This is a pretty serious problem.
http://www.cio.com/article/595304/Prison_Labor_Outsourcing_s...
http://newworkerfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/02/us-prison-labo...
Paying someone who you have in complete physical bondage under $1 an hour is slave labour as far as I'm concerned, even if it is nominally voluntary. At best its unconscionably exploitative. Add to that the fact that the US govt. is legally bound to prefer prison labour over any other for the production of body armour, weapons etc. for the security agencies.
EDIT: Here's another fun stat: america has more black people in prison than in college: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2223709.stm
Although we in the UK are definitely doing pretty well at emulating uncle sam: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/uk_prisons_...
– edit: To add a bit more substance, here is an article about the recent Georgia prison strike and the Thirteenth Amendment: http://prisonlaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/prison-labor-and-t...
Slave labor convictions for blacks were very common in the South from reconstruction up until World War II when they fell out of favor. For 70 years from 1870 to 1940 it was quite routine whenever slave laborers were needed for companies to pay local sheriffs to round up blacks on bogus charges such as loitering, convict them in sham trials, and then sell them to corporations to do hard labor 6 days a week 14 hours a day. This is extensively documented in Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II."
I know that I’m casting a wide net. Prison labor is certainly not the same as slavery as it existed in the US decades ago. I do think, though, that I’m at least somewhat justified in calling prison labor slavery. Prisoners are forced to do it and they are not paid or paid very little. (This is not necessarily a moral judgment. Just because something meets some definition doesn’t mean it’s wrong.)
That seems like quite a stretch and isn't really consistent with the language.
(Source wikipedia.)
I also recommend reading Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, on why the US should empty their prisons: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartl...
This claim is a little misleading - the absolute numbers are true (or close enough depending on your source) but it compares blacks in all age groups in jail with blacks going to college. If you limit the comparison to college-aged blacks, there are far more blacks in college then prison.
EDIT: I wonder what would happen if you injected the racial makeup of the prison/university management and staff into the calculations.
1. Prison terms often last longer than the average university education.
2. Once you've finished your term in university, there's not much encouragement (regardless of racial group) to continue.
For example: You have a BS in Computer Science, and are now working. Why should you go back for a MS? Or a PHD? Or Post Doc?
18-24: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind00/c4/fig04-06.htm
there are plenty of 30 year olds who go to college
True, but the under 25 range makes up ~70% of college students (IIRC).
Why replace children in a chinese sweatshopa earning 80c an hour with prisoners being paid $1 hour. Wouldn't it be more profitable to replace people being paid $1000/hour with prisoners at $1/hour?
Imprison the bankers, have them continue to work from prison for $1 - use profit to pay off national debt.
Prisons get to extend the sentences of inmates if they test positive for drugs while in prison. Guess whether it's public or private prisons where inmates are on average 8 times more likely to test positive for drug use.
http://www.bop.gov/news/research_projects/published_reports/...
The underlying problem--criminality in some American cultures--is difficult and rather unique to the United States. Other rich countries are more culturally homogenous and hence suffer less criminality, though that's changing if you look, for instance, at Scandinavia, where the rate of rapes has risen dramatically as more and more Muslims immigrate there.
And yet, somehow, over the last 20 years the crime rate in
the US has dropped tremendously.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-t...
[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris...
I'll readily concede that at least half, maybe 60% of the US prison population is only locked up for drug offenses, and that legalizing drugs by the end of this week won't affect the rates of other crimes[1]. 84% seems high.
[1] I couldn't easily find any good breakdown of what all these people are imprisoned for, and would appreciate it. That said, as much I'm in favor of drug legalization, drug possession and sale is still a crime, and it's also a crime in nearly every other country you're comparing crime rates to.
In other words, the prison population is large because there are more criminal actors; and there are more criminal actors, because there is a large prison population.
My point, though, was that it's not a controlled experiment to compare the US and the Netherlands. It would be a controlled experiment to compare the US to an alternate universe US where, for whatever reason, we didn't incarcerate 84% of the current US prison population.
The US imprisons maybe six times as many people, per capita, as a Western European country. The question is why. Obviously, actual criminality has to play into this, unless the US wrongfully convicts many times more innocent people than Western European countries do. Longer sentences also play into this, though--it will obviously increase the prison population (or, more precisely, stop it from decreasing) but it will also decrease the crime rate by preventing prisoners from committing crimes in open society.
