26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we develop products. Our instincts about what other folks will pay for/want/value/use are rarely totally accurate.
“I don’t want to go to jail, therefore, jail will be a globally effective crime deterrent” is demonstrably false for this subset of the population.
From a purely behavioral science perspective, we know that humans deeply discount uncertain future downsides compared to short term certain upsides.
If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I strongly suggest reading Mark Kleinman, particularly his work on “swift, certain, fair” as an effective means to address this population and challenge.
More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal and only criminalize the activity of people not like them.
This is true by definition. Anyway, what sort of violent crime do you propose to legalize?
a parent physically abusing their child when they feel like it (bear in mind the parent is also taking care of said child)?
a parent bound by society reduced to moaning at their child (think kids under 10) hoping to control them?
I know which is more perverse.
All forms of hitting children are abusive.
Also, what about when children hit their siblings, or their parents, or their class mates? I don't think that locking these children up is conducive to their welfare either.
I remember being in Texas and seeing on the news how a guy shot another guy in a bar and they were not prosecuting because the person who was shot was not pressing charges, but that's Texas.
The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would still apply.
Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does not effectively deter.
So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand those who are currently not effectively deterred.
More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.
In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty.
> Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?
This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.
Crimes of passion (i.e. many violent crimes, especially) don't take the system and its deterrents into account.
Because I hope that’s not what you are saying.
We can put significant effort into understanding criminals, for the purposes of both preemptive treatment and reactive rehabilitation, but this is not likely to eradicate crime. What do you suppose we should do with criminals who continue to commit violent or disruptive crimes in perpetuity?
To clarify, I think the system could improve: extremely long sentences may not need to be issued for first time offenders, even if they are very serious. But I don’t think the system can remove permanent sentences if criminals exhibit a clear predilection that is resistent to all known forms of treatment.
Been studied, replicated, and thoroughly tested.
It’s just one option as well.
There are many many more.
About one-third of probationers and parolees fail the terms of their supervision. Over three-quarters of parolees are re-arrested within five years, and over half return to prison. High failure rates for people on probation and parole—whether for new offenses, revocations, or individuals who abscond from supervision—result in increased crime, crowded prisons and jails, and strained public budgets. Indeed, every single one of the seventeen states that have undertaken justice reinvestment since 2010 has found probation or parole revocations to be an important driver of their growing prison populations. And despite a variety of local, state, and Federal initiatives over the last two decades, failure rates for supervised individuals have not meaningfully fallen.
Why Swift Certain and Fair? Because—if the conditions are right—a SCF program can take high-risk individuals in your jurisdiction and substantially reduce their drug use, revocation and re-arrest rates, and the subsequent reliance on incarceration.
Swift: SCF programs deliver a sanction immediately upon detection of a violation, which is critical in changing behavior. Responding swiftly also supports perceptions of the fairness of the program, reinforcing that element of SCF programs.
Certain: The consistency and predictability of punishments make the consequences of bad behavior clear to the offender, reinforcing the need to make better decisions and change behavior. An essential role is played by the clearly-defined behavioral contract with the offender—a tool that has repeatedly been proven to increase perceptions about the certainty of punishment.
Fair: The clear demarcation of the offenders’ new supervision conditions and the opportunity for a fresh start allow the offender to regain their sense of self-control. The contract enhances the perceived fairness of any subsequent punishment; this perception of fairness is further supplemented by the sparing rather than harsh level of punishment upon violation, which additionally limits disruption of employment and other non-criminal routines and relationships.
Drug use is a symptom, the result of another problem. Consider, for example, an undiagnosed personality disorder, or an untreated childhood trauma. Furthermore, what I'm going to mention next isn't helping that either.
> the opportunity for a fresh start
That's just marketing shenanigans. In reality this is rather relative; if one has become a convicted felon, they remain a convicted felon for life. This haunts them till the end of their time. The stigma hampers functionality in society in multiple ways: friendships, and employment first and foremost, but also hypocritically the 2nd amendment (of which I as a European am no proponent of, but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander), and the loss of other rights [1]. This society inhibited perfectionism inhibits a defeatist attitude which lures a convicted felon back on the dark path of criminal behaviour on top of things like personality traits or already financial issues. Prisoner series like Orange Is The New Black (though certainly not the first!) beautifully articulate this specific problem, and a myriad other.
The problem is that we see criminals as individuals who cause an issue in society. Instead, we should regard them as individuals who are unable to participate in society and look at it from that angle, by trying to make them participate in society. Getting rid of the defeatist attitude is one way to increase participation in society, looking for medical treatment. Some examples of problem solving procedures (vary on individual basis) are dental procedure (for e.g. former meth addicts), basic insurance, medicine/drugs (methadone for e.g. former heroin addicts), psychological therapy.
