Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23 | Hacker News Reader

Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

eurekalert.org

334 pointsEGreg312 comments

I think that this trend, at least in part, has been influenced by a change in the way that we treat adolescent crime. For example, even when I was a kid (early 90's) you would not get arrested for getting into a fist fight at school. Nowadays, bam; call the cops.

Get caught with some pot? Arrested. Get caught performing some petty vandalization? Arrested. Get caught at a party drinking as a minor? Arrested. We arrest kids for things that they used to just get a slap on the wrist/call to mom & dad for. Now they get a court date.

We throw the cuffs on kids much more readily than we used to 20, 30, 40+ years ago.

> I think that this trend, at least in part, has been influenced by a change in the way that we treat adolescent crime. For example, even when I was a kid (early 90's) you would not get arrested for getting into a fist fight at school. Nowadays, bam; call the cops.

Well, the people in this study were born in the early 80s. So I'm not sure any modern shifts that you point to are the distinctive factor.

I think they were born in the 80's. Which means they were kids in the 90's and early 2000's, at the very peak of the US prison population boom.

I could be wrong.

No, they were 18 between 1997 and 2008, so they were *born in the between 1979 and 1990, i.e., they were teenagers in the 90's or early 00's, same age as me (DOB 1983).

  "The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18"

I guess we had different ideas of kids. This data is based on NLSY97, meaning the subjects were born between 1981 and 1985. [1]

Still, doesn't that contradict your point about these results being based on a substantial difference from when you were a kid? As you point out, this study is based on exactly your cohort. Thus it's not a matter of policies nowadays leading to 40% arrest rates. That figure is based directly on the policies of the 90s.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm

90's and 00's, yes, but it's become even more extreme. I was arrested a couple of times as a teenager, but if I had done half the things as a teen now that I did back then I would probably have spent my formative years in juvie.

I'm just saying, the trend is there. More and more kids get arrested for what I would argue is petty stuff that most kids do.

> I'm just saying, the trend is there. More and more kids get arrested for what I would argue is petty stuff that most kids do.

I don't disagree. I wholeheartedly abhor the criminalization of the current educational discipline regime.

My only point is that unfortuntely this study is not itself sufficient to comment on that ridiculous escalation, given its use of decades-old data.

This has been dubbed the "school-to-prison pipeline." It's exacerbated by the fact that many schools now have police officers permanently stationed at the school, which leads to a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. It also contributes to the racial disparity because predominantly black schools are more likely to have a police officer than predominantly white schools.

This was a sensitive topic while I was in high school in Colorado. I don't think the school had a majority, but the largest groups were white and hispanic groups. We always had at least 1 permanent police officer heading a group of a couple of people who could be either police or security.

Nominally this was a response to incidents throughout the rest of the state such as Columbine, but in reality the purpose was to try to combat youth gangs. In this respect I think it partially worked for the circumstances.

However, this was also used to target usage of marijuana and cigarettes by students. I'm not sure how effective this was, because data about that was not commonly released by the school. Needless to say, a lot of students didn't like this, but opinion of the student body was very divided. It would be interesting to see how things have changed in Colorado high schools since marijuana was legalized; I'll have to look into that, but in most schools marijuana is still banned (like tobacco products) so things could only get worse if school policy is unchanged.

As an outsider that seems incredibly wrong. The answer to youth gangs is not more security. Perform a root cause analysis and go back to the fact that kids often fall into gangs because parents are not around (working double jobs), they are stuck in poverty with an easy out (crime).

It saddens me to read about solving youth problems by attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. Though I understand why, fixing the cause takes time, is unpopular to those on the political right, while fixing the symptom seems can achieve immediate results (though not long term).

Your analysis certainly has merits. I think that that is why a lot of schools throughout Denver are still struggling. My own high school saw better results though, largely because it has an excellent administration which realized that improving the overall environment of the school was key.

To tackle the problem of gangs around school, there were a couple of important changes our last principal initiated, that other schools in the area did not necessarily pick up on. 1) Strictly enforce a ban on certain types of clothing that were being used to display allegiance to given gangs. 2) Increase the amount of open spaces for students to stay in while not in classes. 3) Require that students show up to school each morning, even if they do not have classes that morning. 4)Encourage students to stay inside during school hours, even when they have off blocks. 5) Have police/security officers at school introduce themselves to students, and engage students in conversation to get to know them.

On the whole the principal was very engaging so it was thanks to these programs that the gang problem was not as bad when I left compared to when I entered. In this case the heightened role of security was leveraged to have some positive effects, something not seen at other schools where there is a fundamental lack of trust between students and security. Trust and positive engagement are key, but achieving that is difficult.

If poverty were relevant, Colorado would have zero gangs.

Colorado has zero poverty?

More or less.

http://b-i.forbesimg.com/richardgreen/files/2013/12/Income-d...

Surely you are not comparing income in Colorado to income in Brazil or India.

> in most schools marijuana is still banned (like tobacco products)

s/most/all

and that won't change any time soon

Exacerbated, not exasperated. :) You were close though, they only have a Levenshtein distance of 4.

Thank you :-)

I understand that this is also partly due to legal liability issues. Nowadays, due to civil suits, schools often have little effective way to discipline the uncooperative students besides calling the police. When any potential physical contact can result in an expensive lawsuit, or maybe even sexual harassment/molestation accusations, they tend to play it safe and dial 911.

They can really arrested you for drinking as a minor? In here a bar can get into trouble if they sell you a drink, but your only trouble are parents if they ever find out. And I remember that 18-19 years old Americans I knew indeed used to drink (and get wasted too).

As always in the U.S., it depends on the state and city where you live. But I'm pretty positive there are cities where it's actually illegal for a person to be drinking underage. Knowing some of our cities, mere possession of an open container by itself might be enough.

However as you note, that hasn't really stopped teenage drinking...

When I was in college, some dorm buddies of mine got caught drinking on a public beach at night, were arrested, and charged with "minor in possession." I'm pretty sure this was a state law, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't widespread.

It's worse than that - entire states have adopted the concept of a minor in possession by consumption - if a minor is behaving in a way that leads police to believe they are intoxicated, that is enough to charge them with being in possession of alcohol.

Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing.

Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were. They've lost many disciplinary tools they could use to deal with violent students, and even then it's hard to say that schools properly handled bullying or other student-on-student violence issues back in the "good old days".

Bringing in the police to handle those kinds of issues might actually be the appropriate response. Pulling out an arrest for it though seems excessive.

Except that actual violence comitted by teens is going down.