Besides that, there's social issues, whereby subgroups are disadvantaged and have fewer opportunities for lawful profit in life. It could be that these social issues are the same in the US as elsewhere, but the US invests in prisons rather than welfare, for self-defeating political reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
The reason why we are different from much of Europe isn't a secret, it's just taboo to discuss. Most of our crime is confined to a small subset of our population and this subset is mostly absent from Europe.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_informati...
(I'm focusing on murder because while things like drugs might be counted differently between the US and Britain, dead bodies with knife holes probably aren't.)
Depends which crimes you look at. Britain, for example, has a higher overall rate of violent crime than the US.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murde...
What happens when you control for income?
In Europe, race appears to play a major role in criminality, unless you take wealth into account. Models controlling for social factors don't reveal any significant race effect.
Poverty is the real culprit. I wouldn't be surprised if this transfered to the US.
According to those figures, the most effective way to lower the homicide rate is to get rid of men.
The link you provided to fbi.gov doesn't indicate it.
It's not really taboo if rationally discussed in a small group (like a college classroom) since there's a long and complicated history surrounding the contributing factors which have been fairly unique to the Americas, but in an open forum on the internet it's practically impossible without moderators.
(c) doesn't create criminals so much as it creates prisoners. (c) is bounded by (b) in one respect, but in another respect, you can unjustly change aspects of (c) through longer sentences. There is evidence of this, if you look at some of the differences in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine.
The social issues you cite are probably a big part of (b), though. It's easier for these disadvantaged subgroups to arise when you have cultural heterogeneity (since the society has to have some way of distinguishing a subgroup in order to disadvantage it) but there's definitely room to say the US has answered those challenges poorly throughout history.
I'm not so sure about that. You'll not go to jail for possession of small quantities of drugs in Denmark, but you might in the US?
What a horrendous farce!
There are people in prison in the US because they were 18 and they had sex with their 17 year old girlfriend. What european countries also do this?
A clear side effect of being in prison is that you are more likely to get the wrong friends and less chance of a job which leads to more crime. Rinse & repeat. That explains away a lot of the rest.
According to the crime statistics for The Netherlands the rape victims rate is 0.8% versus 0.4% for the united states [1] (its definition being: "People victimized by sexual assault (as a % of the total population)". However looking at the rapes per capita[2] The Netherlands has 0.1 per 1000 vs 0.3 for the US.
Additionally the murder rate in the US is about 5 times higher than in The Netherlands[3]. The Dutch rate is without attempts, but still I doubt if it would get even close to that in the US.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_vic-crime-rape-vic...
[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Rape? What we call rape in many states in the USA, an 18 yr old having consensual sex with a 16 yr old, is accepted in other parts of the world. Or let's take Sweden's definition, having consensual sex without a condom. That's not against the law in most places. Pedophilia? Anthropologists claim found that it is common and accepted in Polynesia and other cultures. Cannibalism? Again, supposedly many cultures practice it and consider it an acceptable and beneficial practice.
What exactly is universally reviled by human nature? Copraphilia? That's not illegal though.
The more serious immoral acts, however, of the kind that leave their subjects unable to emote (whether because they are dead, in a coma, "brainwashed", or whatever else) have to be analyzed from an in-group vs. out-group perspective. Given a "tribal unit", murder by outsiders of the tribe, to insiders in the tribe is universally reviled by tribe members. As we all (except sociopaths) mentally assign ourselves one or more tribes, this is generalizable back to all of humanity.
In canada, people caught with kilos of coke get house arrest.
There was a guy caught with 500kg of MDMA in his backyard kitchen and he got house arrest.
People don't go to jail for drug crimes - they usually get community service or house arrest.
Certainly for possession NO ONE goes to jail in Canada, but I've read that in the US people with a gram of weed have been sent to jail. WTF?
Or for that matter, two hits of crack, and you get like 10 years or something ridiculous.
In canada it's almost impossible to actually serve jailtime for a possession charge, and even trafficking charges are often not met with incarceration but rather conditions.
