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Comment by dcwca | Hacker News Reader

> As a society, while our ethical ideal is justice, a more practically compelling priority is safety. This word, “wouldn’t,” is not compatible with our sense of safety

Safety is the ethical ideal, not "justice". We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness, we remove people for the good of society.

Edit: I'm Canadian. I know this isn't true today, but I'm glad I said it and am grateful for the replies below. I hope this statement becomes true in America one day.

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The United States justice system, as well as that of most common wealth countries, is based not on safety or rehabilitation but on vengeance and systemic racism. To claim otherwise, when the United States has institutionalized slavery ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.") and more prisoners per capita or by absolute number than any other country on this planet is naive at best. The overcrowding at every prison, chronic corruption and mismanagement, privatization of the system and unionization of its beneficiaries, and lack of all but the cheapest rehabilitation programs makes it nearly impossible for convicts to reenter society and become productive members. Texas is one of the most egregious examples - especially given that they speed up the appeals process on purpose and have shit for oversight on forensic science in criminal cases. Texas alone has executed over 500 people since 1980, many of them borderline too mentally incompetent to stand trial, let alone face death row. Combine that with a culturally accepted racism among law enforcement, itchy trigger fingers, zero training for how to actually deal with people, and a cultural obsession with violence and you get the United States: a place where entire communities of Latinos and African Americans are decimated because a significant fraction of their working age males are stuck in a tiny cell with nothing to learn except more crime and nothing to do when they get out except more crime.

Countries with prison systems that try to rehabilitate, like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons and they have an amazing track record with recidivism. People like to claim "blah blah homogeneous society blah blah" but the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them - often because they view it as doing "God's work."

We do not have justice systems, we have vengeance factories.

I'm very unimpressed with the US justice system and agree with a lot of what you say.

But does this really explain a massively disproportionate homicide rate among certain groups in the US? Sure for lesser or non-crimes like drugs there can be massively unfair, racist enforcement and penalties. For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

As far as Norway and "blah blah homogenous society" do they not also show a heavy bias in crimes committed by the "non homogenous" population there?

"But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?"

There's a scale from accident, via involuntary manslaugher to murder. There may well be bias in judging what to prosecute.

Also, laws such "three strikes you are out" may lead to more murders. If, say, you're a burglar with two strikes, and a house owner wakes up and recognizes you, hitting him hard out of fear for that third strike becomes more likely. Similarly, racial bias by the police may make people so wary of "he said, she said" situations that they will 'snap' and kill someone instead (IMO, many people convicted for murder aren't cold-blooded killers, but mentally not the most stable persons who have been dealt a socially unfavorable card in life)

Very good points, thank you. I wonder if there studies that show what kind of impact this has, overall? Probably hard to measure without finding an area that had a rapid racial change in government.

I guess I was just objecting to the idea that "racism" is the cause for these statistical imbalances, especially since you see the same kind of thing happening in Europe which would seem, at least on the surface, to have less racism issues, no? But perhaps I'm wrong since a lot of good people think the opposite, but it's hard to tell since it's so politicized and sensitive, just like anything about race.

It is absolutely not the case that Europe has less problems with racism than the United States. Racism is a very real problem throughout pretty much all of Europe.

Interesting. So e.g. Norway has a similar level of racism towards blacks as the US does? Why?

Non sequitur. Your analyses across this thread are all very weak, based on weirdly fallacious premises; here, that "racism" means "racism against black people".

A reasonable reader might suspect that you reached, for whatever reason, the conclusion that capital punishment couldn't be racist (perhaps because, as you've stated in other comments on HN, you feel the term "racism" is used too often), and are now intent on working your way backwards from that conclusion.

I think you should take a beat and reconsider how you're approaching the topic. It's an odd experience discussing this with you and watching you do little dances after each response to reorient yourself towards your preferred conclusion.

Edited extensively from the one-liner I originally wrote, sorry.

Fair enough, though I'm not talking about capital punishment or lack of racism in the US justice system. It's terribly unfair, especially to blacks in the US - zero argument there.

Do you have any suggestions on straight, fact-based reading on the subject, sources that aren't trying to appear sensitive? It's hard - even admitting races and may have differences upsets people.

On Norway, I'm just saying they don't have the same levels of racism baggage as the US regarding "Africans" (quotes cause it seems weird that many of them have families in the US longer than mine, but I would get no qualifiers as an American) yet still Norway sees overrepresentation.

Yes, murders are selectively investigated. The clearance rate for urban core murders is surprisingly low. In some major cities it's as low as 30%. The national average is 65%.

Wouldn't that make the stats even more racially biased if they were investigated, given the demographics of urban areas?

No, it means that when black and latino people are the victims of crime, the perpetrators are less likely to be convicted than when white people are. More importantly, it rebuts your argument that the severity of the crimes we're talking about is so grave that it's unlikely there's any bias in their enforcement. Not only is there bias, but smoking gun evidence of that bias (whether it's intentional or systemic) is a simple Google search away.

You wrote:

For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

The answer is, "yes, of course."