That could be taken as an argument that police intervention in schoolyard violence works.

My point isn't that schools are more violent, but that we're correctly identifying that managing school violence is not part of the teacher role, and simply ignoring it as "boys will be boys" isn't good either.

It could, but the time period violent crime has been going down and the period that saw far more cops in schools don't completely overlap.

The "more cops deployed in schools" thing lagged the preference for police intervention and legal charges for school-site crimes that previously might have been handled informally (deploying cops to schools was a response to the fact that the cops were being called to schools more often.)

So if it was the change in disciplinary approach that drove the decrease in violent crime, its quite possible that effect would somewhat precede the increase in police deployments in schools.

While violence may not be a part of the teacher role, education certainly is. And that sounds like the kind of social education that is an extension of what family should be providing. I'm wary of sending policemen to school, just the same as I'd be wary of sending policemen to families ("violence is not part of the parent role").

>Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing. Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were.

I don't know, they are perfecty fine to "handle violence between students" in Western Europe, and without metal detectors and police on site.

Perhaps it's time for the society to recheck it's course, instead of throwing jail time at the problem?

I don't agree. School in Western Europe can be a horrifying experience where the only solution is that the person being beaten up transfers to another school. Nothing is done about the people beating.

Emphasis on can. Of course it can, there is always outliers and there is nothing that can be done about that. However I would guess that in the majority of cases people beating do get handled. I am just guessing. Are you just guessing too or do you have some hard evidence or statistics to back your claim?

My personal experience and that of other members of my family is in line with Kiro's claim. Not very strong evidence, but it's what I've got.

Where I'm from people doing the beatings would get warnings, detention, special class and consultation, or as a last resort youth detention center ("prison" for kids with focus on rehabilitation) in that order. Sure, you could also move schools but this seems more to have been a decision taken by parents and not the school system itself.

I don't know. I went to school there, and there was absolutely zero (or 0.01% cases) of beating I'm aware of. In a whole region of 130.000 people.

Perhaps that's the case in some down and out regions in England or France, with rampant poverty and ex-industrial towns/suburbs (think Detroit).

But not in the majority of Western Europe. Some guys getting into a fight, sure. But beatings are not an occurance in schools, the same way guns aren't.

That's what "Zero Tolerance" means. It means the powers that be have no leeway, and no tolerance to any thing, and must call the cops.

Most striking are the race differences revealed in the study, Brame says. In particular, the research points to a higher prevalence of arrest among black males and little race variation in arrest rates among females....

By age 23, 49 percent of black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males have been arrested....

By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 16 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively.

By age 23:

- Black males have been arrested at a 29% higher rate than white males.

- White females have been arrested at a 25% higher rate than black females.

While the absolute rate of especially black male arrests is troubling, I find the racial differences in both genders striking and particularly surprising in the female case.

It's interesting the article downplays the discrepancy in the female arrest rates based on race.

It's because the author is bad at interpreting statistics and doesn't recognize that a 4% difference when the average rate is closer to 18% is a way bigger difference than a 5 or even 6% difference when the average rate is closer to 40%.

The manuscript highlights the differences among the male populations are significant while those among the female populations are within the estimated confidence intervals.

Correct. To see the original, you can check the journal itself [0] (check for it on google scholar if this link doesn't work) or look for it at your nearest academic library, if they have it. It is published in the April issue. The conclusion was that the difference was not significant for the female population. Keep in mind that the study was based on a limited sample so care must be taken when generalizing conclusions from the starting data to the population as a whole.

[0] http://cad.sagepub.com/content/60/3/471.abstract

This is a curious approach to the study. You'd think you'd at least consider using census data paired with arrest data. Sure there are statistical biases there, but they'd probably be smaller than the sampling error.

Yes, but the correct interpretation of that is not that the variance is too small, but that the population is too small.

The correct conclusion to reach here (and appears to match what the study says) is that there is a huge gender gap, amongst males there is a statistically significant racial gap, and amongst females the sample size was too small to detect if a similar gap exists.

The female racial gap may not be statistically significant, so you can't say for sure if it is there, but it is possible that it is actually much more significant than the male racial gap. The article says there is "little race variation in arrest rates among females", which is not true. There is more variation than amongst the male population --it just might not be statistically significant.

At best you can say, "despite even bigger variance between races in the female arrest data, the sample of female arrests was too small for it to be conclusive".

Strange, but coming from an European background while taking in a lot of American culture, I was (pleasantly, I guess) surprised that the discrepancy between white and black males wasn't larger. I am more or less shocked about he percentages overall, but really thought the gap was much larger.

Sorry if this doesn't add anything substantial, but I honestly would have have guessed that it was about 3 times more black males getting arrested than white males. I need to broaden where I get my US-information from obviously.

The arrest rate is also different from the incarceration rate, which is much more heavily skewed. According to Pew, black men are incarcerated at ~6.5 the rate that white men are, per capita[1].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/06/incarceratio...

As tzs points out above, this could be because police take crimes against black victims less seriously.

I had the same reaction, and even though I have an European background I don't think it has anything to do with it.

There must be another divide in play there in addition to racial. Small town vs big city? Poor vs. rich? Cold vs. warm climate? Those percentages seem incredibly high, and looking at the circle of people I know, I would never have guessed it that high. It could be that people just don't talk about their criminal records but it's still not 1 in 5.

Your perception is mostly based on TV.

Crime correlates to poverty. People with nothing to lose roll the dice and do dumb shit.

I grew up in NYC and a rural part of Upstate NY that were about as opposite as you could get. The small town still had "bad" neighborhoods, they were run down trailer parks with old trailers and poor people. They committed the same types of stupid crimes, like robbery, vandalism and fighting. The drug trade was there, but mostly centered around smuggling and growing weed. (There are only so many drug users in a town of 2,500 without a major transit route, so the retail business wasn't great!)

In the inner city, you get the added instability of the retail drug market. IMO, population density and the retail drug business are the reason why black males get arrested more. Desperate white people are just as desperate as their black equivalent.

Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males. If the police completely ignored race, we would expect black males to be arrested at a higher rate than white males.

The most troubling possibility that the black male vs white male rate suggests to me is that police might not be taking black victims as seriously as white victims.

Blacks die by homicide at a rate that is around 16 times the rate whites die from homicide, for instance. I haven't analyzed this to make sure I'm not running into something like Simpson's Paradox or something similar that makes it easy to mess up when looking at cross group statistics, but my first impression is that if police were working as diligently to solve crimes against black people as they do to solve crimes against white people, they would be arresting a lot more black criminals than they do.

