Why are there so many people in prison in America? (2017)
braino.org
braino.org
A lot of people, especially Americans, like to think of Americans as a uniquely violent people, but this is really a systemic and cultural problem as well as a failing of individuals. People used to think of Glasgow as uniquely violent but that problem has been greatly reduced thanks to the VRU.
What's this mean exactly?
- there's an epidemiology of violence: untreated violence tends to breed more violence. Fear of violence and responses to violence cause violence of their own. Either retaliation or pre-emptively carrying weapons.
- squalor tends to breed violence in the same way as it breeds disease
- this stuff often starts at school (see US "school to prison pipeline")
- A&E departments of hospitals are convenient contact points for people who've been stabbed or punched - this is an opportunity to discourage them from taking revenge or starting more fights
- also it recognises that the effectiveness of police before a crime has been committed is (rightly) pretty limited, but social services can perform other kinds of interventions.
But, unfortunately, political correctness won over, and the practice is mostly gone now -- and the crime rates have since soared. Giuliani was once called "America's Mayor" -- my how quickly times change.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p0106a/overall-crime-new...
And all this without having to stop and search some rando black or brown dude walking down the road. This categorically proves that stop and frisk had no impact on crime rates at all. Los Angeles also experienced similarly historically low crime rates and had no stop and frisk. I can’t imagine how someone can live in a liberal democracy and be ok with authoritarian behavior like stop and search.
All Giulliani did was move the problems to New Jersey.
It was successful in reducing crime in his jurisdiction. It didn't really reduce crime in the NYC metro area relative to anywhere else. Crime dropped off a lot over the 90s and '00s everywhere.
There's a really wide gulf between police state tactics that ignore people's rights (90s stop and frisk) and the current situation in parts of the country where crimes with a victim that people are complaining about are ignored or given such a small slap on the risk they have a positive ROI.
I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty.
I put culture and social cohesion ahead of income because plenty of poorer asian countries do much better than richer european countries.
So maybe cities have the same order of magnitude effect in increasing crime as guns do - what would you suggest we do about that? Should we lower violent crime by banning cities and banning guns, or should we focus on the root problems of culture, social cohesion, and poverty?
Also: Switzerland also has a ton of guns and major cities, violent crime rate is near the bottom - is suspect because their culture, social cohesion, and efforts to minimize poverty.
Switzerland has a ton of guns but not a ton of ready access to ammunition. Also according to this article [1] the U.S. has far more guns per person than Switzerland.
According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, there are about 89 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people who live in the United States. Switzerland ranks third in terms of gun ownership, the Survey estimates, with 3.4 million guns among its population of nearly eight million.
So NH having a high amount of guns isn't really a counter example. The point wasn't that guns are the sole cause, but that their prevalence makes it harder to resolve a violence problem (that stems from many sources).
Or if I am assuming too much about the original posters view, I can instead just say this is my view.
On the other end of the spectrum of marginally more harm but dramatically less freedom, would you suggest that we go into a covid shutdown every flu season? Or compelled speech laws? Or banning cars because the harm they cause? It’s all a balance between freedom and harm.
This sounds like borderline race theory or something Charles Murray would argue... So basically you’re saying that richer white people in homogeneous states are less violent than the states with poor, more diverse populations? I don’t think it’s based on race or culture, but income and class are definitely factors.
Culture is so obviously a factor: why does Switzerland have so many guns and similar average income to New Hampshire but much less violence? Clearly culture has an effect.
Well, roughly speaking, the prison population for a given crime is:
Occurrence Per Year x Report Rate x Solve Rate x Conviction Rate x Prison Sentence Length.
In all of those, American ranks either high or very high.* false convictions
* concurrent sentences
* parole
* time off for good behavior
* remand (detention without conviction)
and probably other factors I couldn't think of off the top of my head.
Unless your just lumping all these factors "prison sentence length" in which case the equation doesn't seem useful.
Concurrent sentences are tricky because it's almost always the case that sentences are served concurrently. This equation would probably be most accurate if only the most serious sentence were used for "Prison Sentence Length."
Parole and good behavior definitely would affect prison pop. and so should be included.
