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Comment by mu53 | Hacker News Reader

The data shows that violent crimes are lower today than they've been in decades. Ever recorded, technically in the US.

Crime is enormously politicized. Whichever politician is in office can be attacked with any crimes that happened in their jurisdictions. Its easy to see it in alt-right propaganda bringing up horrific stories.... from years ago. As in, they had to go back years to find a story horrific enough of a story to resonate with people. I see this pattern common in European and American conservative news.

Between the media's "If it bleeds, it leads". Private prisons ties to politicians. Companies benefiting from slave labor. Many people's personal preference for excessive punishment. The data supports one story, and more and more people feel another one is true.

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Around 40% of inmates in the US will reoffend, many finding themselves back in prison (and subsequently released) within the year. Violent crimes can be at a low and repeat violent criminals can still be a problem. Most crime in the US is done by a fraction of the population, and we are doing nothing to actually address rehabilitation. We simply let them go and watch as they hurt more people.

You can try to hand wave this away as “alt-right propaganda” all you want, but the government’s statistics don’t lie.

> Around 40% of inmates in the US will reoffend, many finding themselves back in prison (and subsequently released) within the year.

Why?

Having served their time are they dumped without resources and the stigma of a criminal conviction with limited ability for employment and support?

The US is outstanding extreme in the per capita imprisonment rate which speaks to some systemic issue, however to be fair the US is about middle of the pack for G20 recidivism rates after (say) four years.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...

~ 40% seems commonplace.

Reoffend how, specifically?

Obligatory context: the monetary value of wage theft alone (not including other types of white-collar crime, like embezzlement, tax fraud, securities fraud, etc.) is greater than that of every type of "violent" theft or burglary. Combined. Priorities.

It's a lot less mentally stressful to get a lower paycheck due to some white collar criminal's fraud than it is to get violently robbed for $20 or burgled, raped etc. Some of these crimes aren't even about money but destroy lives.

So I think it's definitely with reason that violent crimes are receiving heavier sentences.

Getting mugged or held-up are very different things from being raped, particularly for something like $20, and it's a problem that you and others conflate them as if they aren't.

As for the relative stress of high-value white collar crime versus low-value "violent" (I put that in quotes because many of these crimes only involve threats, and sometimes even no contact between parties, e.g., pick-pocketing)... Yes, it sucks to feel violated or to be injured. That's on a completely different level from the all-encompassing, debilitating effects on one's life that not being able to pay for food or medical treatment, or getting kicked out of your home, or living in a culture of hopelessness that actually encourages violent crime, has. All are effects of the unfettered economic corruption in this country. White-collar crime is WAY worse, and further, fixing it often goes a long way towards ALSO fixing violent crime.

Again: priorities.

Considering this story, this 18 year old was in a robbery and a fight. Nobody was murdered.

He got 18 months and has been in for 18 years. The article makes no mention of justification for the board's decision to keep him in prison or his behavior while in prison, but they are continuing to do so. They could be keeping him in prison purely out of spite, power trip, or actually be protecting society from him. We don't know.

Is this justice? Is this how it should work? Jailed for life for relatively minor crimes that resulted in a grand total of 18 months prison sentence. Hand waving someone's life away is different than hand waving obvious propaganda.

> The data shows that violent crimes are lower today than they've been in decades. Ever recorded, technically in the US.

Homicides are indeed lower than they were in the height of the cocaine boom of the 70s and 80s and crack wars of the 90s. But they're about 20% higher than they were a decade ago[1], and that's really bad. Murder is one of those things that should be zero tolerance don't you think?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-h...

The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime. For one, cities and states have highly variable rules on what they record and report. Second, the trend of releasing offenders and understaffing police departments has led to citizens simply not reporting many crimes - what’s the point of reporting anything and losing time if no one investigates and even convicted offenders are just released. Third, the west coast of the US has run the experiment on an alternative approach, restorative justice, and it obviously doesn’t work. The last 15 years are evidence of this - leniency induces crime.

This has nothing to do with the “alt-right” or “conservative news” you brought up. Ironically it seems like you’re making this political, despite complaining about politicization.

> The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime.

OK, so on one hand we have crime data going back decades and on the other we have HN user blackeyeblitzar saying "Trust me, bro". I know which one I'm going to believe.

> The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime.

You’ll need to back that up with facts, not “it seems to me…”. It’s easy to say “the data are wrong, think about it,” but that doesn’t make it true. That’s just a nice way of saying, “of course those people are criminals, just look at them, but there’s a conspiracy making reality say different.”

Exactly. FBI gathers crime statistics from every police department across the nation, and most States also do an independent set of statistics on crime. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that they are lying, and their personal incentive is to the exact opposite, as they receive more funding in times where crime is higher. These institutions already make up the majority of most City and State budgets, its well into the billions. But good luck ever trying to reason with people, crime has been used for emotional manipulation on social media and news for decades now, facts don't matter to most people on this topic.

That's a voluntary program that most large cities have declined to participate in since 2020.

And the 'standardized' form has been messed with so much that increase or decrease for any particular line item is meaningless.

Personally, I know that shootings and other crimes I've reported on my property have been white-washed and don't show up in our city's 'open data' system.

Being 'open' with statistics just means they're much more careful about manipulating them first, or about what data is allowed in.

Anyone doubting this needs to go lookup how many murders New Orleans reported to the fbi for the year 2023, published today: 0.

Hint: they had more than 0 murders in 2023.

I looked this up because it sounded implausible. I used the FBI's crime data explorer tool here: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...

I looked at homicide, location Louisiana, agency New Orleans Police Department for the last two years. There were multiple homicides recorded every month in 2023.

EDIT: I found that the New Orleans Police Department also publishes a daily Major Offense Log here:

https://nopdnews.com/transparency/major-offense-log/

It has a homicide reported as recently as 2024-09-21:

https://nopdnews.com/getattachment/2ed5b866-db79-4edb-aeda-7...

Yea sorry everything was coming up zero because they didn't submit supplemental data, so all filters based on that data (including age and other demographics) come back as zero.

Which is not the way 'nodata' should be returned.

But the point stands- eg Jackson ms didn't submit this year. So your get a 'state total' that doesn't include the majority of the data for the state.

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