Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much.
Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.)
(I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.)
I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police.
[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)
How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated, but that's not the same as having a criminal record.
About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23.
About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record.
Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US.
These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations.
It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record.
Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.
While some of the effect may be more frequent and longer incarceration per arrest, the US (until recently being passed last year by El Salvador) has had the highest incarceration rate in the world, so its a good bet that it has a higher than typical arrest rate for the developed world, as well.
Among whites the only person I know to have been shot dropped his shotgun and accidentally blew half his forearm off while hunting.
Blacks are 14% of the population, so black men would be under 7%, poor black men who live in cities would be less than that.
So that doesn't explain the statistic.
Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.
I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.
Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction.
You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.
EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.
For example some types of DUI (drunk driving) is a felony in many states, but extremely common in the population as a whole. Very few do actual prison time unless especially egregious, are repeat offenders, or if they hurt someone during the commission of that crime.
Many other examples abound - ranging from felony (over $1,000 in most places) shoplifting, breaking and entering, bar fights, etc.
Felonies used to mean "high crimes" and were intended to be exceedingly rare and for exceptional crimes, but they have lost any meaning whatsoever over the interceding years.
I believe "criminal records" also includes folks with misdemeanors which is even more common and almost never has associated prison time included in sentencing.
Not sure if the statistics you're referencing re: "criminal records" even includes arrests in that. Many arrests don't result in further prosecution on top of all the above.
Dude totaled at least his two cars (don't know what happened to the cars he hit), hurt some people and obviously didn't care since he did it twice. Of course it was over a woman...
It excludes "minor traffic violations."
> Brame, Turner, Paternoster, and Bushway (2012) recently investigated the arrest experience of a national sample of American youth and found that 25–41% of those youth reported having been arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.
> Assuming the missing cases are missing at random, about 30% of black males have experienced at least one arrest by age 18 (vs. about 22% for white males); by age 23 about 49% of black males have been arrested (vs. about 38% for white males). Earlier research using the NLSY showed that the risk of arrest by age 23 was 30%
Edit: Link to original paper https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appe...
When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.
You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
Felony on your record? Yeah, you’re basically fucked for life.
Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.
Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.
Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.
You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.
It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.
Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.
Spent $1,500 on a lawyer who negotiated it to a trivial “failure to maintain control” ticket with a maybe $100 fine.
The system is dumb. Or maybe it’s smart, giving people with means, like us, favorable treatment without having to outright say “poor people aren’t worthy.”
The speed limit is a limit, not a requirement. Driving fast in conditions where you can hydroplane is absolutely reckless.
I don't think “reckless” is the right word. Clueless, really. I didn’t know there was a problem until I lost traction.
Whatever you want to call it, do you really think that’s worth a criminal charge? Possibly destroying my livelihood over this? Do you think the possibility of criminal charges is what stops me from doing it again, versus the potential damage to life and property, including my own? Lay it out for me.
I don’t believe your driving was safe. I also don’t believe you were taught driving correctly, assuming you’re American, and I might also believe that driving slowly would have been equally dangerous, if the other cars did not.
Furthermore, I don’t believe a reckless driving charge without injury should be a criminal matter or that a criminal conviction should destroy someone’s livelihood.
However, four wrongs don’t make a right. It just makes a mess.
I’m in the US, where driver training goes just slightly beyond checking if the candidate is capable of fogging a mirror. I learned in a northern state so we learned a lot about how to deal with ice and snow, but I don’t think there was anything about rain. If there was, I’d forgotten it in the 20+ years since I last had any training or check.
I agree with you that my driving was unsafe and I wasn’t taught well. I don’t think my behavior even came close to criminal.
I am confused about your assessment of my charge. You previously said it was correct. Now you think it shouldn’t have been a criminal charge?
The original fine seems reasonable.
Writing it off as "Oh, I was just clueless" is a little downplaying.
Yes, it's a one off instance, but the stakes in vehicles can be very high, hence our requirements for licensing and insurance.
On one hand, there’s a responsibility to seek further knowledge and self-evaluate. I accept responsibility for not doing that here.
On the other hand, having the government sign off on your training as officially adequate, then threatening to jail you and put a conviction on your record when it wasn’t, seems rather uncool. Hold me liable for damages? Sure. Ticket me? Ok. But charge me with an actual crime?
If they charged every rain related accident in Arizona as a criminal offence the court system would be clogged up for months after the monsoon season...
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
The has a criminal record refers to the population as a whole.
> [...] between 70 million and 100 million—or as many as one in three Americans—have some type of criminal record
Linked PDF: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn’t.
However that is misleading, the below link talks about problems with the definition of a ‘criminal record.’
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns, diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has diabetes, etc.
Some will be looking for math flaws. It’s an exponential model for time until first event, “constant hazard.” It’s actuarial. Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn’t calculate the durations until events insurance couldn’t work. The biggest factors are numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things…
The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it’s crazy, isn’t because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto insurance would be way cheaper.
This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter. You cannot be much of a “better” driver. You can’t be a “safer” criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries, it takes 41 years. I didn’t give the figure for causing injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we’re primed to assume it’s all about agency. Consider if there were only ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they’re still going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits everybody: you’re still going to be involved.
The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to question their beliefs about agency.
800k permanent residents.
> In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26 million visitors travelled to San Francisco.
That changes your statistics quite a bit.
Anyway, you can Google “how does insurance modeling work” and see for yourself. There are whole teams of people who do this modeling. I am just sharing a simple and representative model, better than to an order of magnitude.
It doesn't account for the fact that people can be injured more than once. Taking that into account, the number would be closer to 50 years. It also makes agency more relevant if most of the injuries are concentrated in a smaller group of people (ex: bikers).
> The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%!
Well, in France, the maximum discount for safe driving is officially -50%, and the maximum penalty for unsafe driving is +250%, calculated based on your history of at-fault accidents. That's a 7x difference! Not only that but if you get into too many accidents, the insurance company may cancel your contract, usually forcing you to go for insurance companies that specialize in high risk customers, which are even more expensive. I don't know about the insurance system where you live, but a 5-10% difference seems crazy.
Well. That’s what it is. It’s crazy only because of how deeply you believe in agency.
If you instead think deeply about the numbers, and then the fact that you are comparing two completely different driving environments, one thing becomes clear: the way the driving environment is designed and driving culture is administered in France might be much better and safer! Then, agency plays a relatively larger role, by definition, even if it is absolutely small everywhere. Whereas in America, such as in San Francisco and many other communities, a lot of injuries are probably attributable to the environment and culture. This is at least the expert consensus is, not just the consensus of insurance companies.
Definitely not the explanation.
You'll have to supply evidence that the US is safe, as that's not self evident.
When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not Ireland to the US.
The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country altogether.