The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
voiceofsandiego.org
voiceofsandiego.org
If we want fewer repeat offenders, maybe we should stop punishing them after they fulfill their punishment.
How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out? If you were to offer your home as a halfway house or something similar, would you feel safe without any sort of guarantee for your safety?
Then I would make it a requirement that every state offer a realistic way to have felonies expunged by petition after a certain length of time. Prove you're not a problem, get back to a clean record.
Honestly, there are a lot of people I don't want around me or my kids who haven't been convicted of a crime. It's hardly a perfect filter as it is.
Even better might be spending directly on ex-cons to better integrate them back into society (education, training, etc), instead of spending copious amounts on detention, security, punishment. The resulting decrease in recidivism probability is likely well worth it in most cases.
Also programs for locating at-risk for crime individuals and making sure they have better alternatives, to lower crime rate in first place.
The main problem is I'm quite skeptical that you could consider most criminals as "rational"/well informed of their possibilities and consequences of choices. Therefore increasing punishment probably doesn't change significantly their behavior, only might worsen the outcome once they leave detention in a negatively-reinforcing environment, not to mention consume public resources that could be better employed -- like targeted education clearing the minds of at risk individuals on what are the likely outcomes of criminal life compared to alternatives.
I would also add that the means bit is rather important. If I was getting out and realized how slim my chances of actually getting a job and supporting myself were, I might plan on doing more crimes. There isn't much incentive not to. On the other hand, if I knew I'd be OK just by going through the program, I'm more likely to do that.
This is mostly a result of words. If someone who committed a crime 2 years ago and someone who committed a crime 42 years ago are both "former criminals", people will avoid both of them.
>How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out?
Time is not perfect, but it is simple, effective and hard to cheat.
... on the people who work in it. Not on the kids. They hardly get mentioned at all.
The kids barely get mentioned at all. And of course, when the system abuses kids (including literally), the employees/bureaucrats are protected/shielded from consequences and the kids ?
Sometimes it seems like half of them commit suicide. This is distressingly common thread in the stories about these people. Now I get it, stories only make it out if they're dramatic enough, but still.
In the name of being "nice" to the kids they are locked up, excluded from schooling, imprisoned (including in solitary confinement for weeks), beaten ("pain impulses" is the psychological term), constantly moved around (so they don't have safety and predictability), and so on.
Everything is done to prevent these kids from, even if they want to, get a normal life going. But you know who this is hard on ? The employees of youth services. That's who it's hard on.
This has been going on for decades like this. The result is that most of the employees never even sees the kids. Everyone's working on figuring out what to do (without seeing the kids, of course), on dividing up the kids, on "influencing" the laws and advising government/parliament, on administrativa like processing request forms, on ... and the kids systematically aren't happy with their performance.
And the saddest part is. These people are being judged against the lowest standards you can possibly imagine. These kids, most of them have been in youth services since 10 years old or less. They have never known differently, and so they accept the abuses of the system. Getting thrown out of their residence into the street every friday evening, because they can't pay for a weekend presence, then incarcerated by the police because they weren't back on monday morning ... Kids comment "that's inconvenient, I cried a bit", and move on in the conversation as if that's the most normal thing to have happen to you. Like this is hitting your head on a door. "Oh well".
But even these kids judging these people by those sorts of extreme low standards ... aren't happy with the system, mostly because of the psychological safety issue: the kids can't predict what the youth services system will do to them in 2 months, and it's just 100% forced on them. So they can't plan, they can't compensate, they can't achieve anything, because it's just ripped away from them by someone they've never seen before 2 months down the line.
Needless to say, the standards youth services uses to judge parents are getting ever stricter, and what they themselves do is ... remniscent of the stories we used to hear from Eastern Germans when I was young.
Reality is that it's pretty damn clear that leaving a kid with alcohol addicted parents is a far superior option to putting the kid, even part time, into youth services.
I think there are many factors that contribute to this trend and would love to see a paper which goes into the details. I would bet that prosecutors have a lot to do with this. Prosecutors have so much power in our criminal justice system due to what charges they choose to bring forward.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/florida...
