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Comment by tomlockwood | Hacker News Reader

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, though. Maybe the issues with American society aren't ones that can be addressed with more arrests and jail terms?

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The causes of crime is a different discussion from the crimes being caused. There should be more a holistic approach towards the causes but simply deciding not to prosecute is not the way out of this.

But, is prosecution truly the way out of this? It doesn't appear to have been effective at preventing plenty of other crimes, in America. Why would it be any more effective in this case?

If it’s the same criminals committing the same crime shortly after being released, keeping them in jail will reduce the opportunity they have to commit the crime again, at least for as long as they remain in jail.

I've absolutely heard this rhetoric about short jail terms before, though, about any number of crimes. Is there data to back this up?

I think the point was that the number of thefts made outside the prison by people who are in the prison is necessarily zero, unless they escaped. Do you need data to be convinced of this?

They're in prison until they aren't and at that point they may steal enough to make up for the stealing the imprisoning prevented.

The point of adding a 10s delay on incorrect password attempts isn’t to make it impossible to brute force passwords, it’s to slow an attacker from 600 tries per minute down to 6/min. This is enough of a deterrence to make brute forcing impractical.

If you have to wait 7 days between train robberies instead of 24 hours, that’s a big hit to the business model. Maybe enough to make it impractical.

Your analogy doesn't really help because they aren't just "delayed". Money is wasted on incarcerating them, they come in close contact with criminals, and it makes their ability to get a job, lower.

You're forgetting the cost of jailing them in the first place. Not only is there an upfront cost of $106k per year(assuming we're talking about CA)[1], that person is also not working(or paying taxes) or gaining any useful skills. What they're doing instead is hanging out in a population of other criminals and participating in a social order that incentivizes if not downright mandates behavior that in itself would be considered criminal in wider society. I don't think it's so far fetched to say that the cost society pays to incarcerate someone with the goal of preventing them from committing more crimes can exceed the cost of the crimes themselves. Deterrence is the only possible way to justify these costs(And prisons do have nonzero use as a deterrent), but the current prison situation makes it clear that prison's RoI growth has some seriously diminishing returns that started at a funding level far lower than the current one.

[1]https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

What is the alternative though? Societal interventions are a slow, months to years long process to an acute problem. I'm sure most criminals can be reformed through years of education, therapy and trauma healing but you can't deny that lax sentencing and lax enforcement contribute to opportunistic crime sprees like organized retail theft mobs and train robberies. Nobody needs to rob trains to eat, in America, as you put it.

> Nobody needs to rob trains to eat, in America, as you put it.

They don't? That's not what I've heard.

https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america

When they have to invent a new term "food insecurity" and your country leads the world in obesity, you know people aren't going hungry in the normal sense of the word.

Do you feel like the obese people are robbing these trains?

Seen photos? Yes, some of them are obese.

What’s your point?

Oh, I guess some of them aren't hungry, then.

My understanding is that most of the people struggling to feed themselves make too much money to qualify for assistance, but too little to reliably feed themselves.

Obviously, those people aren't making too much money (as documented by the IRS and/or banks) by robbing trains.

The leading health problem among the poor in the US is obesity.

Prosecuting crime does not eliminate crime; it minimizes crime.

For the criminal justice system to deter crime, there has to be a reasonable chance of getting caught and punished, and the punishment must significantly exceed the benefit that obtained from the crime.

> punishment

This makes the big assumption that people know or care about the punishment. Most people do, but plenty of people are desperate and just don't give a shit.

I think if you flip that thinking, there'd be people spreading the word that the prevention is minimal and the punishment not a serious deterrent. e.g., no one thinks "I wonder what happens if you're busted grabbing stuff out of a shipping container?" But if there's no punishment, word would spread fast. "Those guys have been doing it for weeks and no one cares. X got busted but they had to let him off light. They don't do anything about it!"

There's also literal evidence from the original article that these criminals know they won't be punished and can do it with impunity.

That seems likely, but that's existing criminals. Doesn't it make logical sense that lowering punishment enough will attract rational people who are not desperate to do crimes?

That's not what I've heard:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/do-harsher-pu...

Some of this is really just common sense. I believe the following:

- If murder were not prosecuted, or punished by only a day in jail, murder rates would increase. It would effectively be legal.

- Changing the sentence on murder from 10 years to life, however, would be unlikely to have any marginal deterrent effect.

Stated more generally, I think many sentences in this country are horrifically long, and dramatically shortening them would not increase crime. But if you decrease them to a level where they are de minimis compared to the benefit of the crime, or just not prosecuted at all, I don’t need a study to tell me crime will increase. It is human nature.

I've heard incorrect folk wisdom parroted as if it were true, before, so I'll wait for the study.

Plenty of people claim they have a grasp on common sense, and many of them disagree.

Do you eat when you’re hungry and put on a raincoat outside when it’s raining, or do you wait for a study?

