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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US

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It can be true (and likely is) that both:

a) much more time and effort should be focused on catching and stopping the most persistent repeat offenders (sometimes by locking them up); and

b) orders of magnitude too many Americans are currently in prison.

From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.

Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.

For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues

How are you measuring that? There are plenty of developed countries with a higher immigrant share like Switzerland and Australia. If you're taking about visible minorities then Canada has a higher proportion of the population.

I don't think you can make a facile pronouncement that European countries and ethnically and culturally homogenous any longer. We can't have a High-trust society in the USA when politicians scapegoat immigrants, in spite of their being more law-abiding on the whole. We can't avoid having a demoralized populace when corporate funded politicians of both parties drag their feet instead of giving citizens of the most productive and wealthy country in the history of the world parity with less wealthy countries, in terms of healthcare, education, housing, retirement and lack of life precariousness, like going into bankruptcy over medical debt...

If the only crime--at all--in America was rape and murder, America would still have a higher incarceration rate than Germany.

America has a lot of criminals and therefore America needs a lot of incarceration.

Or maybe repeat offenders can be put in jail, and other people could be let out. Just a random thought that occurred to me.

Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?

I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.

I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.

It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.

This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.

The real problem is people who don't want to be victims of crime, not the people doing the crime?

Now you're getting it. You have exactly identified the problem.

Instead of identifying and addressing the real problems--mass unemployment, homelessness, hopelessness--your dystopic "solution" is simply more and bigger jails, more and better armed cops with surveillance cameras attached, more laws, more weapons, more bondage and discipline, more "you will do what I say or else."

Doesn't work. Never works.

Read the essay "Fate of Empires" by Sir John Glubb to see how things this time are not in fact any different than what came before.

> Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?

Say it then cowardly racist. Stop hiding behind rhetorical devices to justify an institution that has its historical origins in slave patrols

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