I don't want to be negative about the program, though:
> Fair: The clear demarcation of the offenders’ new supervision conditions and the opportunity for a fresh start allow the offender to regain their sense of self-control. The contract enhances the perceived fairness of any subsequent punishment; this perception of fairness is further supplemented by the sparing rather than harsh level of punishment upon violation, which additionally limits disruption of employment and other non-criminal routines and relationships.
This puts the other parts into perspective, making it indeed more fair for the convicted felon (or less unfair, depending on your perspective). That doesn't mean the sentence itself isn't still out of proportion; it already is put out of proportion because there's societal punishments on top of the sentence. Some of which are harmful for rehabilitation.
Incidentally, fixing this might also make things like arrests generally less violent.
[1] https://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-rights-do-convicte...
I think it is interesting to find such parallels in the design features of such a wide range of systems as courts, prisons, network firewalls, and authentication systems. One can imagine various interpretations in response to these parallels: on one extreme, the designs could demonstrate common cognitive biases of the humans designing them; on the other, the functioning systems could be illustrating natural truths that have been discovered through the evolution of these systems...
What I hope is that those people get to experience prison for inside, and even better, for some BS reason, like the reasons tons of people are in jail for (possession of marijuana, breathing while black, and so on).
So what I "sound like" is quite irrelevant. Except if you believe that people who cherish revenge and punishment of inmates will one day replace the people population based on my wish.
Which kind of implies that one of the goals of prison is/should be to move to a state where they are no longer a danger.
As for the public safety element, yes, but these people mostly weren’t locked up for life. What this shows, at least, in my opinion, is that much more intensive psychological and therapeutic interventions are needed, because if anything, incarceration as it currently exists would seem to exacerbate the problem.
Becaue the cost is both clear and intensive: Depriving a human being of liberty for additional years or decades. This should be done only when absolutely neccessary, should it not? We disapprove of imprisonable offenses intensely, but these are still human beings, with rights. It seems to me a humane system does not inflict thousands of cumulative additional incarceration years merely to keep the implementation of justice “simple.”
The problem with this is it only looks at the problem from a maintenance perspective rather than a preventative root cause analysis. Like adressing the relationship between cyclical poverty and cyclical incarceration
As far as I'm able to find, only two large countries in history have ever locked up more than even 0.5% of their population for extended periods of time: the USSR for approximately 15 years during the height of the Stalinist period (late 1930s to early 1950s), and the USA for about 30 years, from the late 1980s to present. So I wouldn't consider that a "normal" approach to managing crime.
In particular, the institution of slavery and perhaps even more so, the culture of segregation, condescension, and disdain that followed from The Reconstruction onwards resulted in such drastic dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and demoralization of a huge percentage of the population that has not been seen anywhere else in the world.
No solution can be drafted that does not address this ugly stain on our history (continuing to the present) and still ever hope to work, and whitewashing history books and tiptoeing around this elephant in the room in the name of political correctness does us all a disservice.
- $71k/person/year
- 130,000 inmates
- 135% of capacity
- highest rate of incarceration in the world
We're maxed out - and all this doesn't even solve the root issues of mental illness and poverty. We need alternative ideas with better ROI.IMO there is no politically easy solution or we would have already done it. Society has to change how it views criminals and invest resources in the things that increase the likelihood of crime. For example, rich psychopaths commit a lot less violent crime than poor psychopaths. Social services, addiction counseling, education, etc help. But its extremely hard to convince people more resources should go to helping criminals vs punishing them.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0006...
All the science points to preventing initial conditions for conviction and significant improvements needed post release.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...
https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx
https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...
I don’t see how that’s true. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, the system was encoded based on what the designers knew about motivation and desires at the time?
The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image.
So we can really boil it down to, people didn’t understand human nature as well when these systems were created. Then, even as better understanding evolved and continues to improve, the problem of inertia and entrenched thinking works against change.
From that we can conclude one of the biggest problems with the criminal justice system is, simply that it’s impeded in the exact same way so many other systems are.
edit after comment: Point is the description of the problem seems to imply pretentious motivations, when the simplest explanation is they just didn’t know how things worked at the time.
My understanding of the comment you’re responding to is that the nature of human experience precludes that ideal understanding, not that people would purposely ignore it. The point appears to be that humans encounter intrinsic difficulty in understanding the myriad idiosyncratic motivations of others in the species, not that they deliberately don’t want to understand it.
In other words: I don’t think you and the parent commenter are disagreeing.