Hilarious that you bought up "eating when hungry" as an example of common sense considering all the discussion about that recently. Folk wisdom loses, again :) I think I will wait for the study.

Exactly! Beyond a certain threshold, increasing punishment severity has diminishing returns (or negative, if you count the fiscal and societal costs of incarceration).

Recidivism for most crimes is high. Putting criminals in prison prevents them from committing more crimes.

But does prison also cause significant other issues, leading to that recidivism?

I mean, no, there's lots of crimes you can commit in jail that can lead you to an even worse sentence. But also recidivism isn't simply some moral badness in a person, there's tons of factors that feed into it, including the community around the person being released, their ability to provide with a record, etc.

And not putting criminals in jail allows them to commit more crimes.

Lacking crime data for the counterfactual world where crime wasn't prosecuted, I don't think you can make this assertion. Not to say that you're wrong (and I've seen evidence that you're right), but that you can't just eyeball our crime rate and come to any conclusion.

It is counterintuitive to suggest that punishments have an insignificant effect on crime rates. It doesn't pass the 'me' test- even my idealized version of myself would steal if there were no consequences, though it's tricky to judge whether I'd be more or less inclined with variable consequences. Again, doesn't mean it's not true, just sets the bar for evidence a little higher.

Well, its similarly frustrating to me that the snap response to crime in America still seems to be, more enforcement. Clearly, the crime rate is the result of a multi-faceted set of variables. Why press the "harsher punishment" button?

Also if an idealized version of yourself would still steal, perhaps that is also multi-faceted, and requires some other change to society other than the justice system. What do you think you'd steal? I think I'd steal too - mostly from large corporations, because I don't really care if Disney or Walmart profits go down.

> Clearly, the crime rate is the result of a multi-faceted set of variables. Why press the "harsher punishment" button?

Because people are perceiving a higher rate of visible crimes within a reasonably short time after the "reduce punishment" button was pushed.

Of course, going back to the old ways without any real progress on anything else is going to put us back to the old problems. (Costs of incarceration are high, concerns about fairness, concerns about conditions, etc)

> I think I'd steal too - mostly from large corporations, because I don't really care if Disney or Walmart profits go down.

I don't necessarily care about their profits per se, but if Walmart (or maybe a chain store you dislike less) leaves my community because of theft, that makes my life harder.

> I don't necessarily care about their profits per se, but if Walmart (or maybe a chain store you dislike less) leaves my community because of theft, that makes my life harder.

There's definitely already theft happening at Walmart so they have a non-zero tolerance for it. Frankly, I don't think Walmart leaving a community will necessarily be a bad thing for that community.

I should clarify that when I said 'my idealized version of myself,' I wasn't talking about an enlightened, self-actualized 'me'. I meant 'me' as I perceive myself. As far as I know, it's an accurate version, but my understanding is that that's unlikely.

I don't have a good answer for your first question, but I would steal for fun and profit.

There's a thrill to breaking the rules and getting away with it. Part of it is the Ocean's Eleven cool factor. Part of it is the feeling of being smarter or more competent than security. And part of it is shortcutting the 'I made this' circuits in one's brain and feeling proud. There's probably more to it than that.

And profit is self-explanatory. Maybe it's greed. Maybe it's that I'd rather work on my own projects than have a job. Maybe something else. But I'd appreciate free stuff, absolutely.

> There's a thrill to breaking the rules and getting away with it.

This is interesting, maybe another facet to the usefulness of rules, discussion?

> But I'd appreciate free stuff, absolutely.

But why do you need free stuff? What are you trying to achieve with the stuff?

I think you probably get where I'm going with this questioning...

We need more punishments, but of lesser severity matching the crime. Ideally with a large parole component with GPS tracking. It can be far cheaper than incarceration, have a large deterrent effect, while enabling rehabilitation.

The Norwegian system is capital intensive, but good at preventing recidivism.[0][1][2]

Evidence based policy works. Even starting the transition to evidence based policy in the US would be hard though.

[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48885846

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway

A system that works in a country won’t work in another country that is culturally different, more heterogenous, etc.

It might not work as well, but there are certainly useful hints to be taken.

At a bare minimum, it proves that recidivism is not laws-of-physics unavoidable.

As you say, going from what we have to what they have will be no simple matter. It would take decades of reform at the very least. In the meantime, it doesn't make sense to just stop improning people for minor crimes.

How do you solve the problem of a subculture which glorifies crime? These people don't care about your rules. They take pride in breaking them. They are not interested in your American Dream or your ideas of educational opportunity. Taking advantage of opportunity (or altruism) is an achievement, a victory over perceived weakness. Altruism is a respectable virtue, but forcing altruisum upon others at the hands of barbarism is tyrrany.

You start by disconfirming your beliefs.

What is the American Dream? Is it a reality? Is it available to. The people in this subculture you're talking about (curious to hear more about this subculture)? Are the educational opportunities?

