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Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

> the most people detained on earth

The absolute number of "people detained" is meaningless, you have to compare it to the behavior of those people, otherwise you are led to silly conclusions such as that the criminal justice system fanatically hates men, because there are 10x more men in prison than women [1]. Once you normalize prison population by an indicator of violent crime, such as homicide rate, the USA stops being an outlier ('homicide' and 'incarceration' are rates per 100k) [2,3]:

          homicide  incarceration  prisoners per homicide
  USA        5.763            541                    93.9
  China      0.502            119                   237.1
  Norway     0.725             55                    75.9
  Canada     1.98              90                    45.5
  France     1.335            115                    86.1

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/252828/number-of-prisone...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

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But the real question is: Why is violent crime so much more common in the US than in Canada, or the UK or any EU country or Australia or Japan etc ?

Only 31.5% of homicides are committed by non-Hispanic whites [1], while they were 57.8% of the population. That brings the white homicide rate to 3.14, which, if you squint, is pretty close to the Canadian 1.98. The common misclassification of non-white offenders as white (but almost never the reverse) [3] probably explains some of the remaining disparity.

So in that respect, whites in the US are not so different from whites elsewhere.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... (I think due to incomplete reporting, and due to including only cases where some information about the offender is known, the absolute numbers do not reflect the number of homicides in the entire US, but it is still useful for relative comparisons)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... (using 2020 numbers, which are close enough for the 2019 FBI stats, which are the most recent I know of)

[3] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1700341490206310416

3.14 is not "pretty close to the Canadian 1.98".

It's 59% more.

And Sweden's 1.147 is 58% more than Norway's 0.725. And again, that's without the misreporting.

I’m not sure why you’re bringing Sweden and Norway into the discussion, to be honest.

Do you not think they're similar countries?

And… ?

This seems a rather vile line of commentary. Kinda shocked to see it here. Perhaps you’d like to say what you actually want to say? Why do you suppose this white/non-white disparity exists? Do you believe it is genetic? Cultural? Perhaps there are other factors?

Gross.

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