My point is the comment suggests almost an egocentric process, i.e. modeling a system in our own image, when actually it’s explained by simple ignorance.
In any case, you disagree with that, so I suppose you are disagreeing with the parent; my interpretation of the parent commenter’s point was that this ignorance you speak of is pretty tightly coupled with innate egocentrism. I don’t think they’d consider that necessarily malicious if they consider it from that framework, whereas you might consider it malicious if the process is egocentric because you disagree with the same relationship; vis-a-vis ignorance and egocentrism.
Does that preclude us from trying to fix the problem?
Additionally, speaking as someone that agrees with the scientific premise of your argument, any alternative would be a trade-off, i.e. the percentage of the population that are not committing crimes at all would need to remain sufficiently deterred, which may change when the deterrent does.
EDIT: But for that period it was not as much, that is true.
This study is not as comprehensive but in 30-state USA study, 77% of prisoners are jailed again within 5 years of release:
Check out the list based on Alesina’s analysis.
Or go to Sweden. In the younger population groups, muslims are now are huge minority.
Online sources suggest about 30% of Stockholm is non-Swedish, and most of those people are European. New York and Chicago are only about 30-35% European descent, and that’s mixed between Irish, German, Swedish, English, etc.
It’s way more diverse in Sweden. I lived in NYC, and have travelled a lot in Sweden. Nowadays, large Swedish cities are much more diverse.
For whatever reason that objective "diversity" doesn't seem diverse to some people.
They also seem to have more but smaller (as a percentage of the total) ethnic groups than the US. Again, while mathematically more diverse than a big chunk of African or Latin-Americans, people seem to view this as less diverse.
It just leads to uncomfortable places, especially in the context of Swedish society.
So you are confusing mental/behavior explanations with unscientific correlation-hunting racial explanations that are too popular in discourse.
Your comment here is emblematic of exactly what HN discussions need not to do. That requires the strength to resist temptation.
Please provide some factual, quantified basis for this statement.
“These studies can be socially controversial, and so authors must be especially careful in the way they conduct their research and present their conclusions.”
At a certain point, demanding empirical evidence for a clearly observable societal zeitgeist becomes disingenuous or obtuse, regardless of how well-intentioned the request is. It stifles discussion that can otherwise proceed.
I don't think the poster needs charity. Clarity is more like it.
It also leaves any potential of discussing "chilling effect" like things. You're measurement does nothing to gauge the overall zeitgeist of the time, which would clearly influence the outlook of any researcher who didn't have balls of steel and bulletproof funding.
I agree the author needs more clarity. And the clear thing to say is that "one could easily imagine this type of study in the United States causing problems for the author due to possible accusations of racism".
I do not see those sorts of comments as up to the usual standards of HackerNews. Perhaps to be expected on an article like this, but still they should be discouraged.
What you're asking is not just uncharitable, it doesn't even make sense (even if it was possible).
It's also irrelevant to what the parent said, which is not a quantified claim that such studies are "labelled racist more than 50% of the time", but a casual "usually labelled racist".
In casual conversation "usually" doesn't mean some hard 50% + c, any more so than "often" and "a lot of times".
"Do you have any references for this?" might be less strident.
Though that's hardly the only place or time.
SPLC maintain a set of references on more current instances.
[1]: Though not necessarily xenophobic; the difference between the two confuses many people, as does the difference between sexist and misogynistic. Xenophobia and misogyny imply a certain intent, a certain feeling of resentment towards other races, cultures and genders, while racism and sexism are merely actions or inactions -- usually unintentional and sometimes even well-meaning -- that serve to increase or maintain the current disparity in power among different groups. While I don't like applying the terms sexist and racist to people, as they're best applied to actions, laws, rules, institutions etc., we can apply them to those who do racist/sexist things. I know I'm racist and sexist, and I can assume you are, too. If you spend some time learning about those concepts, you know it is very much expected for people in racist/sexist societies to be racist and sexist, and it takes active effort to fight them. People should not be offended that they're racist and sexist, just as they should not be offended to learn that they may be carrying and spreading germs that cause infectious diseases, although I'm sure many were insulted to be "labeled" as disease-spreading when microbes were first discovered. Once you understand those "labels" aren't insults but well-researched observations, you know you shouldn't be offended by them, but you should learn to identify racist/sexist behaviors and prevent them, just as you learned to wash your hands.
You might not, but lots of people do -- and publicly say so.
Obviously, I can't vouch for everyone, but since I haven't seen any behavior of the kind you refer to (certainly not among more-or-less mainstream figure), I can safely assume it's not done by "lots of people".
Plenty of people jump on the “that’s racism” bandwagon. If they can’t attack the math they attack the author and make wild accusations about their intent.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies, and socially most would rather live with comfortable lies.
