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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

The '25%' number is a red herring and not worth debating. The US has over 6 times the number of inmates (per capita) as the average Western European country[1][2]. How could that be, other than because of a seriously fubared justice system?

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris...

[2] http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r234.pdf

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> other than because of a seriously fubared justice system?

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.

That sounds like the difference between inefficient and an efficient police work - not something that is due to a greater incarceration rate. If that was the cause, there would be fewer crimes, but the resolution of them should be about the same. Of course, that evades the question of whether incarceration has any kind of positive effect on crime rates - Popular wisdom assumes that, but scientific evidence is lacking.

And the efficiency of police work doesn't always depend on location. I also live in Brazil (São Paulo) and had my car stolen last year; they found it the next morning. While living in Paris years ago, I had my car stolen and it was never found.

I was told it was safe to assume, considering model/year of my stolen cars, that they were dismantled the very same day. It's possible your recovered car had a lower demand for aftermarket parts.

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. ;-)

If the people who told you that were the police, they have a conflict of interest if they don't feel like hunting down stolen cars, which I imagine is policework equivalent of being the guy who gets to tell people to reboot in the IT world. Yeah, it fixed the problem, but it's just going to happen again, in the exact same way, possibly to the same people.

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.

I had my car broken into in the US, and I knew who did it. It was a friend of a friend (hey, my friends weren't the best back in high school) and they bragged about it. The cops wouldn't take prints when they investigated. When I called up the officer in question after finding out who did it, they said "sorry, we don't aggressively pursue theft".

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.

Well... That sucks.

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.

I hope one day not to have to say this in one of these debates: Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. At all. Not only is it invalid reasoning but it taints the rest of the debate because it often sounds so convincing, going hand in hand as it usually does with appeals to emotion. This applies doubly when discussing macro-level societal issues like the justice system.

Well... This time you really didn't have to say that.

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.

However, anecdotal evidence can point to a line of inquiry that might uncover important statistical evidence. It presents categories: "Crimes not addressed" as a cause of low incarceration.

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.

>Truly, to combat his assertion, you should find statistical evidence to show that his anecdotes are actually contrary to the trend.

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.

If you consider that the original premise - based on one anectode, BTW - is that a corrupt law-enforcement/judiciary/correctional system is the sole responsible for a high incarcerated population, all I need to provide is evidence that other factors may be at play.

Interestingly this is actually untrue in a statistical sense. Purely statistically, we never prove an assertion, we merely find that we cannot disprove it for a certain strength of disproof.

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.

It could be because of higher crime than the average Western European country. Imprisonment is a lagging indicator, of course, so the US crime rate would have to have been higher than the average Western European crime rate 10, 20, 30 years ago, rather than today necessarily.

Well, for instance[1] shows that the violent crime rate has been 2.5 to 3.5 times as large as in Canada between 1980 and 2000. That still leaves a factor of 2 to be explained. The other statistics in this report only makes the difference in incarceration rate harder to explain. The most common explanation I have heard is that in the US, people that are accused are both prosecuted and convicted more often. It seems extremely doubtful that the US police force and justice system could be twice as effective as that of other Western European countries.

[1]http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/85-002.../01...

I'm more than willing to let that factor of 2 come down to a fubared justice system--or possibly to longer prison sentences, which is possibly a "works as designed" type of bug.

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.

A factor is that countries like Germany don't imprison first time criminals, but give them probation mostly. And sentences are much, much shorter than in the U.S.

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