The female data is interesting. I don't even have a guess as to why white females might be arrested at a higher rate than black females.

Black females don't have the time in the day to get arrested. White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't. A dozen other things. It depends how frank we all want to be.

>Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males.

Who on earth is the intended audience here--

Why downvoted?

Because of this:

White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't.

While absolutely true in North America, it's one of those things you're not permitted to say:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Hence, the downvotes.

Sorry, it is not true.

For instance, you ought to visit some rural areas sometime and see the "consequence-free environment" in which white women there live.

If you want to talk about middle-to-upper-middle-class white women in urban and suburban areas that is a different story, though "consequence-free environment" is still a bit of a stretch.

Just a guess: more white females than black females go to college, where they have plenty of opportunities for underage drinking, marijuana use, trespassing, vandalism, or other minor crimes. More black women at that age are mothers, where they have to provide for their kid and don't have time to get into mischief.

The arrest rates at age 18 were nearly identical for white vs. black females, the discrepancy only arose in ages 18-23. It would be interesting to see the data broken out by crime and by educational achievement.

Just a guess: more white females than black females go to college,

In terms of raw numbers, yes, because there are more white females than black females in the U.S. In terms of rates, no, black women enroll in college at a higher rate than white women [0] and are awarded degrees at a higher rate than white women [1]. Now this is a relatively recent (last 10 years) development so it could be that arrest rates haven't had time to adjust for this if the hypothesis is correct.

[0] http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/2011/tables.html look at the "White alone non-Hispanic" and "Black alone" table data and assuming we're limiting the comparison to 18-24 yro per the post I'm responding to, 4.6% of black women attend college vs 4.3% of white women.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

As mentioned elsewhere, the journal article on which this is based specifically found that the difference in rates among women was not significant enough to make a statement about women arrest rates based on race. So the data provided in this article are based on a restricted sample size and it is challenging to make statements about the overall population saying that "white females are arrested at a higher rate than black females". That might be true but we simply can't be confident in saying that that is true unless more data is gathered. Speculation on why such a difference could occur is harder still.

When is comes to violent crime, yes. However violent crime arrests make up a relatively small amount of arrests (about 8% of arrests according to my accounting, including arson [0]). Drug related arrests make up 12% of arrests, that's an area where whites and blacks are known to use use and sell at about the same rates [1] but blacks are arrested at higher rates. I'm not sure about the other classes of crimes (burglary, fraud, disorderly conduct, etc), but I suspect those are highly dependent on local conditions.

[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-like... - this is link to a mainstream media summary, the data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health for various years goes into more detail, I just don't have time to look it up right now.

I'm not sure what the data looks like for your reference on black vs. white drug use since the original data isn't there.

Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites [1, Table 1.19B]. That would explain _some_ of the higher arrest rates of blacks for drug crimes.

[1]http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTables/De...

Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites

My quote was "whites and blacks are known to use use and sell at about the same rates" - your link shows 8.7% of whites use drugs vs 10.0% of blacks in the past month, and 15.9% of whites used drugs vs 18.7 in the past year (and when looking at lifetime use, that usage flips) - I think "about the same rates" is a fair characterization of that data.

When we're talking about a 20% difference in arrest rates, if the difference between drug use rates is >10% I don't think it's fair to characterize that as "about the same".

>I don't even have a guess as to why white females might be arrested at a higher rate than black females.

Have you spent any time around white American females?

Please understand that this is a racist comment.

My first reaction was that it reads to be about American culture (and wonder if 'schrodinger' is Swedish, racism accusations are used as often as "hej" these days).

My second reaction is trying to replace 'white' with 'black'. Also, considering the heterogeneity of different parts of USA...

OK, racist.

Culture.

Much too late, but my explicit point was:

It sounded like culture to me too, until I replaced the word "white" with "black" in my head.

If I should say anything more: There is a limit of different standards for different groups (somewhere between a factor two and five), when it becomes disgusting hypocrisy.

schrodinger, which part of your comment is racist?

Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities.

An arrest by itself, without an accompanying conviction, cannot be used to deny employment.

1. http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/arrest_conviction.cfm#I

Do arrest records show up in background checks by employers?

In Canada, at least, background checks can reveal attempted suicides and dropped charges, unfortunately: http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4538747-names-of-420-000...

The dropped charges is the worst of this.

How many people that were "kettled" during the G20 protests, despite not actually participating in the protests, nor ever being charged with anything, now have a police record?

Charges show up on background checks in the US as well. Even if there was no conviction.

I believe only convictions / guilty pleas in the US.

Nope. Everything. Forever.

I have never been convicted of a crime, but I do have felony arrests on my record that have prevented me from getting an apartment, and hindered me from getting into a university.

If it goes to court, in most jurisdictions the disposition of the case will be available in a standard background check. For example, if you were charged with resisting arrest and found not guilty, it would still show up but also show "not guilty". Good luck explaining that to an employer, even if you did nothing wrong (and the courts confirmed it).

A "not guilty" verdict means that there was enough evidence to go to trial, but not enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. It's far from a confirmation that you did nothing wrong.

I have a dismissed DWI that's still part of the public record.

I've never had that experience, but I've been turned down on a couple of home rental applications when past arrests have turned up when running a background check. I'd assume the type of business that cared enough to run background checks would certainly catch any arrest on someone's record.

Given that they're often published in newspapers, you can often find that information in a few seconds on Google. I think it's dreadful that police forces do perp walks and publish mugshots of arresstees who may not even end up getting charged.

All sorts of other things show up. I'm named in an eviction lawsuit from the 1990s, which might make someone think I was a deadbeat who didn't pay rent. As it happened the house I was renting a room in was sold and the new owner wanted everyone to leave so he could move in, but nuances like that aren't obvious from the summary records at the court.

Legally, no, but it's getting common for employers to Google-background-investigate potential hires, and arrest notices can come up in such searches, which employers may or may not put unofficial weight on. Though you might be better off in a big city. In smaller towns, this kind of administrative stuff ends up published: local papers, or even the sheriff's office directly, often put out an arrest blotter with the names/ages/circumstances of everyone arrested in the past day or week, and those end up indexed forever (I gather this kind of situation, where a non-public figure gets minor but potentially harmful facts about themselves prominently indexed Forever, was one of the things the EU's "right to be forgotten" business is worried about).

Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions.

I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/

The 'right to be forgotten' is impossible to enforce. We just need to be more forgiving.

The right to be forgotten lies in a gray zone. Who is going to be the judge of what needs to be forgotten and what can stay public ?

Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court.

I should have a right to make people forget that I have a bad attitude, never shower and am prone to cursing anyone in my vicinity?

The topic is arrests.

The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.

You didn't actually limit what you said to that topic. You said there should be a "right to be forgotten," and when someone wondered what it should apply to, answered "Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court" (emphasis mine). The fact that someone never showers falls under that heading. At no point have you said anything to suggest you were only talking about arrests, and the EU law does not limit itself that way. Did you instead mean for it to apply only to arrests and nothing else?

> Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions. I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/

> Anything that might make someone unemployable that didn't result in a conviction or other defeat in court.

> The topic is arrests. The fact you never shower is not going to get you arrested.

I guess to me the pattern was obvious but I accept it wasn't obvious to you. Yes, the topic is related to arrests & court cases.

OK, just so I'm clear, which is it: Is the topic limited to arrests and court cases or is it just related to arrests and court cases? You seem to object to my comment on the former grounds ("the topic is arrests"), but you have not been restricting your statements to those topics. I find this a bit frustrating, because you keep making broad statements, but object to commentary that is equally broad.

I reject your comment on the fact its groundless and in no way related to arrests being published by the media.

I'm not sure how I can be any clearer. If it isn't directly related to arrests by a single degree, it isn't on topic imo.

Yes, because you did those things as a baby. We all did.

I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them.

- If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, and her crazy ex-husband used that information to locate her and kill her, the newspaper would be liable. But the Internet does that all of the time and claims that it's free speech.

- If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'. Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up.

Here's the thing - in the U.S., people are up in arms over the 'right to be forgotten' and claiming it violates free speech. But that's not really true. Today, if there is inaccurate information about you - like, say, Google links to a website that says you were busted smoking crack in a nearby schoolyard, but it is completely untrue - you can go after the offending site and they will have to remove it under U.S. laws, and that means Google's links will evaporate. But this isn't the case in the E.U., where this law was passed.

Do you have any sort of citation or reference to back up your claim that a newspaper would be liable for a murder due to printing an address in the US? Wouldn't everyone be liable for everything if "someone used a fact you published to commit a crime" was the standard?

In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.

The most famous case is probably Neal Horsley, who was found liable (though only civilly) for publishing the home addresses of abortion doctors, some of whom were later harmed. He was sued for contributing to the attacks and lost. These were correct addresses and it was true that they were abortion doctors, but a court nonetheless considered their publication to constitute an implied threat of harm to the doctors in question. There are some less dramatic cases involving the "public disclosure of private facts" tort, against which truth is not a defense (though an address would not usually be considered a private fact).

In the traditional (pre-automation) era intent played a large role. This worked out okay in most cases, because harmful things (like Horsley's site) tended to only show up as a result of malevolent intent. Sites with lists of abortion doctors' home addresses didn't just show up innocently, so if nobody had malevolent intent, they wouldn't show up. Now if algorithms are just throwing up lots of things, there is probably not malevolent intent on the part of the algorithms, but the same harms can result. So different legal systems are trying to figure out what to do about it.

Getting nailed in civil court is a completely different animal than criminal charges. You can even get nailed in civil courts for things that criminal courts found you not guilty of (see: OJ Simpson).

But that's what the discussion here is about as well. Google's "right to be forgotten" loss was also a civil case, not a criminal one.

The 'right to be forgotten' has more to do with the fact that in the past there was a barrier to entry to gain access to this information. Let's say that (e.g.) you were arrested at a peaceful protest in your teenage years. The Internet makes it easy to gain access to this information with minimal effort and/or cost. In 'the old days,' someone could find this information about you (public record and all), but they would have to be very motivated to look into it.

It's the same thing with the move from manned helicopters => unmanned drones for local law enforcement. Unmanned drones significantly lower the upper bound on what local law enforcement can do with air surveillance. Society didn't care too much about reining in local law enforcement on these issues in the past because it was too costly (to law enforcement) to be a problem to society at large.

> If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'

The big difference between now and the pre-Google days was that there were some checks and balances on the public record. Yes, I could find out that someone had been arrested, convicted, served their time, and was released...but it took some effort. I had to actually go down to where the records were kept, and actually go through filing cabinets or microfiche to find the relevant record.

For some kinds of public records, I could write to a government office, and they would send back copies of the relevant records, so I at least did not have to actually go to the record office, but this was slower and would often have fees.

This also presumes I know who has the relevant record. I could potentially have to go on a record fishing expedition in every state the person might have spent time in. There were firms that would do these searches for me, but they did not do it for free.

In this environment, we had balance. The public record was public, but an employer or a nosy neighbor was not going to go to the trouble of finding your records unless they had a really good reason. For most jobs, it was not worth it for the employer to bother.

Furthermore, records could be sealed or expunged, and that actually worked. Now, there are widespread copies of everything, so once something is out there, it stays out there.

Actually, most employers pre-Internet would get background checks from a single service for $8-$30. I knew a guy who started a company offering just this and always had plenty of business. Still does.

Those are legitimate concerns. How about the cases when a politician said something racist/bigoted 10 years ago. He wants them expunged now because his views are different. How do you differentiate political convenience from legitimate change in views?

Also to clarify the two points you've mentioned

Google does not generate the data. The data has to be public somewhere. If google is not doing the indexing, some other search engine is doing it. Even if the search engines did not exist, a motivated stalker will still find the public address.

> Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up.

If it is not fair, the data should not be public. It is the law enforcement's fault to make such information public.

There is another argument that can be made here as well. What if the person who went to Jail was a significant person ? Should he have the right to ask a historian to ignore his past crimes when a biography is being written ?

I originally said this was a grey area because there will be cases where this is a good reason and there will be cases when this is a terrible idea. However asking the search engines to ignore public data is most definitely treating the symptoms instead of looking at the broader problem.

If you said something in a public forum, you can't have it expunged. You can address previous remarks, you can state a thousand times that you were wrong, but it cannot and should not be expunged.

I don't see why someone's arrest record should be hidden unless they were exonerated or there were specific circumstances for doing so.

We're not asking search engines to ignore public data. The EU is telling search engines to ignore incorrect/defamatory data because the EU doesn't have the protection laws that the U.S. has.

> I don't see why someone's arrest record should be hidden unless they were exonerated or there were specific circumstances for doing so.

The problem you aren't getting is that for the poor and anyone who can't afford a lawyer...this doesn't happen. The exceptions are notable nationwide media coverage types.

I am not sure what you are referring to. I was talking about the laws in relation to the original comment, which was related to whether the 'right to be forgotten' was a good law or a bad law.

