America’s incarceration rate is in decline
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?
Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
…which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us.
Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
Half the population has an IQ less than 100. Do not expect the low-IQ group to ever get a masters or earn 300K as a couple, etc.
Caveat- this may have to be amended due to the watering-down of educational standards in the USA.
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mother-birth-age...
My ex-wife was 37, and I was an year older, when our younger one was born and energy was not the problem so I agree with you that 35+ should not be a problem.
However, a lot of people are having kids significantly older than that.
I not know whether I could cope with a baby 20 years later. Contrary to stereotypes I used to get up faster and more fully if a baby cried in the night. On the other hand, having a baby might energise and motivate me! Not planning to try it out though!
An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in.
Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
I know two men 18 years apart in age who became fathers at the same time - two months apart to be exact. Even though the older is an avid gym-goer, it's only the younger who can pull off popping back into full strength after less than 6h of sleep.
> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Yup, this is very much key.
So if you hear anyone telling you they can't imagine late fatherhood ignore them, they obviously aren't good at imagining things.
The chance you will need to take care of both your kids and your parents in your 50s is pretty high (not even going into you and your partner), while facing declining health yourself.
Could be easily manageable, or not. Ask me in a decade.
But one thing is darn true - if a good long term stable match is not there, no point pushing for kids. World really doesnt need more damaged folks struggling their whole lives to overcome shitty childhood. And thats fine, parenthood is not for everybody and there can be an amazing life to be had instead (and I mean it in best way possible, but that life shouod not be spent behind the desk and on the couch)
I am perfectly capable of keeping up with my kids.
My 72 year old father who is also in good condition keeps up with my 3 year old son.
The difference I see between a reasonably fit 40 year old and not is the massive gap.
Interrupt that 60 year old's sleep twice a night with a newborn crying, add a bunch of new responsibilities, and I'll be impressed if he even makes it to the meet.
You're comparing people who have made exercise their #1 priority in life to people who have made their kids and supporting their families financially their top 2 priorities. It's a bullshit comparison.
My father is 63, raised three children and has had a successful long marriage and retired from a good career. He also goes works out daily and did for most of my childhood. He didn't make exercise his number one priority.
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
I also have plenty of energy, the only real change I’ve noticed getting older is I’m in bed a bit earlier than I was in my 20s.
I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
Kids change you, for the better if you let it. There's nothing like a completely helpless infant who is totally dependent on you to wear down your selfish tendencies.
However at 22 I wasn't the experienced person I am today. Nor was I stable, nor could I jump on opportunities like my peers could.
If having a child in your early 20s would mean not losing opportunities in progressing in a career, at least with enough free childcare and food to feed the children, people could be more inclined to have children while they get their life together. Our culture of moving away from home is also a big problem -- having 2 sets of grandparents helping raise a child REALLY helped me at my youth not miss out on youth and still raise my child.
kids between 25-32 is something our society should aim to be as practical and pleasant as possible.
Securing stable health insurance dictated most of my career decisions. I was captive to turrible gigs, had to pass on a lot of opportunities.
Want to revitalize our society?
#1 is Medicare for All. More startups, more risk taking & innovation, higher birth rate, etc.
#2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.
#3 is housing. Again: Cheap, plentiful, good quality. Plus, rentals better suited for young families (eg more 2 & 3 bedroom units).
This costs infinite money.
It's impossible to scale, because nobody wants an environment where their child is not getting attention from compassionate, engaged adults throughout the day. To get the same level of care as a stay at home parent, you need as many care workers as there are families with young children. And if you pay those workers comparably to the average wage, you need to tax the entire wages of one parent in each family to cover the care costs.
It's probably much cheaper to write checks to families encouraging them to have one parent care for their own children full time.
There are definitely pros and cons, but overall I'd recommend kids in mid- to late-20s.
>However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time.
Yes! There is no perfect time to have kids, but there will definitely be a time when having kids isn't biologically likely anymore
A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.
You write your comment about the maximum safe age for having children as if most people (at least in the advanced countries and moderately reasonable income brackets) were living the lives of 19th century industrial workers.
Kids take a lot of energy but they also give you a lot, no matter the age. We are biologically hardwired to rise to the challenge of having kids no matter the age.
Depending on the circumstances in a persons country, maybe getting children at a young age isn't that dumb. I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student, grandparents are younger and able to help more and you have more energy and can more easily deal with lose of sleep.
As a bonus, when your kids move out, you're not even 40 year olds.
The only real issue is: Have you meet the right partner yet?
Where... where do you live? I'm all for having kids as soon as possible, but I was barely able to provide for just myself during university.
Also, adopt. Before I was a parent I thought of a child as "mine" because of biology. Really you see that you shape people and form a connection with them because they are part of your family.
