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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

High trust environments tend to crumble in society when you allow too much immigration. Japan’s xenophobia has worked well in this regard.

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Switzerland is a diverse society with lots of immigration and it is also a high-trust society

Switzerland is so small, basically a city.

Switzerland's population would make it one of the biggest cities in the world, more than double the population of Los Angeles, and more than New York City. Neither of which could be counted as high trust.

The population of Switzerland is ~9 million. The population of LA metro is around 15 million, and NYC metro aroound 20 million

LA "the city" might be less but you can't tell where LA ends and it's other parts begin. It's one giant metropolis. Same with NYC.

You can tell where the city ends very easily. There are well-defined boundaries. Government statistics take that into account. Here's the census page for the city of Los Angeles, which lists a population just under 4 million: https://data.census.gov/profile/Los_Angeles_city,_California...

The city of LA is just there for administrative purposes. People who live in "Burbank" or "Pasadena" are seen as living in "Los Angeles" by most people outside the region.

That's irrelevant to how the world works.

There are countries that are equal or much smaller than Switzerland with 10x worse crime and low trust. Just look at Jamaica.

And there are countries 12x bigger than Switzerland (like Japan) with high trust and low crime.

That probably has more to do with who immigrates to Switzerland. I don't now the numbers, but people who immigrate to Switzerland is probably fairly well educated and generally pretty well of.

Denmark is still a fairly high-trust society, not to the level of Switzerland or Japan. We're seeing certain items in supermarkets being locked away or chipped to prevent theft. Now that's not just because of immigrants, Danes steal from the supermarket as well, because prices on many items are increasing rapidly.

The huge majority is from Germany, Italy, France, etc. A lot of it is highly vetted, professional migration.

If it adds enough of illegal immigrattion or low-grade legal one, it wont be a high trust society anymore.

Also depends on type though. I’ve seen honesty boxes work out fine where the immigration consists mostly of professionals.

And a 99.8% conviction rate.

Only 33 prisoners per 100k population (cf 541 in the US). Whatever they're doing, it's working.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

In 2024, the average US prison sentence was for a duration of 52 months, with over half the total months being for drug trafficking (average 82 months) https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... (page 11).

Also in 2024, Japanese prison sentences were mostly between 1 and 3 years, and about two thirds were fully suspended. https://www.moj.go.jp/content/001436547.pdf (page 20). Assuming an average of two years for the third not-fully-suspended, that works out to 8 months of time spent in prison per person handed a prison sentence.

That results in about a factor of 7 difference in prison population simply due to the difference in average sentence length. Maybe the US should sentence more people to prison but keep each of them there shorter.

The US court system already relies heavily on plea deals to not jam up the courts. Increasing the throughput of the justice system to facilitate your idea would require an order of magnitude investment into more courts, judges, public defenders, prosecutors, etc. I'm all for it, but the incredible cost does have to be considered

Are plea deals factored into the US conviction rate?

In the PDF I linked above, on page 4, you can see that 97.2% of sentences result from guilty pleas and 2.8% from trials.

It's a different system, they don't go to court without iron-clad case. Japan does not have a large prison population.

And they heavily influence (using pressure such as off-the-record interviews, and long detention times during the investigations) the suspect's statements so that it says what they need to make it a crime, even when it isn't.

Whatever the suspect may say afterwards, they just have to point out to the signed statement and say "but here you confessed".

Source: I have been directly living such occurrence lol.

That's what has been coined the "hostage justice" of Japan (referring in particular to the "long detention times during investigations" part above).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostage_justice

given the stats above, 33 of 100k incarcerated, vs 541 of 100k in the USA. I'm inclined to think that the USA has far more of those types of cases than Japan.

Hmm, the thing is that the hostage justice system does have a deterrent effect.

Its net effect is that you absolutely do not want to have anything to do with the police to help solve your problems in the society (true problems, not merely e.g. asking for directions). And then you really want to avoid problems at all.

So, you cannot think of them as "friendly useful workers to help solve problems", because they are heavily incentivized and biased to find or invent crimes if you give them the opportunity.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but police interviews are recorded in the US?

And also, you always have the right to an attorney? (that's not the case in Japan except if you want to stay 20 days incarcerated while waiting for an attorney, all for a tiny minor dismeanor).

> you absolutely do not want to have anything to do with the police to help solve your problems in the society

this is commonly said in the USA as well

Ah ok, I see.

Maybe I rather have (had) the notion of police as it exists in the UK or some European countries.

There was the French "police de proximité" who acted as friendly allies (it seems it was dismantled in 2003, unfortunately).

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