The core of being American should be to question and challenge authority at every opportunity. It's why we have the First and Second Amendments. It makes me sick that so many Americans are spineless slaves to this dying corrupt government.
Like this one?
In the US system, there's a distinction between jail (i.e. pre-trial detention) and prison (i.e. post-conviction incarceration).
Cultural homogeneity and its effects on crime transcend race. European immigration to the US during the 19th and 20th centuries were linked to crime as well. Usually, the dominant cultures in a heterogenous society will exclude and oppress minority populations, which leads to poverty and desperation. The problem really is cultural heterogeneity, not anybody's race. Acceptance of minority populations into the greater culture solves the problem much more effectively than any kind of antagonistic separatism, that's for sure.
Plus, assuming cultural heterogeneity leads to higher crime doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea. I happen to think the benefits of a diverse, heterogenous society outweigh the costs. That doesn't mean the costs don't exist.
EDIT: In particular, check this link out: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-t...
There are countries with majority Muslim populations with lower-than-average crime rates--check out Turkey and Tunisia, as do countries with majority black populations--check out Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica. Obviously Islam, or blackness, isn't the problem here.
Anyway, you spoke in terms of "criminality in some American cultures", which sounds like a euphemism, since you neglected to name them. Although you followed it up with your hetereogenity thesis I (like many readers) was already lost.
I do agree that it is the rifts between groups that ultimately cause all the problems. However, who's really to blame for that? America's slave-descended population have been in the country for over 500 years. By any normal expectations, their original culture should have been completely blended with the mainstream culture hundreds of years ago. And a large extent this is true of those blacks that enter the middle class and beyond. But for those that are trapped in a ghetto lifestyle -- with ghetto attitudes -- I don't think you can attribute that up to cultural differences. That's circular reasoning again. Something else is keeping the cultures separate.
I think we should be open to the idea that the forces keeping the cultures separate are both external and internal to the black community in America. Still, anecdotally speaking, as a Canadian I find the racism in America to be pretty breathtaking. White Americans, whether liberal or conservative, take it as a given that there's always some part of the city dominated by blacks where gunfire is heard at night and the cops are afraid to go. If you probe even a little bit you find that most white Americans, even nominally liberal ones, think blacks have lower capacities than they do. This seems to me, with my Canadian attitudes, like a shocking abandonment of a large part of your citizenry.
In any case, heterogenity doesn't always lead to a higher crime rate. Toronto is over 38% immigrant [1] and yet has a low crime rate. Montreal has been riven by cultural heterogenity (between English, French, and others) ever since the 1700s, and yet has an even lower crime rate. [2] I'm not saying Canada is perfect in this regard, and it is a pretty universal rule that the newest immigrant population has a higher rate of crime and organized crime. But, unscientifically, it seems to me that the availability of better social services, less inequality, more equitable law enforcement, plus a very strong tradition that the norm of "Canadian" isn't any particular race [3], must all be factors in mitigating this.
[1] http://www.mta.ca/about_canada/multi/
[2] http://www.toronto.ca/quality_of_life/safety.htm
[3] Even the gangs in Canada are sometimes multiracial: the "United Nations" gang is famous for this. http://www.vancouversun.com/Gallery+gang/1350012/story.html
Wow, so you just did what Americans are always accused of doing - paint large groups of people with one giant brush.
True racism in America I think has shrunk considerably. The problem is that racism is now commonly used to label any not so nice statistics about any given group of people. Years ago when Bill Cosby pointed out that strong families raised better kids he was called racist. He was just looking at the facts that over 1/2 of the single parent families out there are black[1], and kids from single parent families generally don't do as well as those from a 2 parent family.
When it comes to bad areas in large cities nearly every city has at least one such area, although racial groups may differ. There used to be places in LA where simply wearing a blue or red shirt will get you shot. This is not something made up or in the minds of white people. Even when I lived in a smallish city it had streets or areas that even police avoided. Heck, even my black friends avoided the area.
I also strongly disagree that 'most white Americans' think blacks have lower capacities than they do. That's complete BS. I don't know anyone who thinks that, and I certainly don't think that is true.
[1] http://family.jrank.org/pages/1574/Single-Parent-Families-De...