"In Florida, more than 21 percent of black adults are disenfranchised because of this policy."
There was a time when lynch mobs were normal in the South.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594035229/ref=as_li_tl_no...
My opinion is, if society has decided that an individual does not get to exercise their right to vote, then they also should have no tax liability. No taxation without representation, and all that jazz. I guarantee you if they were forced to make the choice between the two, they'd immediately reinstate every felon's voting rights.
A lazy Wiki snip:
Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991. Property crime more than doubled over the same period. Since the 1990s, however, crime in the United States has declined steeply.
I'm sure there was probably always some racial influences, e.g. perhaps people were more willing to hand out harsh sentences because the defendants were mostly black. But to say that "Tough On Crime" was really just a cover to marginalize african americans & nothing more... it just seems like a stretch when you suggest everyone was in on it.
I read one article that described how because of the increase in police presence in schools students were more often being handled by the criminal justice system like the common school fight, that would’ve otherwise not been included in assault statistics in the past.
During the crack epidemic many small offenses, such as petty theft were being punished harshly and used as an excuse to put more resources towards the war on drugs rather than diversion and treatment.
Hand waving away racial influences is convenient to some, but definitely not to those affected by it. If you look into the statistics, you'll see that primarily minority communities were targeted by the "tough on crime" era. And these touted "tough on crime" policies only had the effect of enslaving and crippling generations of minority communities.
The crime rates are nearly similar among all races, and it's actually been shown that whites use more drugs than minorities. The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities. They also let white people off the hook. If you're not white though, the tradition is "one strike" (see Bill Clinton's damning policy). Hence, you get in trouble for something any kid might do at 16, and you get locked into a system of control and degradation for the rest of your life.
Please, please, please, do not defend the dark parts of American history. Especially when they're still going on.
A Channel 4 News fact check says: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer... "Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimisation rate was six times higher."
You can look at the stats yourself: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf See Page 3 Table 2. This is the "Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey" where they ask victims of violent crime demographic information about the offenders. This avoids any question of bias from the arrest rates. Doing the math, black people offend at a rate 2.4x higher than whites.
I disagree that whites are left off the hook: "The probability of arrest given the commission of a crime is higher for whites than it is for blacks for robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, whereas for rape the probability of arrest is approximately equal across offender race. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S... https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/81/4/1381/22345...
I tried to find data about offender rate for property crime, but every discussion said that since the victims don't encounter the offenders, there is no good way to estimate offender race.
I'm not defending anything in American history. I just want to set the facts straight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even if you believe someone is arguing in bad faith, the exercise of responding to their best possible interpretation forces us to sharpen our own arguments and makes us stronger. It's a worthwhile constraint.
I hope you'll find a way to accommodate yourself to the guidelines and stick around; if not, I hope you'll find a venue that suits you. Regardless: keep on keepin' on, amigo.
Besides, isn't this begging the question? You can't really use statistics from the same institution you're trying to evaluate. The wikipedia link you posted gives a good summary of whats misleading about the snippet you chose immediately after that snippet.
This is patently false and not all crimes are the same. The murder and assault rate, for example, is tragically - and dangerously - high for blacks.
> The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities.
The thing is though, police patrol crime-ridden communities, which sadly are often black communities. Or do you think there's a massive unknown murder wave in New Hampshire that would be uncovered if only the police presence there was increased?
I'm sorry to be blunt but this kind of obfuscation of facts is extremely unhelpful and we'll never resolve societies problems by shifting the blame to 'the man' all the time.
Actual crimes committed is what you need to look at, not who gets caught and charged. That's the part that's broken, and that's what you're using to justify the brokenness. I see this time and time again from people.
The more you patrol an area, the more crime you'll find.
All you need to do is look at the statistics. The crime rates (I don't mean arrests or charges here!) are the same or higher among whites. They simply aren't charged or harassed like minority communities are.
As long as you don't explicitly say it's about race, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that it's okay for police to target minority communities.
This is all detailed with plenty of sources in the book I mentioned. It's truly sickening.
