https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The difference is in consistency in enforcement and general background crime rate.
If you have a nearly guaranteed chance of getting caught doing something, the punishment almost doesn't matter. If every single time you went over the speed limit you got a $500 fine 100% guaranteed, there would be effectively zero speeders ever. If you have a 1 in a million chance of getting caught but the punishment is 10 years in prison - there will still be plenty of speeders all over the place.
Humans do not do well with estimating risk on low probability events. We are all just big children in the end. Consistency in consequences are what actually matters, not overly harsh punishment.
If they stop committing crimes either because they are still in jail or dead, the crime rate would absolutely drop.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
We have literal high tech surveillance equipment being vandalized at scale with not many people getting caught. Referring to the Deflock movement
Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.
That way you'd get a massive reduction in crime without having to invest into more police officers.
1. Give people housing.
2. Give people housing.
3. Give people housing.
4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes.
with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
That’s already been done in my area and really doesn’t make a huge difference. Some people are so antisocial they are difficult to house (causing fights with neighbours, burning buildings down and so forth). But yes, it does help to have both abundant inexpensive housing and also programs for people who can’t afford it.
It does have to be paired with police enforcement that doesn’t tolerate living on the street or in a park when housing is available.
It also becomes a problem when people who live in such housing abuse it, such as operating drug dealing out of it.
>4. Expand access to mental and physical healthcare so that everyone can get access to the care they need.
We tried that too. It’s great for people like me. Some people refuse to access mental health or addiction rehab services. So the access is there.
>5. Remove the hurdles placed in front of social welfare programs. When people don't have to steal to make 10 bucks just to have something to eat or their next dose of whatever drug they're shooting up, that takes a lot of petty crime away.
There is zero public support to give drug addicts extra cash to go buy more drugs.
Other than that, benefits are generous - I can say definitively nobody is going hungry. Some people will still refuse to apply for benefits. I stayed a few days in a hospital and my hospital roommate refused to apply for any benefits because he didn’t want to give the government info they could use to try to get the child support he owes. (The hospital sent a social worker in every few hours to try to persuade him.) Should such a person be given benefits including cash benefits?
>6. Provide (access to) public toilets everywhere.
We have that too. You need staff to clean them and it’s not fun to clean up after an antisocial person.
>7. End the "war on drugs". Provide legal ways to access high-purity substances, either via dispensaries and allowing people to grow their own (for low risk stuff such as cannabis), or via pharmacies (for mid-risk stuff that already has pharmaceutical supply chains such as cocaine), or via dedicated centers for higher risk stuff such as heroin.
There is no public support for a heroin dispensary.
> As many other commenters seem to be pointing to many other crimes being as a result of people being on drugs, yes. with the drug-related crimes, it's not just about the crimes being done in the pursuit of money or drugs... it's also about cleaning up the streets. Organized crime makes enough money purely from drugs (especially cocaine) that they can commandeer entire nation states, with their militia often being much stronger on paper and in practice than the official military, and the constant infights between cartels and gangs is endangering everyone around them.
Well, around here drugs are so cheap it’s not a big deal to pay for them. Now we just have loads of drug addicts who are strung out all the time, and in addition they can’t earn income with small time drug dealing like they used to. A fentanyl habit is cheap (maybe $10 a day) which is easily financed by selling eg your children’s food stamps card.
The public is not going to support the government paying people to shoot up drugs all day.
- Harsh prosecution and punishment of corruption and white collar crimes, combined with publicity around these efforts. How can you expect someone to respect the law if they routinely see those in power over them (the police, their employer, their senator, etc.) get away with criminal activity?
- After setting up safeguards to enforce privacy protections, vastly increase the use of camera-based traffic enforcement. For example, create separate traffic enforcement agencies so that police don't have access to camera data. Use trajectcontroles (Dutch word for a system where multiple cameras on highway entrances/exits track your license plate and ensure your average speed was below the limit), cameras that detect texting while driving (pioneered by the UK), microphone-linked cameras in residential areas that detect modified exhausts (pioneered by Taiwan), and HOV-lane enforcement cameras. Keep traffic officers focused on ensuring that everyone has a valid/viewable license plate. The result should be a system where committing small traffic violations is not normalized.
- Reduce the punishments for most crimes. Large punishments are cruel, expensive to dole out, and less effective than consistent enforcement + small punishments.
- Set high expectations for police officers and create a culture of accountability. Fire those who are playing on their phones and arrest those who are committing crimes. You probably need independent oversight agencies to be able to do this.
- Make police highly visible - bright yellow high-vis vests and cars (pioneered by Antwerp) ensure that police are there to deter crime rather than hide and catch it.
- Provide actual public services so that people have a chance to succeed. A variety of unpleasant behaviors (e.g. public defecation, being disruptive/yelling in public, public drug use/intoxication) are things that no one wants to do - they are driven by a lack of, for example, homeless services, mental health services, and drug treatment services.
- Reprioritize enforcement (looking at you, drug task forces). Expand the legal definition of entrapment and stop doing so many B.S. sting operations.
Yeah bro, your average diseased junkie is definitely watching MSNBC and reading the WSJ in between rounds of fentanyl and shitting on the side walk.
Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on. That doesn’t do any good for people who refuse to use it. Sometimes a court orders someone to attend their mental health provider appointments, drug rehab, etc as terms of a sentence.
Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere. It turns out some drugs are actually bad.
