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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?

You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.

For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.

You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.

It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.

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

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> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.

Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?

Yes

> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?

What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.

> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.

And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.

> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.

You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.

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I think another framework is blank slatism.

For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.

I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things

So now you're asserting there is something uniquely, inherently bad about Americans that causes them to need to be locked in jail at 6 times the rate of every other country.

Do you know what that thing might be, and how to fix it?

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Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.

Neither side of any political spectrum thinks that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Obviously if that was the goal, the easiest path is to remove laws and disband police. Instant crime rate drop.

But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.

I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.

While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.

Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.

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