I don't follow this. If you're falsely convicted of murder and get 30 years, why would that show up in the statistics any different than your cell mate who was correctly convicted.
> This equation would probably be most accurate if only the most serious sentence were used for "Prison Sentence Length."
Not if the lesser crimes affect the total length of your sentence.
> people are mostly remanded to jail, not prison, aka custody before trial
I think the difference between prison and jail in this case is irrelevant. If you were held in jail awaiting trail for 1 year and acquitted vs. being sentenced to 1 year in prison on conviction, you're still held against your will for 1 year.
>I don't follow this. If you're falsely convicted of murder and get 30 years, why would that show up in the statistics any different than your cell mate who was correctly convicted.
Falsely convicted people are in prison. The equation is about calculating prison population. The equation is not about calculating the number of people who should be in prison or any other qualifier.
That being said, "solve rate" is probably a bad term to use here. It might be more accurate to say something like, "percentage of cases resulting in a charge/indictment"
>> This equation would probably be most accurate if only the most serious sentence were used for "Prison Sentence Length."
>Not if the lesser crimes affect the total length of your sentence.
In the vast majority of criminal cases, the following is true: conviction of 1 count of murder and 100 counts of other crimes (with a lower guideline sentence) results in a sentence equal to the sentence of the most serious crime in the case: murder. It is irrelevant what the other crimes are as the sentences for those crimes will be served concurrently to the murder sentence, which is longer/more serious. So in the vast majority of cases there will be no effect on the total length of the sentence to be convicted of multiple crimes, only the longest/most serious sentence matters.
>I think the difference between prison and jail in this case is irrelevant. If you were held in jail awaiting trail for 1 year and acquitted vs. being sentenced to 1 year in prison on conviction, you're still held against your will for 1 year.
The article quote is:
Well, roughly speaking, the __prison__ population for a given crime is:
Occurrence Per Year x Report Rate x Solve Rate x Conviction Rate x Prison Sentence Length.
Communities who think they "know who did it" will bypass the right to legal representation, will bypass courts, will bypass proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and will bypass the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The result, of course, is not justice, but horrific oppression. Encouraging communities to take matters into their own hands is encouraging injustice.
A) regular American citizens, that unfortunately includes racist people
B) the United States federal, state, and local governments
I believe the answer is clearly B is far worse. I have no desire to argue or change your mind if you believe A. If we’re lucky, perhaps we can live in different communities that go by different rules so we can both be happy.
Probably more than others, distrust of government and especially the justice system tends to produce that result.
> There is an incredible amount of violent crime in black communities
“Taking matters into your own hands” is, itself, typically crime, often violent crime, and disputes about the correctness of the attribution or level of punishment in a community that does self-service law enforcement tend to be resolved by more self-service “justice”.
So, yeah, that’s exactly what you’d expect with self-service justice, even if you ignore that the reason for that is itself selective criminalization, prosecution, remand, and punishment of blacks. All of which (because US penal facilities don’t just house criminals but help form and harden them) contributes to criminality in the black community.
I personally started with making sure my youngsters respect teachers.
Irrelevant, my comment is about white people taking matters into their own hands by torturing and murdering black people, which is a specific case of the comment about communities enforcing laws for themselves. Speak to that, or go elsewhere to ask about other forms of vigilante justice.
There is an incredible amount of violent crime in black communities that other black people have done nothing to mitigate.
I am not in the mood to rehash the “black-on-black violence, what are black people doing about it” trope. It is not my responsibility to pivot to discussing your pet topic given that I was talking about lynching.
This is a blatant example of “whataboutism” rhetoric, and I’m not going to play along.
* plonk *
As for bootstraps: we don't all start the race to success on the same starting line. Some work very hard to get where they are and some don't.
Unfortunately, my small personal sample size isn't close to representative, but if I had to guess, this is ... slowly getting better?
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4909/terrorism-united-states.as...
But add corruption to the mix, and they all go to crap.
The problem with this way of looking at people is that it assumes we're fully rational beings. This is what neo-liberalism and Christianity share with each other, they assume full free will, the sin belongs to the sinner alone.