I think neilk is aware of that. I took his point to be that it is surprising that Americans accept this as a normal fact of life.
I lived with a friend in San Francisco's Potrero Hill / Dogpatch neighborhood. The north side of the hill is one of the most desirable areas of the city and is one of those deliberately quaint neighborhoods that is pretty much 100% white. The south side has low-cost housing and is almost as uniformly black. [1]
My friend lived very near the top of the hill, where the character abruptly changed. Police sirens were common, but since it was all over on the other side of the hill, everything was okay and nobody even felt unsafe. Apparently whoever it is that makes trouble on that side knows never to come over to the other side, presumably since the police will bring down the hammer much harder.
Taking the bus into the city was embarrassing. The bus started on the "black side" and then came over to the "white side" on its way downtown. And half a century after Rosa Parks, the bus was voluntarily segregated with blacks at the rear. I got on the first "white" stop and was stunned to see how, every day, the entire bus was filled at the back with nobody at the front. One day I went to a different bus stop (just three blocks over!) and got a lot of stares, because this was obviously a "black" stop and I'd crossed the line.
I'm not saying Canada does it much better -- ethnic ghettos exist, and are often encouraged by realtors or even government policies. But I always felt like, in Canada, we all sort of knew that was a bad situation that had to be rectified eventually. If you asked a typical Obama-loving resident of Potrero Hill if they lived in some kind of cultural standoff that amounted to a separate regime for their black neighbors, they'd be shocked and offended.
[1] Race map of the Bay Area: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981425631/
Also... if you leave Toronto/Vancouver/Montreal (and few other big urban centers), there actually is a very strong tradition of Canadian being a white christian.
You're painting everyone with overly broad stereotypical brushes. Nothing makes a Canadian look as lame as possible as going out trashing talking Americans armed with stereotypes and stuff they remembered from Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans.
That said, I know what I'm talking about. I'm an insufferable do-gooder who has volunteered to teach in East Vancouver, and I've had friends and significant others who are artists using warehouse space in economically depressed areas, like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (which, to be fair, is for many a race-blind vortex of despair). And in the Bay Area I've had similar experience making frequent trips to West Oakland, Emeryville, and San Leandro. I never lived there, but I am the sort of person who tries to walk whenever possible (even when people tell me it's ill-advised) so I've seen a lot more that one does from an automobile.
Trust me: the ethnic divide in Canada is nothing compared to the USA. In Canada you have neighborhoods where people are struggling. In the USA you have neighborhoods that look like the apocalypse happened, thirty or forty years ago.
It sounds like we're violently agreeing here. What I refer to as "cultural differences" or "cultural heterogenity" is the result of this process, not the cause. As long as blacks have been materially excluded from the middle class in America, America as a whole has been trapped with these cultural differences.
In any case, heterogenity doesn't always lead to a higher crime rate. Toronto is over 38% immigrant [1] and yet has a low crime rate. Montreal has been riven by cultural heterogenity (between English, French, and others) ever since the 1700s, and yet has an even lower crime rate.
That's a fair point. Canada probably does a better job than the US of handling those issues. French Canadian culture is an interesting difference we don't really have in America--French Canadians (unless I'm mistaken) are no more or less affluent than English Canadians and, aside from various controversies over Quebec separatism, by and large don't seem to be materially oppressed. Those aren't things you can say about, for instance, America's Spanish-speaking population.
American culture accepted and integrated generations of European immigrants, but those immigrants largely assimilated (or rather, their children did) due to geographic isolation from the countries they immigrated from. That geographic isolation doesn't exist for Latin American immigrants, and it's quite possible they will remain a different culture in perpetuity. America is going to have to learn how to accept that diversity rather than expecting assimilation. As you may have gathered, we're not doing a great job of that so far.
I'm not as pessimistic about Latin American integration as you are. Their values are pretty much identical to mainstream America. I don't expect they will ever vote in blocs; they don't even do that today. The worst thing about that situation is the hypocrisy about so-called "illegals", especially in California.
BTW, the French in Quebec were never excluded from government, higher education, or the professions, although they were excluded from the business and managerial classes for centuries. So it wasn't quite oppression, like say Cuba, but the French did feel like second-class citizens in their own country. It's not comparable to any other situation I know of.
