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Comment by cr4nberry | Hacker News Reader

> Come to downtown San Jose and you will see a lot of the same issues

I went there once for the library and it just seemed really sketch. I never thought I would say this but maybe the nimbys aren't all bad :/

also should have clarified original comment, but what I meant was the suburban stretch from like Burlingame to Sunnyvale

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It's an american disease, maybe even californian. Go to many other cities in the rest of the world and they have denser, better cities with none of the literal shit. IMO I would barely call most of the bay a city, just a semi-dense suburb for the most part beyond a few pockets.

There are very specific criminal justice reform and soft-on-crime policies that lead to this. If you go to Tokyo, you'll be put in jail for doing drugs. Most likely extremely tough prison sentence of a decade or more. It prevents people from doing drugs and getting trapped in the spiraling destruction of self. Here in America, we have NYC and SF opening clinics to comfortably allow people to shoot heroine in the comfort of a shelter: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/nyregion/supervised-injec...

Moral underlying reason? We don't want people to overdose. We're saving lives.

I'd say, Tokyo's policies are far more moral. They'd save thousands of lives vs. 2 overdose lives in a reactionary measure.

Eh, I don't think it's so causal. In my mind it's the culture that keeps crime low and the laws have merely been created to reflect the values of that culture.

There’s a famous Bay Area town with no police dept, sizable population, somewhat wealthy, very low murder rate, amazing schools and no homelessness, and neither democrats or republicans have any meaning in local town politics. The nearby towns are similar. I wonder if it's possible to buy this in any other part of the country.

Things are easier when you have a good start.

Probably Bentonville, Arkansas, I’m kidding mostly bc I don’t know if they have a police department but it’s sorta the same idea as Cupertino. Also I think Santa Clara fire fights and polices for them.

The US has the world's highest incarceration rate (and by some distance--it's about 10% higher than the second highest rate, El Salvador, and 300% higher than the highest rate among the EU countries), and Japan is around the 20th lowest.

This strongly suggests that incarceral policies are not the most effective solution to reducing crime.

Yea, we've been telling ourselves this and let's do more of the same for another 2 decades and completely destroy the fabric of society.

Put it the other way, if crime rates would increase hypothetically in Japan, you'd see a proportinal increase in incarcination rate. May be, that there are cultural differences and the crime rates are vastly different between Japan and USA. Disincitivization from hard-on-crime policies could be a non-linear function that we're just glossing over. Highly functional at low crime rates.

But the answer shouldn't be to throw the baby with the bath water and turn public parks into heroine shooting sites. Progressives have been doing this consistently, destroying our nation for last 3 decades of lies and misunderstandings of criminal justice system. Experiments like CHOP and CHAZ, which abandon all law & order are the epitome of the progressive dysfunction.

Sounds like propaganda more than reality but regardless, Japan is a de facto ethno-state and that has certain peculiarities that make it a poor example to contrast with the United States. In comparing to Japan, the United States of course also has a history of slavery in its carceral system is not particularly humanitarian.

> This strongly suggests that incarceral policies are not the most effective solution to reducing crime.

No it doesn't, because you've only changed one variable, and there's a lot more that differentiates the US from those countries other than prisons

Effect size is a thing. The US incarceration rate is >3× comparable countries. If the effect size of incarceration rate were similar to (or larger than!) other causes, the US would have to be consistently 3× comparables in other social statistics, like GDP per capita, inequality, or diversity, to achieve the same crime rate. But it's not, which means that the other factors must have greater impact on the crime rate than incarceration rate. Ergo, locking people up is not the most effective solution--there has to be something more effective out there.

Aren't there similar clinics in Portugal? How are the crime and homelessness rates there?

It’s a totally rational response that is also horribly selfish. You kind of see this sentiment any time discussion of San Francisco comes up. A bunch of people who have voted to consistently take funds out of the city will jump to attack it as if it were some hated foreign country. Meanwhile the voters of California restricted local taxation to be massively regressive. The voters or America consistently give handouts to rural places. But when it comes to pitching in and helping a once great city, people would rather sit smug about how smart they are to have expelled their homeless people somewhere else.

The problem is not lack of money. There is plenty of money and it's being wasted. The root of the problem is the political views of the people who run the city and the voters who put them there.

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