I get angry just like any other person when someone breaks into my car or my home and I believe they should be punished. But if problems become structural, structural solutions are necessary.
(Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics. It’s easy to say, as an addict, that I’m not going to a program recommended by a stranger or a cop. It’s harder to refuse when it’s this friendly receptionist who has never judged me and has told me that they know 5 others like me who have all succeeded breaking the addiction.)
> Edit; also, apparently giving needles actually has significant benefits to a community, in that addicts are constantly exposed to a medically safe space where their addiction is treated like the health problem it is. It also gives them constant exposure to safe, non-judge mental avenues for recovery programs and detox clinics.
But we don’t give free needles or insulin to people with diabetes? I just think our priorities are fucked. And you look at a city budget like SF where hundreds of millions are spent on the homeless only for the problem to get worse every single year and the money is never spend in an accountable way. I’d just prefer to help people who would actually help themselves so we aren’t just enabling them further in a self-destructive path.
I’ve never seen another country with our policies that seems to be a working model. Why can’t we just copy something that actually work? I find it bizarre we just keep spending more and more but won’t look beyond our own paradigm for a better strategy.
The reason why there’s a ton of inefficient waste in Democrat cities is because of bullshit NIMBYism and constant resistance to just giving people minimum standards of living due to some notion of wanting to figure out who “deserves” it more.
We know what works. Needles exchanges work. Free healthcare works. Providing housing works. Strong social programs work.
I'm all for giving them public housing and I believe in universal healthcare. But at what point after we offer them an alternative to living on the street to we force them to stop leaving needles and trash and being a public health hazard to everyone else? There has to be a carrot and a stick approach otherwise it won't work. San Francisco has tried an all carrot and no stick approach and it's getting worse by the day.
The author is unaware of the fact that in recent years, the murder rate in South Carolina has increased to meet or exceed what it was 15 years ago
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/north-charleston-among-c...
>> Secondly, the rate of homicides in the US has been going up quite a bit for the past two years. This is supposedly a localized effect of a few high crime cities, but even in South Carolina the number of people in prison for murder has gone up by about 10% in just the last four years. This is concerning.
"I pulled up a breakdown of total inmate population, by most serious offense. Only 16% were there on drug related charges."
http://www.doc.sc.gov/research/InmatePopulationStats/ASOF-Mo...
I've seen numerous explanations for this, one being that there is a strong incentive for US politicians to look "tough on crime", a greater emphasis on retribution than rehabilitation, historic racial injustice, and a sizeable for-profit private prison industry. But other developed countries also have these factors to some extent, for example the UK's private prisons house 18% of prisoners compared to the USA's housing 8%.
In my view, understanding the cause of why these long sentences are considered normal is essential to preventing a lot of pain and suffering. There are several examples of harmless people given life sentences for marijuana possession under three strikes laws, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. A society that is obsessed with freedom yet incarcerates more of its citizens than Cuba or Russia, and hands down disproportionately severe sentences for transgressions that would be viewed much less seriously in other countries, is a bizarre phenomenon with a huge human cost.
It has a zero-tolerance policy for some people. Some get life sentences for crimes committed while juveniles. Others get an “Aw, they’re just boys being boys pass” for their entire lives, right up to being appointed to the Supreme Court.
Similarly, fairly minor infractions while on probation/parole result in lengthy sentences via revocation.
Not sure how you can frame a previous "strike" as something they didn't actually do. The strikes were actual crimes with convictions.
The legal notion of sentence modifications based upon various factors is nothing new. You can get extra time for committing a robbery if you had a gun when committing it, even if the gun wasn't loaded or fired.
That's something you did, and an actual named charge "Robbery with a Dangerous Weapon" or similar.
Charging someone with a felony for repeated petty shoplifting is just odd though. They upgrade the charge to, "felony burglary", for example, when the crime clearly didn't fit the definition of "felony burglary" in the law. They have separate laws for how the "upgrade" occurs.
https://www.amazon.com/Overcriminalization-Limits-Criminal-D...
2) urban gang violence culture
3) effective criminal justice system
If the people shooting at each other over bad business involving drugs were plumbers they would be arguing with each other in a courtroom.
There's 40,000 people in prison for Marijuana.