Is crime glorification the cause, or the effect of a deeper problem?

Why does this happen in the richest country in the world? Is it a bug or is it a feature? If it's a feature, what does it imply about those that are able to reach monumental amounts of wealth in this same society?

Underrated comment. There's simply too many people who don't care at all about the rules or about participating in a functional society.

AFAIK the incarceration rate problems in US have more to do with locking up non violent drug users, the three strikes policy and probably other miguided efforts than with locking up actual thieves, robbers and murderers.

But I am not an American.

I've read some interesting things about this idea: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

> It’s true that police, prosecutors, and judges continue to punish people harshly for nothing more than drug possession. Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of almost half a million people, and nonviolent drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

> Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our justice system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.

I think it's a very good point but you also aren't going to convince a lot of people without offering concrete solutions to the immediate issue. What are they, in your opinion? I personally think if the company kept its trains moving and/or had better fences, it might prevent the thefts in the first place. But if your idea is let's not prosecute theft and focus on reducing economic inequalities, I'm not sure I buy it!

You hit the nail on the head there - lets not smash the "more arrests and harsher punishments UP doesn't have to pay for (what a coincidence)" button, immediately, right?

Stop jailing people for simple possession of drugs. Start jailing people for repeated burglary.

how would you feel if something like this personally affected you? say you depended on critical prescription drugs to be mailed to you and thieves were robbing the postal service, stealing your medication. what then?

I'd want to reduce the crime rate. But hey, maybe a way of doing that is to reduce the price of medication and therefore its resale value, somehow. Maybe that's another topic we don't really want to interrogate here, though. :)

Ripping and robbing a freight train is not the same situation at all. Things that aren't found as valuable are being tossed along the tracks.

Did you not see the throngs of people stealing from trains? The solution here is not to remove disincentives for antisocial behavior. That would be like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Do these measures actually disincentivize antisocial behavior over the life of the subject?

I mean take the extremes. If there was no penalty, would people be more inclined to steal? What if the penalty was the most extreme? If you look to Singapore, you’ll find a country with very rough penalties by western standards. Yet that translates to almost no crime.

I can also think of plenty of countries that have even more severe punishments for criminals, that do have a lot of crime, though. Which just leads back to the idea that increased punishment isn't necessarily the solution here.

Well, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system. But if you combine a highly efficient and regulated justice system with proper funding and harsh penalties, you will soon have no crime. The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims.

> Well, harsh penalties mean nothing if you have a corrupt and/or underfunded police/criminal justice system.

Interesting... This sounds like America, to me.

> The problem of course, is people who will advocate for “criminal rights” instead of the rights of victims.

Unless the justice system is corrupt, right?

I don’t think that describes America at all. America would have among the safest and best police by world standards. I recently visited Bangladesh, and the police there were recently involved in a shooting - however, they weren’t able to respond, as the local police had sold all their bullets.

In a country the size of America, it’s not hard to find examples of when it goes wrong, which the media then inflate in order to incite racial tensions to increase their ratings.

Sounds like you've already decided, since reading BLM as a media ratings frenzy is amazing - but America has the largest prison population in the world, in a mostly for-profit system. From 2014 onwards asset forfeiture has taken more money from American citizens than burglary.

The number of people killed by police annually in the USA is quite low, fewer than 1,000 per year. For a nation with over 300m people and as many guns, don’t you find it surprising that this number isn’t higher? Of course, 50% of this thousand killings per year are of white people, sometimes at the hands of black cops - but this doesn’t cause race riots, and people don’t automatically assume racism - yet if the ethnicities are reversed, it becomes a national issue, rioting etcetera.

America's incarceration rate is over nine times that of a country like Denmark's. You see the comments here from Americans - even more people need to be incarcerated, the DAs are too soft. People elect these DAs because they are tired of police brazenly murdering people on video and locking everyone up.

US also has, like, heck of a lot more crime than Denmark. We don’t arrest and jail people for the hell of it.

And based on comments here, it seems that many of you guys seriously think that a solution is... arresting and jailing more people? Somehow brings mind the quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

And from my European point of view, the three strikes thing is pretty much a definition of jailing people for the hell of it.

If someone committed the same crime in Europe you would put them in jail too, would you not?

Context was how to reduce crime, not whether a specific crime should yield jail time.

Yes, that’s how the European country I moved to US from deals with crime. US is insanely lenient toward petty criminals compared to Europe.

If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail? No one is saying we shouldn’t find ways to prevent people from committing crimes in the first place, but this experiment in california with having no consequences isn’t working, that’s pretty obvious.

> If someone robbed a train in Denmark would they go to jail?

In Denmark, would the robbery happen in the first place?

It could. Maybe california should send their criminals over to Denmark to see what happens.

American is large. Some DA's are soft. Some are hard. LA's is definitely way too soft. It's dropping the standard of living for common working class people.

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