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Comment by the_evacuator | Hacker News Reader

Article doesn't really highlight the environmental hooliganism practiced by these guys. They rip up a meadow in a national forest, or on BLM land, and they irrigate like crazy people, eroding everything rapidly, and they drive up and down the mountainside in their giant pickups. When they are done they leave everything including their trash and their toilets. When ordinary people go motorcycling in these public lands the growers chase them, shoot at them, and set booby traps. The whole thing is a public menace.

I think with legalization should come some kind of harsh regime for these pirates. Ruining public lands should be a serious felony.

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We have too many things that are felonies. A proper punishment would be to clean up all their mess and pay a fine.

"Should be a serious felony," is how we got into the police state we are approaching. Just because it's emotionally distasteful to uglify nature doesn't mean it warrants years in prison, never being able to work again, and never being able to vote again.

Some things can't be easily fixed. It can take years or even decades to restore damaged wilderness to something approaching its natural state.

Yes, I mean if it is something like toxic waste like Love Canal, that's one thing, but if it's dumping trash, that's easily remedied. Also, once the trash is removed, nature will typically revert to it's natural state all by itself. Humankind has to actively prevent nature from engulfing cities.

But to say, "they left trash everywhere, FELONY!" is a seriously emotional reaction. Criminal justice should be a rational not emotional thing. Is dumping trash the same thing as rape, robbery or murder? Certainly not. Felonies should be reserved for the harshest crimes against people, not littering or ingesting things.

The US has more people incarcerated, not only per capita, but as a total number than any other country in the developed world. This includes China. That statistic shows a serious, systemic problem with our justice system.

http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popula...

The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations.

https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-economics-of-the-america...

Kind of silly to compare China — they have very, very few murderers, drug traffickers and rapists in prison — their rapidly enforced death penalty sees to that.

Even if China imprisoned rather than executed, we'd still have a much higher number imprisoned. The US prison population is 33% higher total than China and almost 7x higher per capita. I guess you don't realize how messed up our justice system is. When you look at the numbers, it's a real eye opener. China is a distant #2 in total imprisoned yet they are 4x more populated than the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China#Ra...

The number of executions has dropped significantly since the Supreme People’s Court regained the power to review all death sentences in 2007; for instance, the Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed 12,000 people in 2002, 6,500 people in 2007, and roughly 2,400 in 2013 and 2014.

For actual numbers, we have 2.1 million people imprisoned and China has 1.6 million.

To be fair we probably have more violent and incorrigible people than China. For whatever reason.

Or our justice system is systemically broken.

Or both.

I'm really surprised at least several people don't believe this may be the case.

Suspecting ideology is maybe being substituted for objective reality?

The "line" is that we have so many people locked up because of unjust (racist, drugs, whatever) policies. And no doubt this is a very large component of the problem.

However, a very large number of people in prisons are dangerous or violent people who shouldn't be out in society at all and I don't think we could say their incarnation is discriminatory or unjust (although we could justifiably speak about how much of an anti pattern the current prison system.. but that's another topic).

Note: I don't say all, or even most in prisons fit this bill but many do.

I guess the point is a question. Why do we have such large number of violent and criminally minded people in the US? Do we have a larger number than China even taking into account population size differences? I bet we do.

TLDR, criminal justice system is broken in many ways, agreed. But I posit we (in the US) have a more violent and criminal population also. I think this is worth exploring rather than just parroting whatever anti-establishment line is in vogue at the moment.

Just to add, we can't blame the large prison population on drug offenses alone, although we do jail a lot of people for drugs (and should jail none IMOP) it's not the whole picture, particularly with state prisons where only about 1 in 5 people are jailed for drug offenses (Violent crimes being the biggest part of that pie).

Federal Drug incarcerations are a much higher percent, but this isn't low level users either.

When we ask, "why do we have so many people locked up?" we also should ask "why do we have so many people we need to lock up"? What the hell is our problem as a society that it's like this?

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html

We may, but do you really think we have the most violent people in the world? Do you think we have 7x more violent people per capita compared to #2 China?