Both victimization and offending rates for murder were 3-4x the rate for blacks than whites in 1980 for example. Why was that? Could it be factors like systematic racism, redlining, bundling a lot of poor people into housing projects, brain drain in cities (due to redlining post-integration)?
The result of "tough on crime" has been incarceration rates exploding. They just throw anyone in jail. 5% of black adults are in jail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
You would think that since the crime rates are down, the incarceration rate would be going down - how can incarceration rates go up as crime goes down? Technology and standard of living increases for the poorest has probably helped crime. The mass incarcerations just help for-profit prisons.
"Lock all the criminals up" when the subtext/unspoken relation for "criminals" is "black people/minorities" is a way to oppress minorities. Its also a failure to think of or implement a different path to work against poverty or criminality - something politicians love to do as a crackdown is easier for them to implement than actually improving people's lives.
Also, one thing that's worth understanding here is that a group of individuals all working under the same values system responding to the same stimuli will typically exhibit the same responses, which can often have the appearance of collusion or organization. And in a way it is, through the shared values system, but not in the overt way many think. That doesn't make the results any more palatable.
I think race in these discussions is a poor stand-in for the reality of the situation. It's convenient, because it's much more easily quantifiable than culture, and we in the US had laws calling out race until ~55 years ago. But, looking at today, cultural mores and attitudes are the more dominant factor.
Even liberal Minnesota has the highest (or one of) achievement gaps in education. Part is the high influx of immigrants, which introduces a lot of second-language barriers, but not all. See https://www.twincities.com/2017/08/18/15-years-later-mn-scho...
Looking at very rural, very white areas, you see very similar bad outcomes WRT education and crime. Some companies are willing to pay very good wages for workers, and are very short on staff, but cannot hire because so many of the candidates fail a drug test or won't take one. A teacher I know in rural Iowa has white children in kindergarten who know (and use) more swear words than most adults, and their parents (if they know more than one of them) have little interest in encouraging achievement in school. They'd rather blame the teacher for the child's bad behavior and grades.
Tough on crime was a misguided attempt to change the culture of drugs and violence. That culture is still glorified in popular music, and fueled by poverty. It destroys the potential for hope, and so leads to more hopelessness, which fuels the culture.
Yes, race plays a factor in all of this, but it's not the only factor, and I suspect (though know not where or even if it is possible to gather) that culture plays a far more significant role. I know several people who believe (or believed) in "Tough on Crime" and not one of them did so because of race, or to lock up minorities for minor crimes. They see families in their community torn apart by drugs and violence, drunk driving, and so on, and want it to stop.
Edit: I read / skimmed the article, and realized it mentioned growing segregation, but failed to mention an experiment run by Eden Prairie and Minneapolis, where students could voluntarily switch schools in an effort to de-segregate. The results were that those who took advantage of the switch were black students moving from suburban to urban schools, and minority white students in urban schools going out to the suburbs.
- Why is violence a sibling of drugs?
- Why do people feel the need to take drugs?
I think you're right that poverty is the problem, and its not only the "culture" of poverty to blame for it. The criminal justice system upholds poverty as a way of life by mass incarcerations of working-age people rather than treatment and rehabilitation. The lack of any social real safety net also upholds poverty - an entire town can be devastated by an arbitrary boardroom decision.
There's a lot of nuance here and I haven't found any good data on what caused the change -- just political bloviation
It's probably worth being skeptical of that hypothesis, since it seems too perfect, but it does exist.
0: https://www.usnews.com/high-schools/best-high-schools/articl...
1: https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/JAR_Display.asp?ID=qa05...
2: https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-development/reproduct...
3: https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-development/substance...
And so, lacking any confounding data, it would seem to be almost fully explained by the general drop in crime. Of course now that begs the question of what's causing that drop, but that's a more actively researched question and it appears that the answer to that could likely also explain this.
[1] - https://www.aecf.org/resources/youth-incarceration-in-the-un...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
Another reference showed "peak juvenile incarceration" at ~100k kids, and 2000 cases were identified in this scandal alone, so 2% of the peak population were touched directly - and this was the most publicized incidence.