Slightly edited.

Thank you for the explanation - I didn't know the solve rate was so low at all. Is it thought that of these unsolved black/latino murders, the race of the perpetrator is disproportionately white?

Edit: So I searched a bit, and, in NYC, it's said this is due to reduced budgets for homicide in certain areas that are predominately minority. For this to impact the stats (the raw numbers being that blacks, as a group in the US, commit 4-5x homicide by population, and similarly bad numbers looking at interracial crime) it'd have to be a massively disproportionate amount of non-blacks going into these neighbourhoods and killing them. From the "flavour" text in the articles I read, the victims families are lamenting that cops don't care because "it's just blacks men killing other black men".

But wow am I astounded how low the solved rate is, that's crazy. Though I would suspect most homicides are at least reported, whereas many lesser crimes (like drug possession) might not be. It's totally plausible that the real drug possession rate among whites is actually orders of magnitude higher than reported, less so for homicide.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond and correct me.

I think you need to start from the realization that offender statistics are systemically biased and recognize that your certainty level here should be capped.

Your analysis here is based on another fallacy, which is that there's a direct connection between the crime of homicide and capital punishment. In fact, no: only a subset of murders, aggravated by circumstances mostly not present in gang shootings, attract death sentences. Further, some presumably large fraction of the black/black murders you're considering occur in jurisdictions that are statistically (or, as in the case of Chicago, legally) unlikely to apply capital punishment.

To reach a conclusion that there aren't racial disparities in capital punishment, you have to de-confound the homicide statistics to eliminate murders that are effectively or statistically ineligible for the death penalty, and then make comparisons.

It's not only commonwealth countries though. Most of the world, be they old countries or new, old world, new world, southern hemisphere, northern, poor, or wealthy have the similar systems.

The Nordics are the exception when it comes to focus on rehabilitation. Not to say they are right, or wrong, just that at this point in history they are the exception.

Really wish people would look at the demographics of Nordic countries before citing them.

They are models, but they are also facing completely different dynamics than pretty much every other country. Wealthy and secure and:

* Denmark - 5.7 million people, 80% of whom are Danish

* Norway - 5.1 million people, in 1992 95% were native

* Sweden - 10 million, the largest non-Swedish ethnic group being the Finns at 150k

You can drive an hour's radius through many big US metros and cover more people than those countries and within that radius find swaths of hundreds of thousands of people of various ethnic groups. These population numbers really pale compared to anything in East Asia though even if they are homogeneous (don't discount how much that helps social dynamics).

The demographics are shifting in Nordic countries but they a really are extreme outliers worthy of praise and recognition that they are outliers.

edit to include reply:

You are talking about demographics. How can it be irrelevant?

The US is in the situation it is in because an entire demographic was transplanted here against their will due to slavery. Nordic countries do not have this situation (good!) so the potential remedies are different.

The only way to solve problems is to effectively diagnose them. You might not like that the US isn't a country of 5 million people with 80% native population which makes policy a lot easier, but that's reality. We can't make things better unless we recognize that and figure out the proper solution within this setting and not some other.

It's not racist to recognize that and it's wrong to call someone a racist because they are searching for solutions.

The demographics are entirely irrelevant to this discussion and I really wish people would stop bringing it up because it's the same type of racist thinking that causes police to disproportionately target African American males. Rampant recidivism, a vengeful justice system, and an entirely ineffectual mental health treatment are the real problems - not the density, skin color, or socioeconomics of urban populations. Crime in those environments is driven by a nearly inescapable cycle of political and economic disenfranchisement starting in childhood and ending in a prison cell.

It is a massive self-reinforcing feedback loop. If we had even an ounce of the empathy and rational approach to public safety that the Nordic countries had, we wouldn't be having this discussion and that feedback loop would have been broken a century ago.

For sure it would help is we had better support systems for the indigent and focused more on rehabilitation and re-integration. These are things we can improve, if we wanted to.

That said, this is not endemic to western cultures. The same attitude is prevalent in LatAm, Africa, South Asia, etc.

It would be helpful if people didn't perpetuate the myth that it springs from race (though race can exacerbate the issue). It was a problem in Britain before they became empire.

It's an issue in China, India, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Japan, Korea, etc. many places far-removed from western culture.

> The United States justice system, as well as that of most common wealth countries, is based not on safety or rehabilitation but on vengeance and systemic racism.

Whoah, don't tarnish everyone else with the fucked-up brush of the US system.

> Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...

No justice system is perfect, but let's avoid the black/white scandanavia/ROW thing. The scandanavians do well, yes, but they're not the only ones that use rehabilitation.

> the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them

Where do you see slavery or capital punishment in modern commonwealth countries? We're not in the 19th century anymore. I assume you actually meant Dominion countries and not commonwealth countries, but even so, which modern commonwealth countries have capital punishment? More importantly, how do you see it as a characteristic of a commonwealth country in general.

Which commonwealth country executes prisoners? The US is not a commonwealth country.

> We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness, we remove people for the good of society.