I never said anything remotely related to whether it was administered correctly or not, or how effective it was in any way.

It is possible to get local papers kicked out of Google search results for things like arrests that did not lead to a conviction [which honestly is a 90% solution]. 90% solutions are good enough.

That also sounds 90% good enough to make the media useless. A politician doesn't like an article about his corrupt behavior? Well, he wasn't convicted for anything in the article, so away it goes!

So, being acquitted is meaningless to you and should negatively impact future employment.

Noted.

Forget acquitted, what if charges are never brought in the first place? Should the Nixons of this world have a right to be forgotten?

If we're talking about the EU version of the right, it explicitly excludes public figures.

For the majority of people? Yes.

If you aren't able to get the person in a court of law and win, you shouldn't be able to prejudice their ability to make a living.

EU excludes public figures [I'm not sure exactly how its written].

It isn't like people are magically going to forget nationwide media coverage of someone like Nixon and his "I am not a crook speech". We still remember it decades later. I think I'd rather err on the side of protecting the poor and weakest members of society that probably can't get someone to take a libel case on their behalf for $$ than punish every guilty person "who got away with it".

For every Nixon, there are dozens if not hundreds of people with arrest records published on the internet that never went to trial.

The "right to be forgotten" is just a societal mechanism for enforcing forgiveness, since we lack any other way to enforce or even particularly suggest forgiveness as a society [1]. Humans are not wired for the proper amounts of forgiveness in a digital world. (One can debate how correctly wired they are under other circumstances, but I feel pretty confident that our thresholds aren't even close to right for a digital world where nothing ever decays naturally and everything is right at your fingertips.)

[1]: Before correcting that, do think about whether it is an option to society, and I am specifically referring to the US. Various religions do some work here, but we do not as a society wish to use that mechanism.

I think the problem is ultimately self-correcting as judgmental people start losing out on opportunities. When Facebook first came out, most of the older generation put out dire warnings about losing jobs because of that drunken party pic you put up. That happens, but now if you start disqualifying every candidate who ever put something embarrassing up on the Internet, you won't have a very large applicant pool. Cue "talent shortage" and "hiring is hard!" blog posts. Meanwhile, the person who got drunk and dirty 5 years ago is now a very talented digital marketer and has gotten a job with your competitor.

Historically, we've seen more tolerant and open societies win out economically over more closed and judgmental ones. Countries that allow women into the workforce do a lot better than ones where work is a man's province, because they have twice as many potential workers. Countries that place people into jobs based on talents and interests do better than those that have rigid caste systems or exams, because they can adapt more flexibly to changing skill requirements. The mechanism is just like the one above: if you deny someone a job for an arbitrary, irrelevant reason, he'll just go find someone less arbitrary (or arbitrary in different ways) and work for her.

In the long run, the problem is self correcting.

However, if someone finds themselves unable to get a job in their local area [e.g. Small Town USA where you might only have 1 employer of a given type in some cases] and is forced to move to find a more tolerant employer...that is a burden we shouldn't reasonably expect people to suffer due to a cautious police officer who wanted to play it safe and arrest someone.

I agree that in the long term we must consider second-order effects; I'm not sure we can call them yet. I can also build a plausible case for the idea that as we all live in a global village, we will all find ourselves adopting village-like privacy policies, in particular including making it so you're always playing a persona in public.

Further second-order effects become interesting, too... for instance, this could be a long-term threat to the entire social network scene. If it simply becomes a place to play a persona, and correspondingly a place to consume other people's personas, rather than connect with people on a human level, it also becomes something much less compelling than it currently is.

I think we also have to consider that job applications aren't absolute, they're relative in many ways. If having drunken orgy pictures up on my Facebook isn't a disqualifying event for a job, I still have to consider that I'm going up against someone who doesn't, and that the other prospect may thus be more attractive (because, let's be honest, there is real information about personality in those pictures however much we may wish it was otherwise). So next time I apply, I purge my pictures and now I'm the guy with the squeaky clean social media presence, which pushes everybody that much further in that direction.

Openness and non-judgmental is fun to say, but hiring is fundamentally, irreducibly judgmental. A judgment is what it is. That has an effect on the process.

I'm just musing... I'm serious about my first paragraph, I think it's too early to call the second-order effects.

You might also want to do something about those arrest rates. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

I'll get right on that as soon as I take over the world.

You assume I'm happy about the arrest rates, I'm not. However, I don't have any real ability to change them besides not voting for "tough on crime" politicians. I already do that for all the good it does.

It possible that the ballot box is no longer the biggest tool in your kit. Stick your neck out, support a local cause that is affected by this perverse phenomenon if you can. Myself, I have been arrested multiple times and have convictions relating to environmental protest (terrorism?). Do not underestimate the empowerment that comes from taking the leap of faith to back up your convictions with acts of resistance.

I know I wouldn't be employable with a googlable arrest record. No thank you.

I meant "you" as the second person plural - you as in the American people.

Fair enough but if you reply to someone...sometimes people assume you mean them.

I should've been more precise, sorry about that.

I was just explaining why I was confused. You are free to do whatever you like :D

I'll be curious to see what the rates are in Colorado in a couple of years.

They're the extreme edge cases, but I'm sure George Zimmerman and Casey Anthony would agree 100%

But it is a publicly known fact they were acquitted.

Alot of these kids never have it published that they were acquitted anywhere notable. :/

Your comment has been noted for posterity as "arrested criminal sympathiser"

If saying people who are acquitted shouldn't have arrest records showing up via Google Search means that?

Then yes, I guess I am.

Can you note mine too?

This example doesn't need a right to be forgotten, it needs a right to not be noted in the first place.

For arrests w/o conviction, the person has done nothing that would justify a violation of his privacy - what right or excuse could there be to allow the police to publish their names or other personally identifiable info in the first place? Especially for minors (as for the curfew issues)?

You need to keep the private info private, that's it.

I think the problem here is the 1st amendment trumps your right to privacy in the US when it comes to matters of public record. I'm not sure I want that to change because people do have a right to know if a legal issue is in process, they just don't have the right to be prejudiced if you are found innocent/released without a guilty verdict.

The first amendment allows local newspapers to publish info that they got from the police public record.

It certainly doesn't prevent a law that forbids police to disclose names of arrested minors, and keep their names out of the public record unless they're proven guilty.

True. However, I suspect many of these "youths" might be 18-19.

Right to be forgotten is completely unsuitable for the purpose.