Which is another important point: if you want multiple children you probably want to have your first earlier than you might otherwise.
I need to push back on this because no one is actually an adult at the age of 25 despite those people wishing it were so. You do not have your shit figured out and assuming a partner of similar age, neither do they. It's only starting in your 30s where you start to understand what it is to be a responsible adult to yourself and to the world.
So please, do not seriously consider having kids in your 20s, for all our sakes.
Too strong.
You're an adult who doesn't have their shit figured out. Some people never get it figured out, others take into their 30s, 40s or even 50s.
And then in your 60s, you've got new shit to figure out.
It seems to me like when you move the definition of “adulthood” back to age X, fewer people function like adults prior to age X.
having energy is subjective and does not really depend on being young or old. some old folks are full of energy and live really active lives. It depends on your state of mind and lifestyle more than age.
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
Having kids fast-tracked me to a critical increase in patience. I've grown so much in less than three years because of my kids. I'm not sure this growth would have ever happened so quickly through other means.
And I'll always have a special, particular respect especially towards my firstborn for causing that in me, and for enduring my shortcomings in the meantime.
I was more patient as a teen than I am now in my 40s. Now I am tired. All the time. I fear I would literally die of exhaustion if I had to maintain more irregular hours than I already do due to insomnia that I have developed over the last half decade.
Someone with no one to care about until their 40s is supposed to be in a much better shape than someone who raised three kids for the last +25 years.
Congrats on making it though, I completely understand why you would feel tired all the time!
biologically, and for pregnancy, yes you are.
I think so too. Now to be sure to balance things, while I was 42 when we had our kid, my wife was only 28.
10 years later and things are still great.
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
What is below RA/LE? My comment addressed common financial realities. It applied to every adult age, up to and including death.
> MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58
okay.
> and I am a single parent.
You may be interested to know that parenting can be get much harder than that. ex: I would have loved my difficulty level to be dialed down to Single Parent.
> Baring accidents or the severely unexpected
I agree that some folks do experience year after year after year of luck.
> (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s)
I agree that not having life-changing advantage & luck is pretty dang common.
> its not a problem.
What's not a problem? Taken together, your comment seems to be lacking a subject.
I did the best I could. If you could share which of my points you were responding to, that might help.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
However, they -clearly- do get away with it, continually the current method of punishment is not deterring them from crime. These are not 'oh he made poor decisions style crimes', you're not paying attention or are not living in this area if you think so.
I wish i could dig up the study from Townsville crime statistics (this is the closest i could find https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/101697 )
The key takeway is:
“The residents living in these areas have been let down for too long under the former Government who allowed serious repeat youth offenders to avoid adequate punishment and let them continue to terrorise these communities,”
Current deterrents clearly are not working. There are only so many levers the government can pull. Children learn poor lessons and inadequate supervision from their families, but if they are taken from their home the media screams 'stolen generation' so in the end individuals terrorised by them have to deal with the burden of their continued long term criminal behavior.
You may believe that children can be rehabilitated, I'd dearly love this to be the truth, however my observations show that its not a reflection of reality.
But if being arrested, handcuffed and taken in front of a judge is not enough to make you understand that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and you do steal a car again a few weeks later, then yes, we will have to escalate instead of saying "nothing we can do, it's just a kid". Otherwise we are literally sending the message that they can act with impunity.
Family friends have kids in a rural school with parents being those that haven’t moved 10 miles from the community where they grew up and small-town soap opera dynamics.
Babies can have kids?
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932
[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.
As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Decline_since_the_e...
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
The human body and mind are always adapting, however subtly, to changing environments. So I wonder -- are IQ tests assessing abilities that may no longer be optimal today?
Homer likely had an exceptional memory, as did many ancient Greeks that participated in oral traditions. But how relevant is memorizing epics in the modern world?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Social media and modern games are keeping them occupied.
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
More of a pet theory, but voters born between 1950 and 1980, boomers and Gen X, have had a well-documented set of policy preferences.
Your points say old people have more lead, but then you say young people are more violent. That doesn't square with the articles point that incarceration rates are falling.
The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?
I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
*capitalist society will die off. ( )
See also: automation, ai, robots.... we probably don't need as many people / are headed for work shortages anyway.
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
And it's only going to get far, far worse.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
That's wrong, actually what's happening is police have just given up on arresting kids who will be released.
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations. This pattern is observed both at the national level, with poorer countries generally having higher fertility rates than wealthier ones, and at the individual level, with poorer families tending to have more children than wealthier families.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
It has been a common refrain that someone has an AirTag or other electronic surveillance they used to identify a thief, for which the police do nothing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
Inflation would eventually make stealing a candy bar a felony. Or we could updated the numbers periodically
Incarcerating people likely to commit crimes will mean their future crimes are much less likely to be reported.