If that was true (in the US) then there would be more rehabilitation in prisons, preparing people to reintegrate into society. Instead of we don't and have a 75%+ recidivism rate for state prisons.

Also, the war on drugs.

> We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness, we remove people for the good of society.

That might be true in Norway, but it's clearly not true in the U.S. U.S. prisons and prison policies are tacitly designed to make them as miserable as they can be without making it obvious that they are in fact torture chambers. The widespread use of solitary confinement alone, which is now clearly understood to be torture, falsifies your assertion. The death penalty too does nothing to advance public safety. It is vengeance, pure and simple (and very expensive vengeance at that).

Let's get rid of those things then.

This is not true. From a legal standpoint, there are various interlocking justifications - retribution, punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence.

We absolutely punish people "because it makes us feel good". That is one explicit goal of legal theories of punishment - retribution is about replacing revenge, so that the state serves as a proxy for our monkey-needs for revenge.

In the U.S., things are very much tilted towards making people convicted of wrongdoing suffer. Granted, not as much as some places, but that's hardly anything to be proud of.

I would add prevention to your list as a primary justification, because people in jail cannot simultaneously be committing crimes on the outside.

> We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness, we remove people for the good of society.

Sounds nice, but isn't it a very common motive that the aggrieved want "some sense of fairness" in punishment? You hear it a lot after publicised trials, the relatives will offer their opinion on whether the punishment was appropriate for their loss. Doesn't it seem a little weird that only society's interest is what matters?

There's a rather large can of worms in the ideas you speak of.

Safety, for instance, is not an obvious thing. Suppose a study comes out identifying that 50% of members of a given group (say geographical, skin color, education, etc) will commit a heinous crime (and 50% is way more than normal in the population). There is no further specific information; as far as members of this group, it's a coin toss.

What are we to do? The ones who haven't committed a crime yet are a risk. Can we lock them all up? I doubt it.

Here's another interesting one. A study appears in which it is studied what happens to jealousy-murders, eg where a guy finds his wife with another guy and murders them. Lets say the study concludes that once the murders have happened, the murderer is no more likely than anyone else to commit a crime. It's totally safe to let him out now, because it's safety we care about? Seems wrong. But many countries do recognise this kind of enraged murder as a special circumstance in sentencing.

Anyway, not saying I have the answers. Ethical questions have been vexing for a long time.

The fact that he murdered his wife is indicative of the fact that he is capable of murdering another person in a fit of rage. Certainly it's not true that "the murderer is no more likely than anyone else to commit a crime."

It was the condition of a hypothetical scenario that the study was correct. Obviously. You can discuss what evidence is in the real world, but scenarios are meant to exercise your reasoning powers in the steps beyond what you think the actual facts are.

This is no different from thinking about what would happen if you could teleport. The correct answer isn't "but you can't do that".

This is a nice idea, but it's inaccurate.

I sat in a court room during sentencing of a young man for a federal drug offense. He had prior drug offenses. No violent crimes. Right before he got clean, a friend asked him to mail him some drugs. The amount was just enough to qualify as intent to distribute. Mailingnacross state lines made it federal. The friend had been arrested and was given leniency in exchange for turning in someone else.

I knew the young man being sentenced. It took two years for him to be picked up. In the two years he had gotten clean, and started a small business that was growing. He had NA spnosors saying he never missed a meeting, drug tests over previous two years showing he was clean, a stack of letters vouching for his current character, and a dozen people in the courtroom who were there for support. He was also given the option of turning someone in, but since he had been clean for 2 years, he didn't know anyone.

The judge said that while rehabilitation was part of sentencing, the primary reason for sentencing was for punishment; To set an example and deter future crimes by both the convicted and people in the community.

He got 7 years in a federal prison.

I didn't say the system was perfect. We treat drug users as degenerate criminals instead of people with health issues in need of help (in the case of addicts) or as regular people living their lives.

> We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness

I always thought this was exactly the reasoning behind the death penalty.

What is the actual purpose of punishing people for breaking the rules of our society? It could be a mix of justice or safety, but it does set a norm that you will be held responsible for your actions. If you do something bad, there is a reactive action that society builds.

After all, TANJ (There Ain't No Justice) in the natural world. Punishing people for breaking laws is one way that society "upgrades" over the natural world.

Why can't I do something bad that only affects me?

For the sake of argument, I can think of a few reasons. One may believe that everyone in a common society is interconnected, so there is no such thing that only affects you. Another reason is that humans are such mimics of each other, that anything you do is likely to make it more likely other people do it. (See suicide rate studies that compare it to media coverage of events.)

People are busybodies and like to exert control over each other. It's a power trip.

If that was true we wouldn't have capital punishment at all. Capital punishment is all about revenge, people talk about it in terms of what the perpetrator "deserves". The fact that it's utterly innefective in stopping crimes is only now starting to get figured out and addressed.

It's entirely effective at stopping future crimes from that particular individual.

Well then, I guess we should be killing anyone who commits any crime. What a novel idea. i'm sure that will result in a perfectly well adjusted society.

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