The US homocide rate has been dropping steadily since 1991, from 9.8 to about 4.5 today. (The post-WWII peak was 10.2 in 1980.) It stands to reason that a drop in juvenile crime would track the drop in adult violent crime.
I googled and found his discussion of the subject. It's worth reading. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deci...
The thing to check would be what happened to crime/reoffense rates. And then making conclusions. But that didn't happen in the article.
But dont worry when the economy goes South again the prison industry will be back with their promise to provide jobs.
The biggest thing seems to be preventing those administering the consequences from indulging in sadism, or exploiting those who they administer.
If the consequence for minor property damage(think public defecation, minor vandalism etc) a 2-4 hour shift cleaning the streets, potentially connects people with the consequences of their actions without becoming cruel
Making jail "cheaper for taxpayers" tends to mean things like more mandatory labour, more phone calls that cost $5 / min, etc. Trying to squeeze money out of inmates will only make them resent the system even more.
Make the punishment for shoplifting being tortured to death in a public square, and the cost of prison will go down. Sounds shocking to you? It used to be the standard in the Western world, until just a couple of centuries ago.
Over time, Europe has abolished the death penalty. They have the lowest murder rates in the history of civilization. In the US, there are wide variations between states for violent crime. Unsurprisingly, the states with the most draconian laws have the highest rates of crime.
I've concluded that violent punishment does not reduce violent crime.
Moreover, the violent crime rates for many parts of the US are no higher than in Europe. Coincidentally, those places tend to be the same states that have ended capital punishment.
Now, I'm not drawing a causal relationship between draconian punishment and an increase in crime. I'm just saying there's demonstrably no relationship between "tough on crime" harsh sentencing and a decrease in crime. Fear of violent retribution by the State is not what stops people from committing crimes. We have to look at other reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_47_(201...
Seattle has a similar policy. Property crimes are not enforced.
No, that wouldn't stop people stealing things for their own use, but it would hit the professional thieves hard.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Fremont-Detectives-Bust-International-Theft-Ring-With-Millions-in-Stolen-Electronics-472047833.html
I wouldn't be so quick to blame changes in laws, though. In my experience, property crime is up because the police don't do anything when they get a report of a theft or burglary. If there's a fight, drug deal, or even just a drunk person stumbling around, the police will be out in force. If somebody got robbed, well, good luck, they'll take your statement and then you're on your own.
Now, perhaps that has to do with incentives and the police knowing that the offender isn't going to jail even if they pick him up for burglary. But it seems like there could still be a healthy middle ground where property crime offenses still result in fines, restitution, community service, and probation without needing to lock kids up in prison.
Are they rewarded for arresting drunk people?
So, the poor will be criminalized regardless of whether they steal, what’s their incentive not to steal? From their perspective, they’re already criminals for not being rich, why not act like it?
Add to that the fact that most plots of land were illegally seized and resold. So from a moral perspective the landowners in SF are criminals too.
The city needs to take those issues seriously before they can reasonably expect the poor to cease their mischief. Without a navigable legal framework for the poor to subsist, and without a property court committed to restitution of stolen land, I don’t see how we can in good faith demand people refrain from stealing iPhones.
http://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/
In 2016 it looks like property crime actually decreased.
SF has the highest per capital property crime rate among the nation's top 50 cities: http://sfist.com/2016/04/25/sf_now_has_highest_per_capita_pr...
There doesn't seem to be anything to support that idea.
I don't know why police aren't responding to these calls, but it's not because those committing these crimes aren't going to face a (reasonable) punishment.
I think because for decades so many crimes were potential felonies that police and prosecutors used the misdemeanor/felony dividing line to systemize the allocation of resources--prosecute felonies, ignore misdemeanors. Most of these felonies were ultimately prosecuted as misdemeanors through plea arrangements, which shows another aspect of the system: heavy potential penalties made it easier to secure pleas, which reinforced reliance on felonies to filter prosecutions.
Now that penalties are actually fair, police and prosecutors need to change their habits. But they haven't, despite the fact that they'll openly admit they won't prosecute the exact same crimes they once did.
