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Comment by someguydave | Hacker News Reader

It is simple to resolve the criminality but the voters have decided they don’t like the answer (much more policing and incarceration)

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These are just palliative solutions. Avoiding to create criminals is far more relevant for building a sane society.

Also avoiding to import criminals, see Sweden - where I live - for a good example of where that can lead [1]. For the naysayers and label-throwers I can only point at the statistics in the knowledge that these are immune to accusations of racism (et al).

There's also a UN report which lifts up Sweden as an exception to the rule that violent crime is on the wane [2, page 119]: Sweden has experienced unprecedented levels of gang violence and firearm-related deaths in recent years ... Sweden had one of the highest levels of firearm-related deaths in a study over 20 European countries

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriminalstatistik_i_Sverige#/m...

[2] https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/2023/G...

how do you propose to do that?

Telling that taking aspirine won't eliminate the root cause of the pain doesn't imply we know what are the actual root causes, and even less what would heal the person.

Obviously, this is a complexe social topic. To pretend to provide a panacea of all criminality generation all by oneself is asking too much for any individual.

No, it's simple. Policing works

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1302

The number one indicator for crime, almost tautologically, is having previously committed a crime[1]. Keeping violent criminals in jail prevents future crimes, it is fundamentally not the same as just putting a band-aid on a cut. "Avoiding to create criminals" is less important than preventing crimes, as the same small group of offenders is often at fault for the same crime [2].

[1] https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2018/12/18/crimehistory [2] https://www.silive.com/news/2023/04/nyc-shoplifting-report-s...

We already have more % population in jail than any other country. Mostly for drugs. The social cost is much less for getting in trouble for drugs in the US, but the incarceration rate is really high.

None of the countries that are doing far better than us have anywhere near the level of incarceration that we suffer.

Asian countries have far harsher punishments for drug offenses, and their societal outcomes are better than both America's or Europe's.

In most of Asia doing drugs (aside from the "normal" ones like alcohol and tobacco) is also considered something good people don't do.

Here (USA) billionaires microdose acid and take molly in the desert. The culture around drugs is entirely different.

Drug use was extremely prevalent in Asia's early modern history. They stamped it out with harsh enforcement.

Maybe the US will end up learning a similar lesson.

those billionaires should be in jail

Which Asian countries would you say are doing better than Finland and Norway?

While Singapore has a lot of things going for it I wouldn't really consider it more free than Norway, even if drug consumption is substantially restricted there.

The US is usually judged against the Scandinavian countries by comparing homicide rates, so use the same to compare Singapore to the Scandinavian countries and you'll see that Singapore does much better.

You could do the comparison using other crimes instead, but bodies are a more concrete metric. By the way, it's not just Singapore.

compare the murder rate of Nigeria (20) with Japan (0.2) and you begin to understand the nature of the challenges with law enforcement in the US

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