He literally equated challenging bad ideas with racism.
He was so angered by the statement, "We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam get conflated as bigotry against Muslims as people. It is intellectually ridiculous." that he went on the offensive and said, "That's gross, it's racist. It's like saying you're a 'shifty Jew.' You guys are saying: 'If you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles, like freedom of speech"
Whatever your opinion about the acceptability of criticizing Islam over violence, sexism or treatment of homosexuals, it's clear that some people do equate that criticism with racism.
Ideological intolerance can often make people blind to nuanced positions, such as being open to a group of people but not all of their traditional beliefs.
> " no one is being criticized for actual science"
Take a look at what evolutionary psychologists and biologists have been facing over the past decade. The criticism coming form people who have little experience in their fields, but intense political and social beliefs, has been intense.
That said, it also doesn’t match the claims you’re making. Affleck wasn’t saying that no bad had ever happened with Islam, but rather that it wasn’t good to make such broad claims about a huge and diverse population — note that each of the things mentioned are also true of Christians but we are far less likely to treat such blanket statements about them as useful or accurate.
> Take a look at what evolutionary psychologists and biologists have been facing over the past decade.
I’m well aware of that and you’re misrepresenting it. They’re not being criticized for actual science but for unsupported claims which aren’t supported by the scientific evidence but are conveniently close to existing political beliefs.
The "rich elite man" Affleck was yelling at for criticizing Islam wrote two full books criticising Christianity earlier in his career and received very little blowback for them. In fact, those books are what made him a "rich elite man", as you put it.
>> Take a look at what evolutionary psychologists and biologists have been facing over the past decade.
> I’m well aware of that and you’re misrepresenting it.
How can you both be well aware of what I was thinking and that I was misrepresnting? I didn't even reference a specific incident! You've both mentally filled in an example and invented some misrepresentation you believe I've made about it.
The principle of charity dictates the opposite.
Yes, obviously
So yes, at least in Sweden you'll voice an opinion like this at your own peril. You describe yourself as a radical leftist (and a radical feminist). I can all but guarantee that you would be an outcast among your peers if you even hint to having such opinions. A good example of this phenomenon can be found with Amineh Kakabaveh [3], a Kurdish woman who was shunned her party [4] because of her active stance against honour crimes, for women's rights and secularism.
[1] https://jmg.gu.se/digitalAssets/1284/1284227_nr38.pdf
[2] The wall seems to be crumbling a bit now that it is nearly impossible to remain ignorant of the facts. Some politicians still try to keep up the narrative but critical voices are now heard even in some mainstream publications.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amineh_Kakabaveh
[4] "Vänsterpartiet", they used to call themselves the left-wing communist party but ditched the "communist" term after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
That's not what I meant. What I meant is that the left, even the radical left -- as an intellectual movement -- does not find this kind of statements racist in and of themselves.
> This is due in part to the fact that the media - print and broadcast - are very active in disavowing such standpoints and putting those labels on people who hold them.
But this is different, and I would agree with the viewpoint that such discourse is racist, and precisely what I meant by saying that the point is misunderstood. The left does not consider a factual statement such as "muslims carry out a disproportionately large number of terror acts" as itself racist. On the other hand, such constant discourse is racist because its subtext is to instill the idea that terrorism is innately muslim (factually false) or that Muslims are somehow intrinsically drawn to terrorism (also false). If talk shows were to constantly talk about the temperature of the sun, that would also mean that there is something going on beside the desire to educate the public of a scientific fact. I.e., there is a difference between some fact and the action of repeatedly talking about that fact in contexts that aren't really about statistics.
It's like that famous story of a man who escapes the insane asylum and, intent on not being taken back, decides to only speak the truth so he won't be considered crazy, and he goes around telling everyone he sees "the Earth is round." It's not the fact itself that is crazy in this story. Because I work in the tech industry I have come across quite a few people in the course of my carreer who are on the autistic spectrum, and some of them were simply unable to understand how a statement and the constant repetition of that statement are different acts and may have completely different meanings.
> I can all but guarantee that you would be an outcast among your peers if you even hint to having such opinions.
You are absolutely wrong about that. Like I said, there is a big difference in subtext between constantly bringing up some fact and stating that the fact itself is racist. The facts I mentioned are a statistical description of some current (and transient) historical conditions; frequently bringing them up is a sign of a (racist) political sentiment.
This article shows the issue of doing so. The subtext from much of left literature is to instill the idea that violence is innately male (factually false) or that men are somehow intrinsically drawn to violence (also false). Even if averaged it out to a whole 2% of the male population, the other 98% are not. The association to the male sex is similar to the association to race or the association between Muslims and terrorism. An other word for it would be correlation.
