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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

The indifference of this by everyone involved is infuriating. This criminal activity is treated as natural as rain, just something us 98% of people have to endure.

It's important to remember that accepting crime, especially low level crime like this is a policy choice. It's the same people doing the same crimes over and over. They have run ins with the law and they just get let go to continue terrorizing the rest of us.

For instance, the number of state prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%. You can cut crime. You can just prosecute these people and take them out of society for their most destructive years (18-40) and we can end this madness.

Even a 15 strikes and you're out policy would make a huge impact on the quality of life for the rest of us

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...

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The US already incarcerates vastly more people than most comparable nations. And yet this level of incarceration does not seem to have had the effect you want.

It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.

While there are arguments for this sort of thing, it is also based on a wilfull misreading (or no-reading) of what we know about the reasons why people commit crime at all.

Explain to me why someone that's been arrested 15 times should be let go to terrorize others.

That person that has been arrest 15 times before cannot continue to commit crime if he's behind bars. You don't need to "read" the data to come to this conclusion.

People commit crime in large part because they can get away with it.

It's not complicated.

That's not really the issue though (and for the record, I agree that a person found guilty of what they were arrested for 15 times should be incarcerated).

The problem is: why is this person doing this, because there are at least two outcomes:

1. we lock them up, and a part of the problem is gone

2. we lock them up, and someone else steps in to do the same thing

From my perspective, there's ample evidence to suggest that #2 is more likely, and thus even if locking them up has some moral weight behind it, it isn't likely to be a solution to crime in general.

>and for the record, I agree that a person found guilty of what they were arrested for 15 times should be incarcerated

but you know damned well that most of the time it doesn't even go to trial. they're arrested, released, arrested, released, charges pressed, charges dropped; an endless merry-go-round. eventually people stop even reporting crime, why should they bother when the criminals don't get put away?

>From my perspective, there's ample evidence to suggest that #2 is more likely

why? this is like the "lump of labour" fallacy but for crime.

and yes, getting rid of just a few career criminals does disproportionately reduce crime. here's a funny natural experiment from ireland:

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/number-of-burgla...

There's only so many people that are criminally predisposed. The org doing bike thefts will stop if the penalty is high enough. Singapore has low crime because they prosecute aggressively. No one seemed to fill in for arrested gang members in El Salvador (extreme example)

Then there are the crazy person punching an Asian lady on the subway crimes and these fall squarely in 1

You've blinded yourself by othering them. "There's only so many people criminally predisposed" - that may be comforting, but it's too naive to build a policy around.

100% of people would commit crimes under the right circumstances. As an extreme example, 100% of us could sustain a life changing head injury that renders us more violent and aggressive than we were before, and that could happen at any moment. The most kind and timid person you know could turn into a monster if they fell down the stairs. You could turn into a monster if you fell down the stairs. The only thing you can do to stop that from happening is to protect your head, it doesn't matter how good or virtuous you are presently.

You can't incarcerate your way out of crime. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

100% of us could sustain a life changing head injury that renders us more violent and aggressive than we were before, and that could happen at any moment

Then I should be imprisoned if I present a threat to the public. I don't understand what your point is.

If you think that there is a distinct group of people who commit all the crimes (as was suggested), and we can solve the problem of crime by locking all of them up, than you are mistaken. Or rather, that group is "everyone."

It's an easy trap to fall into for two reasons. It would appear that you and those you know aren't capable of being criminals. This is more comforting than it is true. Everyone, including good people, has the potential to do something horrible; the problem of evil isn't that it's present in a certain group who we can imprison, the problem is that it's present in us all.

The second thing which makes "lock them all up" a seductive proposal is that it's cynical. Cynicism can feel like the opposite of naivete, so it can feel like you're being clear eyed and realistic about the situation and that the people you disagree with (say, prison abolitionists) are naive bleeding hearts. But cynicism is actually just another form of naivete. It's making the same error - blinking while staring into the abyss - with different aesthetics.

> Everyone has the potential to do something horrible; the problem of evil isn't that it's present in a certain group who we can imprison, the problem is that it's present in us all.

But some people are actually more predisposed towards criminality than others. We aren't blank slates.

The extent to which criminality (or any particular human behavior) is driven by circumstance or "nature" is (and for millenia has been) a matter for considerable debate.

It's clear that both contribute, which is important because that means there are neither "ur-criminals" nor "not-criminals". While some may, by their nature, be more likely to commit a certain type of crime, none are free from the possibility of doing so under some circumstances.

> Then I should be imprisoned if I present a threat to the public.

The problem with this is that's it is extremely easy for people to define "threat" in ways that are convenient to them or that support their prejudices, a la Reefer Madness.

we lock them up, and someone else steps in to do the same thing

Crime isn't an internship program.

