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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

.. has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Or that the US already imprisons more people per capita than any other country, including failed states like El Salvador and dictatorships like Turkmenistan?

The solution is not more violence. I suspect the problem is that the police have failed at the basic business of connecting crime to punishment, so they roam neighbourhoods looking for people they deem suspicious and dishing out punishment. So you get injustice and crime.

It's a basic competence issue.

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Hi from El Salvador :')

I haven't had packages stolen here, because if no one answers the doorbell, the delivery person will personally call you and ask if they can leave the packet with a neighbor.

Sometimes they call you before going on route and ask you if the delivery address is ok or if you would like it to be delivered to an alternate address (like your office/neighbour).

This sounds better than a lot of Western countries, frankly.

Did you read my comment wherein I specifically reject the notion that we need to perpetuate in Prison Industrial Complex? It's an incredible burden on our civilization and must be dismantled.

I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody.

The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.

Well, American society was not merely failing people but formally excluding them until the moon landings. You talk about education; some of the Southern states shut down their education system entirely for a year rather than accept integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance

If you want a solution to the spiral of violence, http://www.svru.co.uk/ were hugely effective as an intervention carrot-and-stick approach.

> has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year?

Just because that was the most vocal faction doesn't mean they are the only faction, or even the majority.

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