The article has an issue with calling out race, and it should because its a very small portion of non-native swedes that do violent crime. It has no issue to call out males, even though the association is weaker. That is politics, and a very specific one at that.
Why would there be? The point of view is not one of describing some hypothetical world but our concrete world. If in our concrete world the position of, say, white men and that of blacks is different, why would you even assume that the two should be treated the same in discussions of society? No sociologist, anthropologist or historian would say that social issues in an imaginary world where blacks and whites have equal power should be studied in the same way as in a real world where they don't. Statistics are studied in their appropriate context; otherwise, they're misleading.
> The subtext from much of left literature is to instill the idea that violence is innately male
No, violence is usually male, but I don't think we consider it innate in the sense you seem to allude to (i.e., as the main cause or as a sign of an inability to change). In general, we don't like talking about innate qualities for several reasons. 1. The science is vague and weak at best -- even when innate qualities are found, their respective strength is unknown and the effect size is usually far too small compared to observation, which suggests that in many cases innate causes have weak explanatory power, and 2. innate causes make for very bad excuses when it comes to calls for changing behavior; innate biological capabilities explain 100% of humans' inability to fly, yet that hasn't stopped us from wanting to and succeeding in building airplanes. In fact, if you find any subtext in leftist thought particularly emphasizes any innate uncontrollable trait, then I'd say you've either found something quite unusual or you've completely missed the mark. The general tendency not to focus on innate "essentialism" is among the left's most distinguishing marks. It's not that we deny the possibility of strong innate forces, but we think that even when they are overwhelmingly strong -- such as the case of flying and airplanes -- they are often overcome, and such a focus is often used as a reactionary stance against change even though that does not follow even from the claimed innateness.
> The association to the male sex is similar to the association to race or the association between Muslims and terrorism.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that both are indeed correlations. No in the sense that men have been subjugating women almost everywhere almost constantly for many centuries if not millennia, while Islam has become abnormally overrepresented in terrorism only very recently, correlated with decline, not rise in its power.
> In general, we don't like talking about innate qualities
"Men violence against women" - Title of a lot of writing, government reports, books, and so on from the left. We don't see "foreigners violence against Swedes" or "Muslims violence against non-believers". That would be titles from far right writing. A spade is a spade on both side when looked at from the middle.
> men have been subjugating women almost everywhere almost constantly for many centuries if not millennia, while Islam has become abnormally overrepresented in terrorism only very recently
No, yes, and no. Religion has been associated with wars and violence for centuries if not millennia. Gender roles has also existed for that long, but only very recently being describe as subjugating. History get interpreted through political leaning and rewriting history is an old political trick by both the left and right. Reading how life was a few hundred years have very little in the form of gender subjugating, unless you count taking men from their home and against their will putting them on the war front to die. Much of cultural values in historical society can be derive from two core gender roles, that of the nurture role and the support role. One exist to create the family, the other exist to supply food and defense. If we want to describe that as subjugating then lets call what it is. Both are being subjugated. Take any time in history and what we have is a lack of liberty for the 99% of the population, men or women. The 99% rarely if ever has power, control, or freedom from subjugating.
But that's not what we do. First, instead of looking at just 2% of the population as you seem to suggest we should do, we look at all of them, and on the whole, much more power is held by men than by women. Second, we feminists generally care much more about the bottom 1% (or 50%) of society -- be they men, women, black or white -- than the rich and powerful men at the top 1%. You can see that not only in historical events (feminists were a strong power among the abolitionists in 19th century US) but even if you look at current events, and see that women are disproportionately represented in demonstrations against unfair incarceration, against deportation of refugees etc..
> "Men violence against women" - Title of a lot of writing, government reports, books, and so on from the left.
I don't see any reference to innate qualities here.
> We don't see "foreigners violence against Swedes" or "Muslims violence against non-believers".
First, because unlike men violence against women, those are actually outliers rather than the norm. Second, like I wrote in another comment, I don't understand your expectation. If the position of Muslims and immigrants in a Western country is so very different from that of native men, why would you even want them to be treated the same? Is a diamond handled the same way as limestone just because they are both rocks? Note that I am not talking about any innate qualities, just the current state of affairs.
> Gender roles has also existed for that long, but only very recently being describe as subjugating.
That's just a total and complete fabrication. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protofeminism
> Reading how life was a few hundred years have very little in the form of gender subjugating, unless you count taking men from their home and against their will putting them on the war front to die.
I actually studied history (mostly medieval) in grad school, and what you're writing here is total BS.