First, it only requires removal of the information from some search engines. Smaller search engines which have not been notified by the concerned person can continue to index and serve the information. Foreign search engines may also continue to provide the information. Most importantly, the original sources of the information on the internet can continue to publish it. All this means that a properly done background check will find them anyway.

Second, it places the responsibility for the correct decision as to what should remain public and what should be censored on a few private companies. This is heavy burden for the companies and misplacement of responsibility since the companies are not independent the way the judiciary is supposed to be.

Thus, the law failed to protect the intended group while placing heavy burden on companies and misplacing legal responsibility in private companies.

While not as important as having a job, etc, it could possibly affect overseas travel. Someone couldn't travel with us from the UK to our wedding in the US as we learnt that anyone who's been arrested for any reason can't travel under the visa waiver program (they can apply for a visa though but that takes time, money, and an interview). And as far as I understand it, US VWP treaties operate on similar principles in both directions.

Eh? The law only talks about convictions not arrests. You need to qualify for a Business or Tourism visa to be able to use the VWP. (source: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/general/inelig...)

Sounds like your friend got screwed by an over zealous bureaucrat.

Sounds like he read the question asked when you go here: https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/ and apply for the visa waiver. And he didn't feel like forking out for plane flights just to be turned back at the border.

"B) Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offense or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or have been arrested or convicted for two or more offenses for which the aggregate sentence to confinement was five years or more; or have been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?"

But see what the US embassy in London says: http://london.usembassy.gov/niv/add_crime.html

> We recommend that anyone who have ever been arrested and/or convicted of an offense apply for a visa. In cases where the arrest resulted in a conviction, the individual may be permanently ineligible to receive a visa and in order to travel, a waiver of the permanent ineligibility is required. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act does not apply to United States visa law. Therefore, even travelers with a spent conviction are required to declare the arrest and/or conviction and apply for a visa.

Imagine you've just spent £X00 on a ticket. Would you gamble that (and the cost of flying back if denied entry), and your future chance of entry to the US, on getting through US border controls?

not mention that laws to allow erasure of minor offenses differ per state

in my state you can erase misdemeanor B and C class offenses after 5 years if 5 years no arrests

"However, an employer may make an employment decision based on the conduct underlying an arrest if the conduct makes the individual unfit for the position in question."

Which is more than enough wiggle room.

True. If you are truly innocent of the crime, you should have a good case to get the arrest record expunged (e.g. arrested for a case of mistaken identity and the charges are dropped). If there is enough evidence that you can't file a motion to dismiss, and the case goes to trial, then I suppose you have some explaining to do. The employer might be justified in denying employment if you engage in behavior that results in arrest (e.g. you are a known gang member arrested in a sweep, and later released or you were caught joyriding and the owner decides not to press charges). In this case, the arrest is not the reason for denying employment, your behavior is.

Just to be clear, even if the charges are dropped, the arrest stays on your record. To get it expunged takes court motions: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/expungement-of-crimin...

I know a few people with felony arrests (charges dropped) who had the records expunged pretty easily. It was a simple form filed with the court, and the record was clean for later background checks. It's a hassle, sure, but it makes the rest of your life much easier.

In some places it may be easy as filling out a form. In other locations (Arizona for instance), there is no such thing as expungement. The best one can hope for is a little note next to the record saying judgement has been set aside.

On the other hand, if you have ever been arrested, even if not accused of anything, and you want to apply for citizenship or a green card in the US, then the burden is placed on you to get proof that you have never been accused of anything [1]. If you fail to provide such evidence (as can happen if you were arrested outside of the US and the police in that country aren't interested in cooperating), then the default presumption is one of guilt rather than innocence.

Edit: And in case it wasn't clear, failure to obtain a green card in the US can make it more difficult to find employment, as not all companies are eager to navigate immigration procedures on the behalf of their employees.

[1]: http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-485ins... (page 3)

That just means it won't be cited as a reason by an interviewer or in a HR letter. But your name and face ina mugshot gallery are definitely not going to improve your prospects.

And when I delivered pizza, my manager wasn't allowed to make me work unpaid overtime. But this is America, and something being "not allowed" doesn't mean it isn't happening all the time. The people affected by this most generally cannot afford legal action to defend themselves against this. Or worse, they're unaware that it's illegal to do this.

You don't need to afford legal action to make a FLSA claim; the point about people being unaware of the legal mechanisms available to them (or even the illegality of it) is I think much stronger.

If I was working hourly, I'd pray they make me work unpaid overtime, because when I was ready to hop jobs I'd walk into court with a fat 2x back wages (1x + liquidated damages) [1]. If they retaliate, it's up to 3x back wages.

[1]: http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/backpay.htm

An arrest by itself, without an accompanying conviction, can be used to deny non-US citizens entry to the US. UK citizens who've been arrested need to apply for a visa and can't use the visa waiver / esta system.

https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q683.htm

http://london.usembassy.gov/niv/add_crime.html

> An arrest by itself, without an accompanying conviction, cannot be used to deny employment.

Your own linked source does not say that -- it says that an exclusion based on an arrest record alone is not considered "job related and consistent with business necessity", and so will not be an adequate defense against a discrimination claim if disparate impact on a protected axis (e.g., race) is established. It does not, however, indicate that deny employment on that ground is per se prohibited.

Further, it does clearly state that the employer may use the fact of an arrest, even without conviction, as a trigger for exploration of the "conduct underlying the arrest", and may use that as a basis for denying employment or other adverse job actions even without an arrest -- providing, unhelpfully, nearly the most extreme possible example of an arrest without conviction as an illustration (an elementary school principal arrested but not convicted of sexually abusing minors where an internal investigation triggered by the arrest found some evidence supporting the accusations but still no conviction occurred), which certainly indicates why an arrest without a conviction may be sufficient to demonstrate that the decision is reasonably job related, but does little to illustrate where the boundary is.

Laws in the US are far too strict.

I am one of the people that are covered by this statistic, I was arrested around age 16. For curfew.

Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time.

Absolutely ridiculous. For what it is worth--my record has been "expunged" and this arrest has not affected my adult life at all.

I'm not sure, but does this have anything to do with being common law rather than civil law?

To be more specific, it's not a matter of the law being "too strict", but rather it's too vague and have to be interpreted by a judge. So until someone actually fight a case, the interpretation could be too broad and can be used easily. In civil law, you pretty much have to iterate everything.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I used to live in a country with civil law, and since moving to the US, the common law system has always fascinated me.

The vagueness of the laws are a different problem. If the laws were just vague then you could have judges interpreting them in favor of defendants as often as prosecutors.

