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Comment by throwaway238347 | Hacker News Reader

I would like to understand the perspective of the people doing these kidnappings. They're "bad people" - they didn't have mothers who taught them to play nice? Or driven by economic conditions and what they perceive is a normal path forward, they are participating in the system?

What I mean is that it seems cultural. There are places in the world where everyone leaves their front door unlocked, because nobody would come in and steal stuff, how rude is that! Then there are places where apparently the normal thing is to kidnap someone for five days.

So please talk about this difference, especially from the point of view of the kidnappers. I would like to understand this.

I've made a throwaway as I don't want my curiosity to be mistaken for pushing some agenda, and in case for some reason people react negatively to my question. Thanks.

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I used to think it's just economic, meaning the poorer area/country would have higher crime rate. But now I've travelled quite extensively around the world, I think crime is mostly related to two things: inequality and social trust. They are also strongly related as inequality leads to distrust in society/government and in tern that distrust leads to people trying to accumulate personal wealth/power at all cost, even at others' expense.

and lack of the rule of Law. and lack of a culture where the rule of law is respected. that's gotta be the difference between the US and Brazil. I hear their version of the FBI is basically terrified to go into favelas. In America, we are all terrified of the FBI and swat teams that very few of us try to pull shit. America has a culture and history of grabbing your briefcase and going to work at your profession. We are brainwashed by Eisenhower era film footage. As well as X-Files that sedates us into thinking--and probably rightfully so--that US intelligence, police, military etc will handle us if we get out of line. Over there it's very quite literally a jungle. There's no where to hide over here.

So I don't disagree with your points. It's just part of a larger picture. My points probably don't even complete that picture.

But for now, for me, it boils down to: inequality + a culture of being civilized.

> and lack of the rule of Law. and lack of a culture where the rule of law is respected.

Culture has nothing to do with it, it's only inequalities. Look at the list of the 50 more dangerous cities in the world [0]. How come the US is the only developed country in the list with St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans. All of those have a higher murder rate then Sao Paolo.

People might be scared of the SWAT, and brutal police, and incredibly long jail sentences. But when they lives in extreme misery, they feel it's worth the risk.

It's not very different from poor populations working dangerous jobs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

Well, inequality is a major theme, because pretty much everything is explained by energy potentials and gradients.

The inequality is partially cultural, e.g. when children don't even learn to read, which counts for some US city as well. Hence, criminal risk assessment seems rather informed by tradition and a myopic outlook (quite literally). So I agree that they "feel" it's worth the risk. On top of that, any local variance in potential will be deceived and abused. The problem then is that informing the deceived and stopping the abuse is hindered by exactly this lack of consciousness. Of course that's an issue of trust.

Error margins are huge either way, when the potential profit seems high and alternatives very low. "Nothing to lose" implies a zero division, resulting in an arbitrary decisions. So at least we can probably assume that for every criminal effort there are as many good intentions on the other side of the equation. Only if you look at people as numbers it's purely economical.

On the other hand, culturally, there are a lot of parallels to developed countries, too, e.g. in business culture. Then the overall difference is rather economic, which the developed countries profit from, thus increasing the differeyial. The US ie. is a more important market than the home countries for the drug cartels, or the weapons being produced in the developed countries).

Education is cultural and economic. It's hindered by poverty and stands counter to crime. Now, the education and the systems devised to control it are a different topic.

It's not only inequality. There are places with large income and wealth inequalities but little crime (e.g. Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore).

There is correlation of income equality and crime, but inequality is far from the only factor impacting murder rates, for instance.

I am Brazilian but have lived overseas in the last 15 years, currently in Sweden. I can understand both your point of view (not being able to believe someone can do things like this to a completely innocent person) and the point of view of Brazilians, who are used to seeing this every day and come to think this is normal.

Here in Sweden, people don't seem to understand that some people are just capable of doing the most evil things. What they don't understand is that these people were born and raised in a place where society sees them as a disease to be exterminated. Even people who live in the "favelas" (extremely poor slums) would do anything to move to nicer areas and be seen as normal people. They are not all bad, but the ones who have a tendency to be violent become monsters. They don't see you as an innocent person. They see you as the enemy, the symbol of a society that wants them dead. They absolutely hate you and all of your kind. When you understand this, you can see how kidnapping someone for 5 days and terrorizing the person the whole time is not that surprising. If they found out by coincidence the guy was a police officer, they would have cut his head off and sent it in a package to the family.

On the other side, it's common for some educated people to talk about these criminals as scum, that they deserve to be sent to the dirtiest, darkest prison they can find and let there to die. There's absolutely no belief in rehabilitation. In Sweden, prisons are quite similar to nice hostels. People see prisons as a place to re-educate offenders. In Brazil, they are places to dump the rubbish and hope they kill each other. If they manage to get out alive, they become a hell of a lot more dangerous as they make contacts with the organised crime (to which they always aspired to belong to). This is called "graduating" for them (because graduating in a real university is not even a remote possibility). They graduate in the university of crime. They actually feel respected after that... and go on to commit more advanced crimes (robbing a bank, managing a drug-dealing region...).

That's how you get to the current situation.

We have similar people in Sweden that think that they are better than other people simply because they are born in Sweden (I'm Swedish). I would say that a significant fraction have the mindset that the Syrians deserved what happened in Syria.. It is completely unbelievable to me that they think that burning down the shelters for the refugees is helping in any way. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39095173

If you haven't already, watch the movie "City of God". You'll get a pretty good idea about the background for this kind of people in Brasil.

It's not an explanation, but the fact is that some places are very violent and some are not. I think there is considerable inertia there. The violence level will stay the same if nothing changes. Violence created violence. Peace creates peace.

One hypothesis: violent criminality is heritible to some degree.

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