> Much of cultural values in historical society can be derive from two core gender roles, that of the nurture role and the support role. One exist to create the family, the other exist to supply food and defense.
Do you still believe that the world is made of the four classical elements? Do you believe that the Earth is flat? If you had actually studied history from actual historians and primary sources, the ideas you mention here would sound equally ridiculous to you as the four elements and the flat Earth. 1. they are mostly ahistorical fabrications, and 2. to the small extent that they are historically true, their explanative power is false as the claim would work in the same way to justify any current state of affairs -- we're here because the system is good. For example, in the time of slavery I could use the exact same description to justify slavery; in fact people did exactly that (and slavery has made much more economical "sense" than the subjugation of women) and yet changing the system turined out just fine. Finally, suppose that this fantasy were true (although I truly feel sorry for you that you've somehow been convinced by such BS), as I mentioned above throughout history women have expressed anger at their subjugation -- do you morally support constantly harming billions of others even for some imagined greater good? Do you also support slavery, then?
I can't stop you from being of the opinion that women should be subjugated (unfortunately, this is far from a fringe opinion; in a way, it's still the ruling opinion although it's no longer usually made so explicit), but please don't try to justify that position using fabricated history.
Kritikerna menar att det finns de som vill ha brottsstatistik
över etnicitet, det är en helt annan debatt. Det är rasism att
koppla ihop brott med etnicitet eller religion. Den debatten
är bortspelad för länge sedan, förutom hos vissa moderater som
vill värva röster från Sverigedemokraterna, säger Daniel Riazat.
This translates to: Critics state there are those who want to collect statistics
on ethnicity related to criminality but that is an entirely
different debate. ___It is racist to connect crime with ethnicity
or religion___. This debate has played out a long time ago apart
from some 'Moderates' (neo-liberals) who want to gather votes
for the Sweden Democrats (nationalists) says Daniel Riazat.
This is a literal quote from a congress which finished today, "It is racist to connect crime with ethnicity or religion".[1] https://www.svd.se/v-vill-samla-in-info-om-etnicitet-och-rel...
Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist',
or it turns into an ad hominem attack on the authors, or struck down
in the media for singling out some minority group.
You stated this was not true, upon which many reactions - mine amongst them - came with citations to prove that the original claim was, indeed, true. I presented a few examples to prove this point but you keep on talking around the issue - "studies are labelled racist, authors are attacked verbally" (and sometimes physically, see the actions of Antifa/AFA and several islamist groups). The result of this is yet again shown by a study published by the Swedish defence academy ("Försvarshögskolan") which was recently published. To quote from an article published today on SVT (Sweden's national broadcaster) about the fact that Sweden has become a recruiting ground for islamic terrorism due to the fact that this activity was close to risk-free in this country [1]: Vilken roll kan det ha spelat?
– Jag tror att den aktivism som fanns mot både Säkerhetspolisen
och de som försökte lyfta allvaret i de här frågorna. Det gjorde
att tröskeln blev högre för både politiker och andra att ge sig
in i det här området, säger han.
– Man riskerade att bli utpekad som rasist på ett sätt som man
inte såg i andra europeiska länder. Där var den här frågan lika
okontroversiell som vikten av att bekämpa nazism och högerextremism.
Men i Sverige tog det lång tid innan det gick att diskutera jihadismen
på samma sätt som vi under lång tid diskuterat nazism, säger Hyllengren.
Translated: What role can this have played?
– I think that the activism against both the security services and those
who tried to point out the seriousness of the situation [played a role].
This made that the bar was raised both for politicians and other who
would dare to speak out on these subjects, he said.
– You ran the risk of being pointed out as racist in a way which was not
seen in other European countries. There this question was as uncontroversial
as the importance of fighting nazism and right-wing extremism. In Sweden on
the other hand it took a long time before it was possible to discuss jihadism
in the same way we've been discussing nazism for a long time, says Hyllengren.
This is, yet again, a literal quote proving the point of the original statement which launched this thread. While it is possible to discuss the finer details of what and why and how the extreme-left wants to put a racist label on this but no that, the fact stands and the effects it has on society are chilling. Where freedom of expression was once a stalwart talking point for the traditional 'left' the current stance taken by many of those identifying themselves as 'left-wing' is an anathema to this foundation of the enlightened society.No, you most certainly have not. Study A that mentions claim X may be not racist, while study B that claims X may be racist. I said that A is not racist, and your examples of B being labeled racist do not disprove it. My whole point about the unfortunate misunderstanding is that people think that since B is racist (due to context) then X is "unfairly labeled as racist" when, in fact, it is not X which is racist, but B.
> This is, yet again, a literal quote proving the point of the original statement which launched this thread.