This place exists in just about every major American city. Not sure about gunfire every night, but places where police presence is minimal and you just don't go there, unless you live there.
How is this consistent? Do you have any single evidence your blanket group of "muslim immigrants" caused the increase in rape? Make your mind please.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article190268.ece
http://centurean2.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/muslim-rape-epide...
You've backed up your theory here - but you didn't initially.
In my opinion, the most dangerous form of prejudice - is prejudice that's backed up by an 'intellectual' argument.
Deleted comment
If you look at actual studies on the subject, there is little to no scientific evidence that tougher incarceration policies reduce crime. There is about as much evidence that they actually increase crime, in fact, depending on the conditions of incarceration and gang ties that that fosters.
For clarification on my thoughts about cultural heterogenity, please look at this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036933
Why would the big increase in incarceration rates starting in the 1970s cause a decrease in crime only in the 1990s?
Although, come to think of it, that might be the answer--a lot of the criminals we first imprisoned in the 70's ended up being recidivists, and cracking down on recidivism in the 90's through longer sentences and three strikes laws decreased crime when the recidivists ended up staying in prison, rather than leaving prison to commit more crimes every few years.
The sad part is, this might even apply to people who were unjustly imprisoned for drugs. Someone in prison on drug charges is going to be more likely to get involved in gangs while in prison, and hence become a more dangerous criminal when let out.
--the legislature who chose to make particular laws
--the police who chose to enforce particular laws
--the prosecutors who chose to pursue particular cases
--the courts who adjudicated the final case
Every one of those four groups is biased against particular groups in the U.S.A. Arguing that the courts alone are "comparatively just" is not only false (race is a notable bias in the courts themselves), it neglects all the other factors that are also biased.
I suspect that either a) poorer countries are too cash-strapped to lock up dangerous criminals or b) that many poorer countries don't have reliable data on prisoner numbers.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris...
I live in Brazil and I had two cars stolen. None was found, nobody was charged. A couple years back I had my backpack (with my laptop inside) robbed at gunpoint.
A friend of mine who lives in the US had his car stolen. It was returned that same afternoon. Another friend of mine had his home completely cleaned up (the thieves left the heavy furniture and the kitchen). All his stuff was returned by the police two days later.
The larger inmate population could also be, in some part, due to more efficient law enforcement.
That, of course, does not forgive the cops from breaking laws themselves. It's just that the issue is not that black and white.
Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend.
Anecdotal evidence _is_ evidence. It is just not strong statistical evidence.
It is never my responsibility to disprove any assertion, as that is fundamentally impossible. It is the responsibility of the person making the assertion to provide a sufficient quantity of relevant evidence.
The old adage that 'you can't disprove a negative' is more specific in scope than your allusion to it here.
Mostly, however, the nature of collaborative argument is such that yes, we are disproving and attempting to disprove each other all the time.
I was, in fact, trying to highlight the fact that the larger number of prison inmates in the US compared to other countries cannot be attributed solely to corrupt law enforcement, judiciary and correctional systems. That's not saying they are perfect, but that is not the cause of the larger population and that, maybe, you could point your suspicions elsewhere.
As for your car in Paris, the obvious conclusion is that the total prison population in France is a bit lower than it should be. ;-)
However, and given the more-or-less subject of this thread, it might be a good punishment for bad cops to have to work these cases (no gun or handcuffs) for $2/day.
So, your experience in Brazil isn't foreign to Americans. Not all police are created equal, and in a place as big and culturally diverse as the US, you'll get some good ones and some bad ones.
The US is, indeed, a very diverse place, but I always had the impression that it has a very disciplined, if somewhat tense at times, society. At least the places I visited.
My point was that the larger number of inmates in relation to the general population can be, at least in part, attributed to a better law enforcement in relation to other countries. When I was robbed, I could have been shot dead. I am sure the guy would never be caught - if for no other reason, he would have killed one key witness.
[1]http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/85-002.../01...
Big complex problems have big and complex sets of causes. Higher actual crime is not an outlandish partial cause of a higher prison population, even if it isn't a complete explanation.
How about Germany which has 95 inmates out of 100.000 people? [1]
[1] http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/downloads/worl...