Do they belong there?
I am sorry but this is vacuuous, it doesnt even scratch the surface of the issue
passing law that criminalizes victimless behavior should be a crime!
Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. (this should be a much loved amendment for those true freedom lover in the US, that are all cringing at the incarceration rate)
Alas, in this case it turns out that it is also one of those "everybody knows" things where everybody turns out to be wrong, and that is covered very early in the article.
That's what makes the article interesting--it is not just another article about how our prisons are stuffed to overflowing due to victimless crime. Instead, it finds that that explanation is wrong, and goes on to work out what is actually going on, which is a lot more interesting.
Note that if the question instead had been "why are there so many people in America who have been in prison" rather than asking about people who are in prison, then it is possible that victimless crime would be the answer.
Anyways, I feel like we have courts to interpret these things. The existing amendments are interpreted in a variety of convoluted ways depending on the scenario.
If we leave it up to the courts, it's not worth the paper its written on.
Drunk driving would fall into that category. However something like illicit drug consumption would not.
So just fine the person and make them do community service.
Which is usually what the courts do for DUI without a victim assuming the accused lawyers up.
Unfortunately the only way this would happen is over a lot of dead bodies or if you spend three generations boiling the frog.
People are too addicted to using overt state violence (as opposed to obfuscated state violence, i.e. fines) to prevent people from engaging in behavior they don't like or risky but not guaranteed harmful behavior. The idea that you could get a DUI or sell heroin and as long as nobody gets hurt the max penalty would be a fine, community service, etc. etc. is just unacceptable to them (despite that being the typical end result in those cases assuming the person charged lawyers up). You can already see this in the comments.
That's a good idea, but much harder to implement than it sounds. Being a small time drug dealer may be a victimless crime to many people, but it certainly isn't to parents who've had a teenager who's OD'd.
And then there are crimes like insurance fraud, that don't hurt any one individual, but do make the cost of living higher for everyone else who's premiums go up as a result.
TLDR; it's very hard to determine which crimes are and are not "victimless".
A relatively simple system would be to require the state to articulate who the victim is. It is then a constitutionally protected defense that the alleged victim was not a victim. Regarding the insurance company, this seems like the exactly the type of scenario that corporate personhood was designed for.
I’d err on the side of avoiding false positives and say that only actions impacting yourself receive the protections of an amendment. Ex:
* not wearing a seatbelt
* consuming drugs
Families lose sole providers and parents have to bury their own children.
but even without that: everyone should be allow to tweak themselves how they see fit. that's just basic tolerance to me.
putting people in cages because they trade chemicals that people seek to induce happiness is to me the main atrocity here.
Isn't the reason that heroin is way, way worse?
To me being an addict is not a problem. I see coffee/nicotin/alc/TV/porn addicts every day and call them my friends'n'fam. No problem. It's "their choice", and they dont look bad for it in my view.
In some cases addiction comes together with other behavior that do make people look bad to me: not taking responsibility, being a cunt, etc. Those behaviors I do look bad at.
If not I don’t understand how the proposed amendment could make this situation any worse than it is now, while it may help many other situations.
I find the point about financial burden to society more interesting because it’s hard to articulate a clear test that would indicate whether society is a victim or not. A few others have made the same point as you. I’d love if anyone has ideas here.
What about that person?
Also, if financially burdening society is a crime, then we ought to imprison CEOs of tabacco and alcohol companies. What about abundance of sugar in food where it doesn't belong, unhealthy lifestyles, etc. Where is the line that preserves any liberties?
And before you say it's obvious, alcohol and McDonald have both ruined more lives than weed ever did.
And with not wearing a seatbelt, you are the victim, along with your loved ones and the rest of us who have to help bear the cost of the emergency response to accidents involving major injuries or fatalities.
A sharp swerve tends to make you lurch to the side relative to the car, which tends to cause you to turn the steering wheel more or less than you intended to turn it. A properly used seat belt limits the extent of that lurch.
If you've got access to a big empty parking lot, it is interesting to do some testing making sharp turns with and without your seat belt. That belt makes a lot of difference.
We can come up with more or less obscure but real examples all day. That's not how laws should be designed.