If you had to point to one thing as the cause of all this, it is likely to be the privatization of criminal justice. As soon as you have a private prison or a defense contractor selling military-grade equipment to civilian police forces, you create the incentive for those organizations to lobby for more "customers" through broader prohibitions, tougher enforcement and harsher penalties.

Only 6% of american prisons are private.

What point are you trying to make? It's not like public prisons send lobbyists to Congress to refute arguments being made by private prison lobbyists.

If 6% of your cells are cancerous you're in deep trouble.

In some states, the issue is not the private prison lobby, it is the prison guard lobby, which can be quite strong, as they may have a near monopoly on the provision of such services.[1][2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O...

[2] http://kalwnews.org/audio/2011/07/19/just-how-powerful-calif...

It would be interesting to see corruption prosecution rates of judges sending people to private vs public prisons. All i can really think of are the 2 kids for cash judges, i'm sure there are plenty of unpaid corrupt judges as well.

That's 6% too much.

Letting private corporations profit from incacerated people? What's next, slavery for the blacks? Oh, wait that's been tried already...

And most of the laws people on here don't like (I'll add cerfew for teenagers to the running list) were instituted long before we had a non-negligible amount of for-profit prisoners.

I find it fascinating how so many systemic problems in the U.S. have such simple causes and easy solutions on HN.

> The vagueness of the laws are a different problem.

It's not really that separate. One way to have a very restrictive society with a high incarceration rate is to have a clear set of laws that are explicitly strict and strictly enforced. Another way is to have a set of laws so large, complex, and vague that it is literally physically impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is breaking a law by performing any given action, or laws so broad in scope that everyone is almost guaranteed to be guilty of something. While there is certainly some of both, I think the latter is a more accurate description of the United States.

> As soon as you have a private prison or a defense contractor selling military-grade equipment to civilian police forces, you create the incentive for those organizations to lobby for more "customers" through broader prohibitions, tougher enforcement and harsher penalties.

You don't even need "private" prisons or defense contractors in the sense you're probably thinking. Even organizations that are operated directly by government are subject to those personal incentives, because it's still individuals who rely on the government funding, both laborers for their livelihood, and higher level officers for career advancement, prestige, and power. Heck, even politicians who are elected directly often have perverse incentives, because the actions required to get reelected are potentially quite different than the actions which would accomplish the traditional goals of "good" government (like upholding law, being fair, increasing prosperity, etc.).

>and have to be interpreted by a judge.

...and don't forget the important role that is supposed to be played by the jury. I always like opportunities to link to common law resources. I like:

"HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW,AND FLUID DRIVE"

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/nyufinal.pdf

"The Myth of the Rule of Law":

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

I unknowingly broke the curfew when I came to US the first time as an exchange student, also at age 16. As it turned out later my host parent has been waiting for me on a back parking lot while I was out on the street corner. Anyway, instead of an arrest I got a free ride home in a police car. I wonder if it has something to do with the skin color or that the area I was in is a low crime neighborhood.

Philadelphia instituted a youth curfew because local highschool kids developed a interest in flash mobs. Not flash mobs where lots of people in a train station start dancing all of a sudden, but rather flash mobs where they all start texting all of their friends that they are going to all meet at 15th and South Street in 10 minutes to riot and loot.

I'll grant that in most cases youth curfews are probably senseless, but in some cases they are used as desperate measures by cities looking to curb random organized violence committed categorically by bored teenagers on hot summer nights.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/philadelphia-fig...

I was living in that city while that stuff was going full swing; it was truly insane. When you walked through areas that were frequently targeted and looked down the alleys, you would see that every single alley on the street was filled with cops, some in riot gear, and some on horseback, and paddy wagons. They would just be standing around, waiting for the call for where the flash mob would be that night.

If it were adults, would you be as casual about people being told to stay in their homes because of some troublemakers?

"Teenagers" is a pretty tight age-range and those Philadelphia riots were large enough to overwhelm the police; if that age range were expanded to 14-70 and a similar percentage of that group were rioting, then that is a massive riot.

A curfew was implemented during the 1992 LA riots and enforced by the California Army National Guard. I think that is the sort of situation which you are describing, and I think that a curfew is appropriate in that sort of situation.

Would I be casual about it? Casual is a weird word; nothing about that sort of situation is casual. I would support such a curfew however.

I suppose many of them would.

Curfews? That sounds like something out of a police state.

I did not know the US had curfew laws.

They don't federally, but some municipalities do.

The U.S. is overly protective of children and young adults. We can't drink alcohol until 21 and many cities have curfew laws for kids up to the age of 16 or so. My city has a curfew for those 16 and under. They can't be out after 11 pm during the week and after 12:30 am on weekends.

"Teens cannot be out after 11 pm" is more about protecting the neighborhood from teens.

Well, I don't know; why are 15 year olds walking the streets at 1 a.m.? Something is wrong there 99.99% of the time. I don't think they should be arrested though, just returned home. I had cuffs thrown on me for curfew when I was 16 or so. No arrest, but seriously, cuffed and thrown into a pen.

This kind of thinking, right here is a problem. The "something is wrong there" assumption is wrong all too often. The assumption that the situation requires cops is wrong too - the wrong thing is most likely a parenting issue and should be dealt with by parents.

Do not take me wrong, I do plan to restrict my kids movements in age appropriate ways and if they are out at 1 a.m. it better be for good reason and with my prior approval.

However, even if it is without mu approval, the appropriate punishment is not cuffing nor arresting them. That kind of thing should be reserved for potential criminals that are flight risk or about to be violent. Teaching teens that arrests are normal part of life and done for normal growing up infractions teenagers occasionally commit in all parts of world is inherently wrong.

"Should be dealt with by parents", I agree. Often, it is not, so the community has to do something. I don't mind a curfew for kids, but I don't think it should be a criminal offense either.

Me, I was walking home from a friend's house after staying up late pair programming on the weekend.

Me, in '95. No curfews in Ireland, of course.

One exception does not disprove the rule, and honestly, I wouldn't let my kid walk home at that hour.

They're not that common. It varies from state to state and town to town. Where they do have curfews, they only apply to minors.

As others have said, they only apply to minors (under 18) and are usually restricted to certain hours and days. And they can vary depending on the cities, counties and states. It can be a kinda confusing mishmash of laws for those who live near the borders.