This does not mean less crime, it means crime just isn’t being recorded.
Even the most rigorous studies account for crimes committed in prisons.
The "California decriminalized theft" narrative is nonsense.
Quotes from the article:
> As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
> But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.
So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.
https://www.findlaw.com/state/criminal-laws/marijuana-posses...
May be the result of a rapidly declining birth rate.
To foment hysteria in feeble minded neurotics?
It’s a bit easier to explain away the inconvenience of locked individual items as a response to a rise in crime rather than the store’s choices.
I doubt it’s a direct motivation but that isn’t to say it’s not a useful outcome either.
One of the biggest ones, GEO, only made $30m last year with a margin of 1.1%.
Another one, CXW, made $84m.
SSTI is losing money.
Microsoft makes $284m… per day.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-corp/summary?id=d... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/geo-group/summary?id=D00002...
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.
If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
In NYC the black community has a majority of pregnancies not end with the birth of a child. This is where abortion policy is focused.
Compare the US to every other OECD country.
Nobody outside the US would even waste their time on having the discussion it is so blaringly obvious, but those in the US suffering the effects will denounce it till the cows come home.
When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
Communist Romania once banned even contraceptives, and yet it never became a violent crime haven, not even after Communism fell. (Which was some 25 years after the ban, so the unwanted kids should still have been in their prime criminal age.)
Maybe the correlation isn't causational, maybe it only works in specific demographic groups...
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...
Compare 1960 to 2020.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
If your point is that the benefits of crime reduction due to smartphones are outweighed by harms to mental health, then I think most people would disagree.
But this is also probably painting far too rosy a picture of what Meta is doing.
My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
"ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
The obvious answer was: drugs. People like me used to do a lot of drugs.
From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.
But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
Cannabis is not the high order bit.
This article claims that about 32k people in 2021 were for cannabis related offense, and simply carrying that to today would be 23% of the prison population: the largest offense type. https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/cannabis-prisoner-scale
https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs
https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/data/custom-graphics/person/all_all...
The NCVS measures self-reported victims not convicts.
It does not measure criminal charges, convictions or imprisonment.
The NCVS is only focused on a subset of crimes, some of which do not carry prison sentences. For example, it excludes drug offences. It excludes manslaughter and homicide. It excludes financial crimes.
The survey is only given to census recipients, i.e., households and individuals. Non-residential addresses are not included. It only targets a subset of crime victims.
Perhaps better sources to look at would be UCR, SRS and NIBRS.
Statistics are amazing.
Even crime stats are "down". Don't report, don't convict - done.
That particular book was criticized by historians a lot.
In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.
Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things.
I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.
Here is a study supporting the assertion that prisons increase (or do not reduce) the likelihood of someone reoffending in the future. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715100
Your claim that prisons reduce the likelihood of the population at large is not obvious on its face, as the US has very high rate of incarceration, but still has moderately high crime rates. Can you supply some data?
Who pays matters.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
There's been something like 900k excess deaths since 1968 compared to if the rate was just flat since then. That's a lot of people who probably had a much higher chance of incarceration than average even if you only consider drug law and the more recently someone was born the more likely they are to have already overdosed at any given age.
And for those who cannot function in the real world (i.e. serious untreatable mental problems resulting in constant criminality) we need to find a softer way to keep them separated from being able to harm the public.
This even if their was a gain from watching others suffer, the lack of discipline, guidance, sternness, is way more detrimental than the positives of fearing the consequences
And it's easy for someone to just give in and go back to prison. Prison is only scary the first time. After that you walk back in and meet people you know who don't judge you. You know the staff. You know the routines. Do a few more years for the parole violation and see if things have changed next time around. If not, repeat ad infinitum.
From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
Crime statistics (e.g. homicides) are often quoted as 'n per 100,000 population'.
It's probably also easier for mental math, e.g. here's a city with 1 million population, that's 10 100Ks, so 1200 people in prison.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
Lets see if cutting education has any impact over the next 20 years.
> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.
Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
Each of these videos puts most film car chases to shame. There must be 20 channels dedicated to this. Participating states I've seen are mostly Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and California. But any agency can publish a video, particularly if there is a shooting death and an official investigation.
Most of them (probably all) have contracts that stipulate they get paid per bed they provide, whether or not it's occupied.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
However since 2021ish crime has been skyrocketing. It's definitely time to figure out the next steps. I want to live in a peaceful, safe society. It makes sense to separate those that can't help but destroy the peace.
It has also been stated that something like 90% of crime is performed by a very small percentage of people and most of it is just the same person over and over and over. Those people must be separated from society.