I don't know about the situation in Sweden so I can't comment on it. It's possible that what I said is not the case in Sweden. On the other hand, it is also possible that the person quoted, like you, misunderstands what it is that is labeled racist. I do know that claims like yours about X being labeled racist when it is, in fact, B which is called racist because it is racist, are made in the US as well, despite being generally false. It's like someone complaining about being laughed at while talking about, say, bed bugs, then saying that bed bugs are ridiculed, but neglects to mention that he was wearing a bug-shaped hat while talking about bed-bugs, and it is the delivery that was ridiculed. Context matters.
> The left, and in particular the radical left, has no issue having such constant discourse in regards to men.
Why would there be? The point of view is not one of describing some hypothetical world but our concrete world.
...but in that case the 'radical left' should not have any problems with factual conclusions about the over-representation of people from certain ethnic groups in crime statistics. As this is definitely not the case - anyone even hinting at this is soon labelled racist, cast out of the ingroup, no longer invited to the television studios to discuss politics with the in-crowd and generally portrayed as an all-out bad person - this statement falls flat on its face. The 'radical left', and especially that contingent which labels themselves as 'radical feminist' do make an exception for two distinct categories: men in general (around 50% of the population) and - to use their own terminology - 'cis-gender heterosexual white men' (and 'whites' in general). These groups can be singled out by their group membership and accused of all sorts of things without risk.We don't. We have a problem with the context this is brought up with. Like the Kiergegaard story about the madman and the round Earth.
> this is definitely not the case - anyone even hinting at this is soon labelled racist
Totally made up BS. If you choose to misunderstand things, that's not our fault. OTOH, people who believe that blacks are somehow more innately inclined towards crime -- a scientific fallacy -- are racist, and so their "labeling" as such is not only justified but necessary. I don't know what word best describes racism other than "racism".
Xenophobia means "fear of outsiders" and misogyny means "hatred or contempt of women". There's nothing implied or indirect about either.
I think you’re confusing studies with conclusions. What you’re describing doesn’t happen but what is common are studies finding a correlation which leads to someone claiming causation and then complaining when they’re criticized.
As an example, in the US it’s uncontested that some populations have worse academic performance. That doesn’t get criticized seriously. What does get criticism is when a right-wing commenter tries to say that this must be because of genetic causes or the popular euphemism “culture” – and that criticism is well deserved since that ignores all of the other explanations and checks which actual science would require and goes straight to the same conclusion which avowed racists have been pushing for centuries.
In terms of the entire population, probably:
* 96% never convicted
* 3% convicted once
* 1% convicted as many times as the justice system allows until well into middle age (average of five times)
An interesting question is: How many of the 3% are released and take up normal life, and how many are not convicted again because their first offense was severe enough to warrant a long sentence? Edit: Unfortunately, the paper can't answer this question.
>The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.
Very interesting, so if you get past your teens without criminality you seem to not become a criminal.
'Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man'
There is a lot of truth in this. When I think back to my childhood there were always a few kids who were just bad.
They came from the same background, had the same advantages, and so on but there was still something evil about them.
Typical behaviours included stuff like sadistic cruelty to animals, bullying , random violence and vandalism with no real logic or reason to why they would act in such a manner?
It could be explained away by saying something would be going on behind the scenes at home but (in these few cases) I really don't believe it.
Of course, from as far as I can remember, all these people went on to be criminals of one sort or another in adulthood.
Did they really though?
Thinking back to my childhood recently, I've come to almost exactly the opposite conclusion. There were some kids who I thought were just naturally shitty until I experienced enough of life to realize that they were the ones getting beaten up by their angry or alcoholic parents or being emotionally abused by a narcissistic family member.
These were all things that I saw the signs of going to their houses or at sports games, etc. as a kid, but it was so far outside of my frame of reference that I didn't understand the context for what was happening. That angry arm grab and wrench just because dad didn't like the choice of font on a book report? Not a sign of a healthy home life, especially if that was the way he behaved with an "outside observer" in the house.
It's all still anecdotal of course, with my small sample size and situation, but after going to a small school with the same ~25 kids (all from similar middle class households) for 9 years I can say that later success in life was strongly correlated to the ones that had supportive and non-traumatic home lives.
In the cases I described before though, I honestly don't think this explains it. If it does their parents were doing a good job of hiding it?
When you control for income and wealth, particularly intergeneraltional, racial differences disappear.
There is evidence that economic inequality has little to no effect whatsoever (1, 2).
There is also evidence that inequality is predictive for blacks but no whites (3).
There is also data that does support your latter conclusion, but my point is that this issue isn’t as clear cut as you’re framing it as.