As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?
Doesn't do anything unless you also get consistent about catching people
>Likewise, virtually everyone poor has access to mental health services, healthcare in general, addiction help and so on.
Really? If so, that's amazing. What state in the US has actually given all people access to mental health services and addiction help.
> Reprioritising enforcement for drugs hasn’t helped either. It just means fentanyl is everywhere.
Fentanyl is a thing because strict enforcement necessitates drugs that are more compact/easier to hide. Many other countries still have heroine.
>As far as “make police enforce visible plates” - that simply leads to more high conflict situations where the person they pull over is going to run; do you want more police chases ending in a violent arrest?
I would suggest focusing on impounding vehicles rather than chasing people.
That doesn't mean you can force everyone who needs mental health services to go actually avail themselves of them.
You can't impound a vehicle without stopping the person driving it first. Most people don't use non visible plates anyway; they would first steal tags from another vehicle.
AI, not human, because the actual incidence rate for a lot of crimes is much much higher than most people realise, including for extremely severe cases:
• Statistically speaking I think it's something like most Americans commit three felonies per day*, but that's probably mostly drugs which IMO should be liberalised anyway.
• For an example of extremely serious crimes, and again statistically speaking, your first day in highschool, your first class on that day, you likely met someone who had been sexually assaulted by a family member.
Increasing a human police force to the scale needed to catch all crimes is theoretically possible (the Stasi basically operated at this scale even if they only thing they cared about was sedition) but is a terrible idea.
If all crimes keep their current penalties, a fully automated surveillance state bankrupts everyone almost immediately.
Note: I'm not suggesting this is a good future. I don't think it's a stable equilibrium, I think there's too high a risk of a leadership using such a surveillance capability to hold power, and they may even not care too much about non-state crimes once they do seize power, so this could easily become Stasi 2.0 or worse.
* Or the mean felonies per day is 3, which is a very different claim. I've not read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Silverglate
Human beings don't empathize well with situations nor people they never have to personally face. That's a well-lit path to fascism. We're one step closer to 1984.
The fourth amendment should really have been interpreted to cover this, but the courts have an unreasonable bias for giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt
She got arrested for that since the law requires it for domestic violence and turned out she had skipped bail for a grand theft auto conviction. She served 3 days then got released because the county jail was full.
Her conviction for domestic violence ended up being 6 days in another county jail.
She has since been running around committing more crimes, including stealing her children’s IDs, birth certificates, social security cards, and using them commit welfare benefits fraud. Police took a report and won’t go pick her up since it’s a nonviolent crime despite her violent history.
I’m not sure what’s needed (more police to say sorry, we can’t help you isn’t what’s needed), but having an antisocial person selling her children’s food benefits is not a good thing. Before anyone says she needs “services”, she already gets a guaranteed disability income, free housing, and her own food and free medical benefits including addiction rehab services.
That was sarcastic in case you couldn't tell.
Likewise people who abuse welfare benefit programmes and steal food from their own children in order to trade it for cash.
There is simply no excuse for that, period, and it doesn't help anyone to tolerate it or be lenient on it.
In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.
This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.
A general comparison of crimes in SK vs US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/South-Kore...
Interestingly, embezzlement rate seems way higher in SK.
I think the difference in the gun murder rate reflects other legal differences, such as those around carrying and storing guns more than the level of ownership. If you have to go home and unlock a safe to get a gun it gives you lots of time to cool down.
That would be an interesting statistic in any country discussing number of jailed people, repeat crime, and jail time.
The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.
Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.
Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.
And, FWIW, SK's 25+0.5 per 100k suicide/homicide rate eclipses America's 15+5 (roughly). If you don't want to die a violent death at the hands of a human being, the US is safer than SK.
The reliability of incarceration data can also vary, but you didn't dismiss that. In fact, all data is unreliable, so should we just give up on comparisons entirely? Unless you have a specific reason to think US/SK numbers are wrong (and by how much - we're not giving up on comparisons over 1-10% errors, when the difference is 10x), what you've done is provided a fully generic counterargument: "well data isn't perfect, therefore I am right and you are wrong."
> Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.
Typical feigned intellectual helplessness. Knowing nothing else, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher. And we use homicide because it's harder to fudge - if I used crime in general, your complaint would have been over-policing or different definitions instead.
> Also, SK suicide rate
How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate? Especially when it's legal in both US and SK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation
>, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher.
Not at all. Different societies have different net values (e.g., violence as a political tool or as a means to some economic end) which will influence the deadliness of violence. So will the nature of the weapons that are available. It's reasonable to expect a trend, but lockstep is unreasonable, and you always have to question if perhaps the situation is unintuitive and higher homicide rates don't go hand-in-hand with higher crime rates for a particular example.
>How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate?
It isn't, but the incarceration rate was put forward to advance an argument about the relative virtue (and implicitly the relative safety and suitability for a dignified living) of American and SK societies. Suicide rate is relevant. Do you want to make it to your next birthday or not?
“In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.”
Friedman replied:
“That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”
Drug addicts, however, have a hard time holding on to a house, apartment, etc and will often decide to exchange a stable living situation for another drug fix.
Giving houses to drug addicts means: - a non drug addict doesn’t get to get that house - the drug addict now has a house to use drugs in, not take care of, and generally destroy
The answer is for drug addicts to be placed in a rehab program until they aren’t an addict anymore.