Reigning in LEO/DA/judge discretion would make the system more fair and potentially prompt the public to demand we fix the broken laws since they would be more likely to be subjected to them rather than let off the hook. I've seen people admit to crimes and be let off the hook based on discretion when others have not. I've seen DAs violate their office policy to ignore misconduct allegations against LEOs - not just performing a shotty investigation, but deciding not to investigate at all even though it's part of a case they are prosecuting. I've also seen a judge give contradictory reasoning in the same case to the detriment of the defense (said lack of a record means they are denying the motion from the defense, when the defense later said they had a record he then said no prior records were allowed to be used).
Changing the mindset of the public from "those criminals deserve it" and truly believing in innocent until proven guilty would also help with the bias defendants face in the system. The first person to call the police is labeled as the victim and that carries a huge bias that affects police and DAs to the point that they don't perform though investigations. In science and other logic based fields you at least think about the devils advocate perspective to verify you are right. This doesn't happen in law. As soon as they get the evidence to "prove" you are guilty, they stop looking. You could have a valid defense or have information that one of their facts is wrong if they investigate a little deeper, but they won't. This puts the defense at a disadvantage since the police and DA have much greater power to investigate than a defendant does. This victim/complainant positive bias will only get worse with things like ex-parte red flag laws and Marcy's law. These are popular with the public, yet in many cases undermine constitutional protections. We even see that things like PFAs are being sought without basis with the intent of weaponizing them in divorces. And this is done with the knowledge of and even pressure from the lawyers, who are supposed to be held to the ethical standards of the bar.
We also need better oversight and higher standards for those who run the system. I've seen a trooper contradict himself multiple times in official reports and in court, one of which I believe was an outright lie to the judge. The investigator said it was just a misunderstanding and they did not care about the contradictions. Any other witness would have been discredited. I doubt they logged these contradictions as Giglio information for future cases. Magistrates in my states aren't required to be lawyers or even pass the bar in my state. I've had magistrates believe that they were being called prejudiced when being asked to dismiss a case with prejudice. Unreal.
Cost of prosecution is covered by the government and virtually unlimited. Cost of defense, other than the indignant, is not covered and can outweigh the cost of pleading guilty and paying a fine. You aren't reimbursed after being found not guilty. This means you can be punished (pay more) more as an innocent person than if you were guilty. How is this justice?
Most cases are settled in plea deals. Many people settle because they could be held in jail while waiting. In many states, if you're not in custody, they consider a speedy trial as anything that starts withing 4 or 5 years. So much for that constitutional protection.
The odds of getting shot by someone wanting to take your wallet is just so close to zero that it literally never crosses my mind. I'm more likely to die getting struck by lightning or having a meteorite fall out of the sky and hit me.
By contrast in US crininals know they will likely spend many years in jail
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Colombia/U...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
That being said, being an addict is not a crime in most countries. Selling drugs is.
Is it different in the US?
Almost every large city in California has a few streets of blocks where they just push all the homeless and trash piles up, you see open bike chop shops pop up, there are super sketchy pimps/prostitutes. I just think we are allowing someone who has a drug addiction to descend to an even deeper downward spiral. I think Neo-liberals tell themselves that they have to not further harm these marginalized folks, but really it's just the the further soft bigotry of low expectations.
My dad was a drug addict and the only time I saw him get sober was after he was incarcerated. I don't think the people out there sleeping under bridges and pushing carts full of trash are getting help, society is just letting them rot until they die off and neoliberals like Nancy Pelosi can just ignore them like a meaningless statistic. Republicans straight up don't care either, but I've never seen lower levels of human despair and drug addiction than in San Francisco or other deeply blue democrat run states.
Uhm... opiates and prostitution have been around for quite some time. Large scale prison systems... not so much.
Except as a punishment for crime. America never abolished slavery, we just made up crimes that disproportionately affect people of color and then use them for free labor. We don't sell their offspring like chattel, we just convict them of the same crimes. Private prisons shouldn't exist and prison labor should be fairly compensated.
Boiling the cause down to a formula like the article does is an incredibly superficial analysis, there's no examination or even curiosity about why any part of the equation is the way it is.