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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Going a step further, we can reduce costs by funding social services that help prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place. I agree with your assessment of our Calvinist thinking.

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Do we have any silver bullets? My understanding is most social services show very small effects once replicated.

I think this understanding is incorrect. My understanding is that housing services, mental health services, medical services, transportation infrastructure, and related things like maternity and paternity leave, good labor rights, good pay and fair working conditions all lead to a reduction in low level crime and homelessness. There is no need for a single silver bullet if we have a collection of policies that work. To just pick one issue here is a nice article about housing:

https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/p...

The fact that some places with affordable housing have much lower crime rates is incredibly far from a replicated RCT (or RCT like data).

This is true, but I think RCT-like conditions are hard to create in the social sciences. This does not mean we are unable to make informed policy choices based on the available data.

For interventions they're not that hard, and 99% of correlations that suggest interventions fail to find an effect when they try and RCT. While it's true it's evidence, it is very very very weak evidence.

> 99% of correlations that suggest interventions fail to find an effect

I'm genuinely trying to square your thinking with the specific services I listed in an earlier comment:

> housing services

It seems obvious and intuitive to me that providing discounted housing services would clearly have an effect. Clearly if we can manage spiraling housing costs, more people can stay housed and fewer people will be destitute. And the case in Vienna supports this notion: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

Have you found an RCT-like study that provided affordable housing of this quality and failed to find an effect?

> mental health services

I would be surprised if you found that providing quality mental health services does not have an effect.

> medical services

This is another one which seems obvious and intuitive to me. A fair number of people in the USA end up homeless or destitute due to medical debt or lack of appropriate medical care. Every other major country offers some form of free medical care and I cannot see how this would fail to have an effect.

> transportation infrastructure

If you follow the urbanists on youtube or websites like Strong Towns it seems clear that requiring everyone to have a car places a heavy burden on the poor, and it seems obvious to me that if you have good transportation infrastructure (high speed rail between cities and good metro rail in cities, appropriate zoning for walkable neighborhoods), then it becomes much easier for the poor. This is not something that you can easily study as an RCT.

> and related things like maternity and paternity leave, good labor rights, good pay and fair working conditions

Again these are obviously beneficial.

I feel like I provided a lot of good examples and I am surprised by the continued assertion of "very very very weak evidence". Really? For every one of these things?

Let me start with what I agree with, we should try all of them in a fashion that tests if they work, and if any of them did role them out everywhere.

I also agree that many of these have beneficial effects besides a reduction in crime and we should maybe provide these services anyway because it makes peoples lives better.

I also agree we should manage spiraling housing costs by upzoning everywhere. I think affordable housing could actually make things worse by concentrating poverty.

I'm not convince transportation infrastructure helps the poor more than direct cash transfers. The US is really terrible at building cost effective transportation infrastructure, and most of the places that have it are terrible places to be poor like San Francisco or New York.

The only example I need is one replicated natural experiment or RCT that shows any of these working.

I encourage you to read the short article about Vienna, which explicitly addresses the concern of concentrating poverty. Vienna has avoided this by building good affordable housing in desirable locations which is owned by the city government, and then they only require people to be poor upon entering the housing. As their income rises, which is a predictable effect of affordable housing, they are allowed to stay. This means that the housing is mixed income rather than concentrated poverty. The city owns or controls approximately half of all available housing units in the city, which helps keep private rents reasonable as well through market pressure. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

I think the research is out there to support these policies, whether the data is an RCT or something else, as I hope the above argument highlights. If you remain neutral while you wait for an RCT, there can be real world consequences for vulnerable people.

I do agree that the US is terrible at building transportation infrastructure, but as advocates like Strong Towns point out, we're actually bankrupting local towns with car-dependent sprawl (due to high tax burdens to maintain the infrastructure) so we really must improve that one regardless. That it will benefit the poor is simply another reason to accelerate these changes.

Sorry my idea isn't to sit out on the sidelines.