(1) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/70/4/1035/22326...
(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630
(3) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999....
We shouldn't be afraid of getting statistics, but you're indeed correct that you must consider other factors when it comes to interpretation.
Please provide some factual support for this. Specifically studies that are _like_ this in their construction. Is it possible that there are studies which are, in fact, racist?
Another case is poorer immigrant minorities committing more crimes than the baseline population (because of their poorer upbringing, lack of opportunities, alienation from the host society, because some things are culturally OK in their old culture but crimes in their new one, etc).
1. Drug prohibition related. 2. Keeping it Real going wrong.
The Drug War and inter-generational poverty are two tough nuts to crack. The American mythology of Bootstraps and Individualism that's so baked into our culture gives us limited toolsets for dealing with these problems because they helped create the problems in the first place.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20indiv...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rugged+individualism%22&l...
See particularly:
https://books.google.com/books?id=85cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22rugged+i...
I'm not a specialist, but I'd think that giving someone a job, a place to live, and a weekly therapy session would do a lot more to prevent future crime than locking him up with a bunch of other violent offenders that have nothing to do all day long.
Sometimes restricting someones freedom is necessary to protect others. But right now we are doing it backward: we lock people up after they committed a crime, but there's very little that we can do to protect potential victims before it is too late.
It sounds like we need to invest more in mental health.
Siderant: I find it funny how humans work. On a very personal level, we love each other (you <> your parents or significant other), but the further the connection goes to other people the less we care. Whereas if we cared about everyone in a very loving way, we would probably not get rid of people we don't like.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t think your conclusion is directly supported by this study.
Since (a) the site guidelines explicitly ask you not do this; (b) you've ignored our recent request to stop doing this, and (c) you've been using multiple accounts to do it in this thread, we've banned this account.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
A very low number of people are ever convicted of a violent crime (they could have also written "3.9% of population accountable for 100% of violent crime convictions"). I think a better way of saying the same thing as the title is "26% of violent criminals commit 63% of violent crimes."
http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow-murd...
"The results were remarkable. Among the 200 gang members who became directly involved with CIRV, violent offending fell by almost half, according to a 2011 study. Weapon possession was down 85%. Even among gang members who had not attended a call-in, violence had fallen by almost a quarter."
(I suspect from the places named that the more corrupt the police are the more violence is present, but have no evidence for that).
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents...
A particularly powerful quote from the article:
On whether the community wanted police to back off after the death of Freddie Gray
“No. That represented our progressives, our activists, our liberal journalists, our politicians, but it did not represent the overall community. Because we know for a fact that around the time Freddie Gray was killed, we start to see homicides increase. We had five homicides in that neighborhood while we were protesting.”
I wonder if the media provocateurs and the liberal journalists will look into this, or perhaps even consider the idea that their narrative has directly lead to the deaths of minorities?
Higher death rate than a tanks-and-carbombs national emergency? Police routinely planting toy guns on kids they've murderd? Something is deeply, deeply wrong there and the rest of the US should stage an intervention.
Please don't post ideological boilerplate to HN. This is not a site for ideological battle.
We may like equality but Nature likes the power law.
Search youtube for Jordan Peterson on this topic.
The challenge is to fix that 1%, without terrorizing the N% who look vaguely similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds-ri...
Exceedingly common in population distributions.
But Willie Horton terrifies people in a way that Bernie Madoff does not, so I expect that "tough on crime" will continue to exclude white collar crime.
How would you measure? Dollar value? Number of crimes? Number of victims of crime?
There's a sentiment here in this discussion that we should lock violent criminals away with extreme prejudice, even at the cost of false positives. (Which is the at odds with the idea of having criminal conviction require proof "beyond a reasonable doubt".) I wonder if people are similarly enthusiastic about such harsh treatment of white-collar criminals.
Which is a double standard; if I'd steal an iPhone from the tax avoiding Apple then that's theft. Heck they even mention that the price includes all kind of levies such as environmental and taxes. Yet when they steal from my government (who represent me) then that's totally fine? Or, if someone would operate a client computer from a country where piracy is illegal, but the server would be hosted in a country where piracy is legal, then suddenly the whole act is illegal even though the computer who executes the commands is allowed to.
I don't have the numbers, so I'm very curious what's more damaging: tax avoidance or piracy. I've even seen criminal acts like mass selling pirated DVDs being also tax evasion. Yet all the crap within the Panama Papers is not? How that does rhyme?
Furthermore it doesn't appear like anyone in power cares enough about tax avoidance in order for it to be solved (we, as in civilians of governments from all over the world, are missing out on a massive amount of tax dollars).