It's perverse and there's no excuse for it. Felonies may have made it easier to secure plea deals, but misdemeanors are easier to prosecute from a technical perspective[1] and because of the lower penalty easier to secure plea deals closer to the maximum sentence. It's an open question whether they're cheap enough, but nobody has yet even bothered to suggest it's not practical, let alone prove it or show that there aren't measures we could take to streamline enforcement.
[1] More safeguards in place to ensure fair trial when felonies are involved. Compare traffic court, where indigent aren't even guaranteed counsel. Indeed, counsel for indigent defendants is only required by the Federal constitution for potential sentences of 6 months or longer. First offense shoplifting kids could theoretically be swiftly prosecuted in the blink of an eye (especially given camera evidence), though in some states that may require changes in the law as defendant protections were often fashioned in the context of insane penalties for common offenses.
I worked with lot of self help groups in California and learned that the cops and prosecutors would rather go after soft targets than real criminals. For example catching those kids stealing $1000 worth of stuff from store requires a cop to run after them fight with those kids (which sometimes might turn fatal). The cop would rather catch a normal kid in wrong place at wrong time because that kid will not fight back.
While compassionate criminal justice reform is needed I think we should also pay attention to the fact that law obedience does not wither away.
That sounds like a real problem to fix - incentivizing our law enforcement to go after "easy" targets does not create the sort of society I want to be in. I don't see how increasing sentences helps change this (if the sentences are being selectively applied anyway), and gun ownership is likewise orthogonal (shooting "easy" targets doesn't sound better, nor does encouraging vigilantism, which you did NOT suggest, but is a logical conclusion if law enforcement isn't doing their job).
Any ideas on how to improve the equal application of law enforcement?
Sounds like SF to me!
Although the police should have these statistics as well, since it is probably impossible to file a claim without a police report in hand.
i'm completely against locking them up and ruining their lives for what in most cases is just a [stupid] fun for them. We do know that the brain of teenager is biologically flawed to correctly estimate risks/consequences of things like that. Yet it is the duty of society to help correct the flaw and teach them a lesson. I think something like allowing store owners to shoot using salt charges (an old USSR method for situations like this, no serious injury, yet supposed to be very painful for a few days) will make these youngsters running much faster and laughing less :)
In more general - while corporal punishment is an unquestionably bad thing on its own, when it comes to the choice of corporal punishment vs. situation of 2nd graders already having a rap sheet, i'm not sure what is better for society long-term.
>Teenagers especially may be less responsive to consequentialist preventive measures (i.e. punishment), but they are responsive to some degree.
Exactly. The issue is that the more immediate/instant punishment works better for teenager mind than the chance of delayed/procedural/etc punishment. The immediate punishment is what helps the forming brain to develop cause/consequences machinery of behavior.
It shouldn’t be shocking. The people who push this sort of feel-good legislation always, always, always fail to think about how these policies can be exploited or handwave away such concerns by assuming that the number of people who would do so is vanishingly small.
Just hope we continue to learn how to build a system that restores dignity, treats the causes of criminal activity and focuses on keeping people out of the system. Hard to do when many prisons are moving to for-profit private facilities.
The numbers show that teenage drinking and smoking has been going down year on year since the 90s. Vaping changed at but I think that trend is a short lived too.
Pot is not a gateway drug. But pot illegalization was a gateway into crime.
But hopefully that's not something we do. Right?
Rick Nevin specifically calls out the juvenile crime/incarceration rate as the canary in the coal mine.
Whether one agrees that it’s correct or not, it certainly deserves a mention
I'm curious - I would've expected this to be "sow" as in "sowing seeds". Is this an American spelling?
The boomers didn't deal with nearly as much war as their parents. Violent crime peaked exactly 18 years after Roe vs Wade. An entire generation was allowed to wait until they were ready to be intentional parents rather than accidental.
That likely has a huge impact.
Sure sounds like sound science /s. I wish more politicians/the general public weren't so vulnerable to Appeal to Emotion fallacy. A guy wandering through a juvenile prison and being spooked shouldn't count for jack shit in policymaking.