It's the difference between "Look at all these policies that reduce crime." to "Here are some good ideas for policies we should test out in as controlled an environment as possible to see if they reduce crime".

In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can't pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.

Is this 1/3 of the current prison population, or is it 1/3 of prison sentences handout in a certain period?

I could believe the latter.

But I assume that sentences for fare evasion are shorter than for other types of theft, or more serious things like murder?

Sadly population

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany

This is wildly inaccurate.

The population of Germany is about 84m. The total prison population in Germany is 56557. [1]

What are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany

Not OP but I believe they're talking about the total prison population and not the total population. They're saying that roughly 19,000 people (roughly 1/3 of 56,557) are in prison in Germany due to the inability to pay a fine that was given to them for riding on a train or bus without a ticket.

I'd want to see a citation on that, only thing I could find so far is this quote "Peter Biesenbach, justice minister in Germany's most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia, said that over one-in-ten verdicts handed down in his state dealt with fare-dodgers."

I can't imagine that 1 in ten verdicts for fare dodging would result in one third of the prison population being fare dodgers.

> In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket.

I think this could be read two ways:

> In Germany, 1/3 of the total population is in prison because they used a train or bus without a ticket.

> In Germany, 1/3 of the total prison population is there because they used a train or bus without a ticket.

I suspect you mean the second, just noting that it could be misunderstood. (Please correct me if I'm mistaken!)

It's ambiguous but first interpretation can be ruled out immediately because it can't possibly be true.

This seems like a made up number. This article here states that it is at most 10% of all people even in that category of crime in Bavaria https://netzpolitik.org/2022/datenluecke-wie-viele-menschen-...

The category being "Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe" (imprisonment for failure to pay a fine)

Do you have a source for your claim?

If your numbers are true, and 10% of the prison population consists of people who didn't pay their bus fare, that is egregious

The 10% are in the category of "Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe" which are is "imprisonment for failure to pay a fine"

The article is about the lack of more fine-grained data in that category

You don't get it. The fines are HUGE and the prison sentences really short.

So what do you choose? Pay x000 euro? Or go to prison for 1 day, a week at most? There are a substantial number of people picking the second option. Hell, people joke it's about the experience.

(Also this is in fact mostly about speeding tickets, not public transport fares)

Bavaria is the second most well off state so it seems a little unreasonable to assume the average numbers must be near that. These are the kind of crimes disproportionately concerning the poor.

I was also curious about this statement. According to wikipedia, one third of the Plötzensee Prison inmates are there due to fare evasion. Or rather, they were when the articles that wikipedia cites were written. Of course, being a juvenile prison in Berlin, it might have the highest rate of fare evader inmates of any prison in the country (which would explain why the articles write about that prison specifically).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plötzensee_Prison

https://taz.de/135-Schwarzfahrer-hinter-Gittern/!5134051/

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/jeder-dritte-in-plotzense...

I am German and support the degradation of this "crime" to a delict, but even if 1/3 of the emprisoned is there bc of riding without a ticket, which I can hardly believe without a source, you leave out a very important aspect. Most if not all of those aren't emprisoned because they were caught 3 times without a ticket, but because they were on probation when they were caught. Most of those got probation immedeately in court. The law was created in the 1930s by the Nazi government because people "hacked" the new ticket machines, which weren't as secure as today. This wasn't an issue before when selling tickets was done by humans. Sadly western Germany always has been too conservative to change it, the reunification would have been a good chance to overthink every law that originated from the 3rd Reich.

I'd rather ride the U-Bahn in Munich than the subway in NYC.

Yes, and I'd rather go to prison in Munich than to Rikers Island.

It will make more sense once you realize the judicial system, cops, prisons etc demand their tribute and if less people are breaking the current laws more will have to be invented or prison sentences made longer.

Government apparatuses don't shrink in size. This is why the war on drugs started after prohibition, Henry Anslinger had to go after the evil marijuana. If people stop committing crimes we'll just have to invent more.

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