Somewhere along the way the 'pursuit of happiness' started to become centered around personal pleasure and hedonism. Think of the rock-star (or hip-hop) lifestyle that was glamorized over the past half-century. It mostly boils down to hedonism and extravagant material wealth.
-The overwhelmingly authoritarian crack-down on drugs in America made it a cornerstone of the anti-establishment counter-culture movement. Though perhaps that's a bit backwards, the crack-down came about as a way to control and suppress the counter-culture. But that backfired in a big way. Drugs have practically become a rite of passage into being cool or rebellious. I bet half as many teenagers would try drugs if it weren't for that perception.
-Americans largely enjoy simplicity and convenience. We don't want to make huge lifestyle changes. Take a pill or something to make the problems go away. Simple, easy, don't have to think about it. Gib me my soma.
-The Media. A lot of TV shows and movies are centered around topics that are edgy, illegal, and/or borderline taboo because that's what people want to watch. We always have. Same way we rubberneck for a car crash. I think that's helped normalize drugs.
Not saying that the system doesn't have drawbacks, but it seems to have led to a higher standard of living, a more equitable distribution of wealth, although perhaps not as much economic growth as the US.
And this(https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/...):
> The FY 2015 Budget requests a total of $8.5 billion for federal prisons and detention
And from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
> During fiscal year 2015, the Federal government received approximately $3.25 trillion in tax and fee revenue and had outlays (spending) of $3.7 trillion;
The population of the US is 318.9 million, and (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...):
> In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population.
So our federal government would be 0.1% smaller in terms of expenses if it weren't responsible for drug offenses, but a full 1.4% of the population is under their control as a result. 2% of the population has lost its right to vote, so perhaps 1% due to drug offenses.
That's about half the number of Jews in the US, which both political parties pander to quite heavily(making Israel a huge point of contention in any election). I guess that makes sense: drug reform is less visible than Israel in the news but still significant, though I haven't measured it to say that it's half.
You're actually allowed to discriminate against people and take away their right to vote, but the states are punished by reducing their representational basis so they get fewer legislators and electors in elections. Since we have a winner-takes-all system, this encourages states to allow all minority groups to vote if they wouldn't tip the election. I was originally thinking it'd be strange for states to reduce their basis by as much as 1%, but it looks like there's an exemption for crimes:
> Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
I suppose, strictly speaking, you could have your right to vote stripped away if you get a parking ticket? I wonder if it's a gerrymandering scheme to throw Democrats in prison and take away their right to vote. (Democrats tend to be big on drugs)
Since drug use counts towards the arrests but probably doesn't count towards the crime rate(it's a victimless crime, and the offender doesn't report it), that portion of it shouldn't affect the link described in the article.
I'm not sure it's smart to directly compare percentages like the article does. If the crime rate is already low because all the criminals are locked up, then you'll have no change in crime rate and a low change in imprisonment. And you usually want to compare derivatives of the log-percentage, not the percentage directly.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2011-07-18/michele-b...
I believe US numbers excludes juvenile detention, but hey...