It is, it has the colloquial name of "hanging with the wrong crowd."

You don't have to commit a crime to be arrested. You just have to do something the police don't like - like holding up certain signs in a public space.

Read the study

> 73% of the prior offenses are violent and 80% are property related (obviously non-exclusive)

Participating in an Extinction Rebellion blockade would fall in both categories.

> why someone that's been arrested 15 times should be let go to terrorize others

First, correct the assumption that multiple arrests mean you're just living your life "terrorizing" society. Perhaps start with using words that are objective and neutral, not just to fan the flames of passionate rhetoric.

>The US already incarcerates vastly more people than most comparable nations

because it has vastly more crime than comparable nations. you have to look at what happens to crime in the US over time, when you are more or less stringent about jailing criminals; predictably as you fill the jails, crime goes down, and when you empty them, crimes goes up.

>It seems that you imagine that the crime is somehow intrinsic to the current group of people committing it, and that by removing them from society, their behavior would not recur.

people try to smuggle this false premise into discussions about law and order all the time. the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals. you put them in jail so that they can't commit crimes. if they commit crimes when they leave, put them in jail again. jails mostly don't rehabilitate criminals, but that's a failure of the idea of mass rehabilitation, not a failure of mass incarceration. crime is a choice.

we incarcerate at a higher rate per capita, not just in absolute numbers. based on your apparent view of things, that ought to result in less crime per capita, but it does not.

> more or less stringent about jailing criminals

is quite different than "fill the jails, empty the jails"

Quite a bit of research on the effect of deterrence on crime seems to strongly suggest that it is the level of certainty of being caught and punished that has a deterrent effect, not the severity of the sentence. This would correlate with "more or less stringent about jailing criminals".

> the primary purpose of jail is not rehabilitation, it is to protect the public from criminals

This is a statement of belief, and there are people who believe otherwise. I don't have a strong position either way, but I don't like people asserting that their opinions are self-obvious truths about the world.

The comment you replied to is talking about incapacitation, not deterrence.

Independent of any discussion on deterrence or incarceration's purpose, I think you misinterpret parent point as being about absolute numbers, but I read their point as per capita crime rates being higher, and thus per capita incarceration rates are as well being downstream of a population committing higher per capita offenses.

America has measurably larger underclass than, say, EU measurable in absolute and per capita terms across metrics like offense rates, incarcerations, income equality, education...

If incarceration is always "downstream" of per-capita crime rates, then it presumably has little effect on the upstream causes of crime.

And yes, the US has a larger underclass than the EU, which just might have something to do with why we have more crime, no? And if so, increasing incarceration rates is not likely to help much, is it?

I think I see where the discussion frequently diverges on these threads - you're pointing out that incarceration does not appear to decrease offenses, while myself and others are pointing out why more incarceration is an outcome (desired, if we're being opinionated) of more offenses.

I think you're onto something in calling your point out, but at the same time, it's daring commenters to ask you what any society's response to crimes should be.

Rather than be coy, I'll stick my neck out and claim incarceration is about optimizing for outcomes among the peaceful/orderly middle and higher classes. We don't have to worry about the philosophical question of why crime occurs, or whether incarceration will work overall, it works well enough to deflect crimes away from certain locally policed areas and demographics and that flawed approach is good enough to keep the unkind, leaky system going.

> incarceration is about optimizing for outcomes among the peaceful/orderly middle and higher classes.

Actually I focus more on protecting the peaceful/orderly poor. Poor people are overwhelmingly law-abiding, but they suffer from the overwhelming majority of crime. On the other hand it's mostly naive rich people who subscribe to these theories that put the blame on everyone except the criminal, and they most of all can afford to insulate themselves from the predictable chaos when those theories are put into practice. Poor people don't have that luxury.

american style incarceration breeds criminals. it isnt a form of punishment for the vast majority of people who end up in prison or jail. its details like these that bleeding heart people gloss over.

The US incarcerates lots of people, but how many are imprisoned for things that aren't crimes? You could drop all the folks imprisoned for stuff like driving while black, and make space for organized theft rings

One of the costs of low trust society is it forces everyone to think short term. You can’t save if your money will be inflated. You can’t collect if it will be stolen and no party will take responsibility for protecting it.

“But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”

> the number of state prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

So one reading of this statistic is "incarcerating people turns them into criminals"

which suggests that maybe the better way is something else than locking people up and giving them a black mark which prevents them ever getting a viable job?

>which suggests that maybe the better way is something else than locking people up and giving them a black mark which prevents them ever getting a viable job?

The fact is that there are a sizeable number of people, for a variety of reasons, who don't have the interest or capacity in holding a viable job. It would be nice if this wasn't the case, but the world exists as it exists, not as we wish it would.

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