That just doesn't add up.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/China/Unite...

According to this, the US vs China has:

6 times the amount of robberies per capita.

4 times the amount of murders per capita.

8 time the amount of burglaries per capita.

and...83 times the amount of assaults per capita (??) <page 2 on chart>.

It also says the US has 30% more people incarcerated than China which at ~4 times the population is indeed ~7 times the per capita incarceration rate. But given the stats above (along with our massive drug use and propensity to lock people up for that) it's not entirely unbelievable either.

I don't think the US has the most violent people in the world, no. But I do suspect the US has the most violent people among the subset of countries with the resources and framework to prosecute and pay for incarceration for that many people.

I scrolled year to year on that chart, and there are a lot of gaps, and all the years I looked at only had a few data points. I went back to 1988 and couldn't find the assault stats that showed up in the summary.

I suspect it would be difficult to find an actual breakdown of crime stats in China. It would be useful to compare it with a country that is more transparent with that sort of information.

Here's a blurb from the site:

The actual crime rate in China has so far been difficult to assess and confirm. Official statistics from the Chinese government says that crime in China is significantly lower than that of more advanced nations, including and especially the United States. Official estimates say that murder rate in China, for instance, is 5 times lower than that of the US.

#3 is Russia, which I would guess to be equally difficult to get statistics on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

Also, looking at the US crime stats, they are spotty as well. The assault rate you noted is from 1999, near our peak. Even with that we aren't #1 on almost all of the compared countries.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/profiles/United-Sta...

But some of your conclusions are right. The US incarcerates a lot for drug use, and incarcerates a lot longer for any crime. Furthermore, it's difficult to lead a normal life in the US with a record of incarceration which leads to more incarceration.

I think I read somewhere that a large number of sexual assaults (believe it was Hong Kong) go unreported. Maybe reporting is part of the difference.

I do intuitively believe the US has a higher violent crime rate but 83 times the amount of assaults per capita seems a bit much.

The problem isn’t trash, it’s clearcutting and soil erosion. Neither can be quickly or easily fixed, erosion especially isn’t going to be repaired without intervention.

OK, we've caught the perpetrators, spent a lot of taxpayers' money on keeping them in prison, then pushed out, mostly unable to work (except low-paying jobs), almost inviting them to do some worse offense just to feed themselves.

How did all that help restore the ruined patch of land?

Deterrent for others. Weed farming is lucrative, even large fines wouldn’t be a large deterrant.

Ruining a person's life is not a good deterrent.

If it were a serious felony, then perhaps they wouldn’t do it? If they continue to do it despite it being a serious felony, then they’ve written their own check.

Yes, that theory certainly eradicated drug use in the US.

Scaring people away by shooting at them should be a more serious offence than just making a mess. Of course it already is, so I don't really see the point of adding more felonies.

Really the problem isn't that people demand more and more felonies, but rather that they demand felonies for things that are already illegal.

With legalization comes the ability to use existing agricultural land without fear, effectively rendering this point moot.

Do you have further reading on these events? I agree with you 100% but I would argue that these growers are probably some of the lesser evils facing our public lands.

I'd rather run across an old composting toilet while biking than an old meth lab, so you have a point

You might be surprised by the scale. I know a few folks doing water management in California, and they've all independently brought up the exacerbating effects of unmonitored but significant water usage by illegal farms during the last few years of drought.

Don't have a link handy, though.

Search for "trespass grow" to find a lot of magazine articles and videos on the subject.

I may shake my head at clear-cutting and overgrazing but I'll say that I've never been chased off public land by a rancher nor fired upon by lumberjacks. The marijuana growers are ... unique.

Pretty common occurrence - http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1AM0C3

As a cyclist I shudder at the thought of motorcyclists ruining the trails, making noise and generally trashing the place.

My hill walking dad curses the mountain bikers and their damage to the terrain - leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories.

I hear you. The thing about a national forest is there are already roads, and already the sounds of logging. These are working lands. We set aside wilderness areas without roads, that are not even welcoming to horses, for those seeking peace.

Enjoy your lands.

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