I grew up outside Knoxville, Tennessee. The curfew in the city was 17-18, Monday-Thursday, 11pm-6am, Friday-Sunday, Midnight-6am. 16 and under, subtract an hour from when curfew began. There were all sorts of exceptions, too. Like if you were coming home from work, accompanied by a parent, coming home from a school activity, etc.

But I lived out in the county, where there was no curfew law. Pretty much the only time I crossed into the city limits was to work and go to school. So it's weird driving in one area where being out is a crime, but you cross through this one intersection and suddenly it's not a crime anymore.

Add to that, it is ... irregularly enforced, to put it best. I was out pretty late at times when I was 17, and never had any issues. I even got pulled over once in town at 1am for speeding. I had been over at my friend's house playing Dungeons and Dragons and lost track of time. I was just told to slow down and go home.

It seems like one of those laws that is a "convenience law." I.e., it's there for the convenience of the police if they see something suspicious and want to question you, or something they can hit you with if they don't like your attitude.

That that simply to provide something to charge you with? If you are acting suspicious, surely they have the power to question you anyway curfew law or no curfew law?

That was poorly phrased. Let me see if I can do better.

Simply being out late is not sufficient reason to be stopped or questioned for most people. It gives them a reason to stop and question people who are out late and may be up to no good. If you look young enough that you might be out after curfew, that's reason enough for them to stop and ask you for identification.

Obviously, if they see you doing something illegal, they're going to stop you. But simply "being suspicious" can involve a wide range of things, and curfew laws give the police a reason to, at the very least, ask for identification if you look like you might be underage.

In general, I think these laws are intended to deter gang activity and what people might refer to as "anti-social behavior" elsewhere (petty crime, graffiti, etc). As a result, I'm betting they are more heavily enforced in inner city areas rather than in suburbs or rural areas.

Sure but that not the most useful aspect of this. If you are out past curfew and underage you've committed a crime. The police officer has a specific and arcticuble reason to perform a terry stop and search you. If they find something illegal on you that's a bonus but now you're trapped. Its an easy way to establish probable cause and gain compliance.

Even better is looking young and driving past curfew. Again this is the kind of thing officer will use for a PC stop. Sure you're 20 but the officer doesn't know than until you've been stopped and provided license, registration, and proof of insurance.

If they want to search you, they would need probable cause; simply "acting suspicious" isn't enough. Overly broad laws like this give them a convenient way of bypassing the 4th amendment.

The US is a police state...

"The US" has no nationwide law mandating curfews.

The Tenth Amendment allows states and local municipalities to set and enforce curfew laws though, and many do.

>Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time.

We had curfew laws in my country too.

Mostly during German occupation, under World War II.

I'm amazed people in the "land of the free" even have such a law...

Curfew laws are mostly aimed at children and don't apply to adults.

Would you draw parallels between the government legislating that 'school-aged' children must go to school and the US decreeing that all Japanese people on the west coast must go to internment camps? Probably not.

As someone who had to go to school, yes I would.

Absolutely.

I would draw that parallel.

And I would take all the downvotes for doing so, too, that you may be spared. :)

Yep, I'd draw the parallel too. Why do you think it's ridiculous?

>Would you draw parallels between the government legislating that 'school-aged' children must go to school and the US decreeing that all Japanese people on the west coast must go to internment camps? Probably not.

Sure, why not? It's a little worse with the Japanese people case, because of the racism involved, but on the other hand, it was an era of war between the two countries.

Byt curfew for children? Even children aged 14 or 15 years old? That's no business of the law.

Would something like that be included in "arrest" statistics? My experience with running afoul of curfew was basically akin to getting a ticket (I believe it was a misdemeanor, not a ticketable offense, but I mean there was nothing resembling an arrest going on).

Clarification: over 40% of young men in the US have been arrested. (It is ambiguous whether "youths" refers to both sexes.)

(It is also possible to interpret the headline as saying that 40% of all youths worldwide have been in the US at some point, during which they were arrested, but I doubt many people were confused by that.)

From the article: "At age 18, arrest rates were 12 percent for white females and 11.8 percent and 11.9 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively. By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 16 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively."

The parent comment is clearly referring to the HN headline, not the article itself. Since young men do not massively outnumber young women, it is not the case that 40% of all US youths have been arrested.

i did initially interpret it as "of all youth arrests worldwide, 40% take place in the usa", but realised the number was probably a bit high for that.

The current title says "Over 40% of all young men have been arrested in the USA". This can easily be interpreted as 40% of all young men in the whole world have been arrested in the USA. Instead, it should say "Over 40% of all young men in the USA have been arrested".

The actual article title: Study: Half of black males, 40 percent of white males arrested by age 23 seems perfectly adequate ehre. I think HN readers can see the big underlying issue rather than being sidetracked by the racial disparity (which is also important, but not the main story).

I agree. Title was editorialized, and we'll revert it.

>It is also possible to interpret the headline as saying that 40% of all youths worldwide have been in the US at some point

Is it really possible to reasonably interpret the title in this way? Really really?

I'm Canadian, and went to university in Montreal with a bunch of Americans. It always amazed me how pretty much every one of them had some sort of run-in with the police (up to and including being arrested). Usually it was related to underage drinking.

At that time I didn't personally know any Canadians who'd been arrested, and a run-in with the police was unheard of (and this isn't because I ran with a goodie two-shoes crowd).

I'm 37 now, and can't name a single Canadian I know personally who's been arrested (that doesn't mean I don't know people who've never been arrested; just that I don't know if they have).

So I had a feeling the percentage was high, but 40% of young men is... just appalling.

I really want to see a heat map of this phenomena. I have a feeling there is strong geographic and urban/rural differences here. I would also like to see the percentage of the population that has been arrested by age.

This statistic is definitely not representative of where I live, that being said I don't disbelieve it, I just want to understand the details.

P.S. I am also disgusted when children are charged as adults. Maybe (probably) there needs to be a middle classification of age legally, but lacking that, it is better to error by being to lenient for the youth. The other day I saw a 12 year old girl was being changed with murder, as an adult- ridiculous!

It's pretty hard to imagine you can get figures like this without it being prevalent in urban areas.

That's why you'd use per-capita rates and not absolute numbers.

Percentages are per capita.

http://xkcd.com/1138/

This is often true, but until you see the heat map you don't know that. When its not true, things get interesting.

I think this case may not completely match the joke. In this case, I have a feeling due to issues of poverty and education that, for example, the rural South might have a higher arrest rate then the rural Midwest even at locales of similar population density.

I think you missed the point of that XKCD. If you're going to publish a heatmap of absolute numbers, then yes, it'll end up looking pretty much like a population distribution map. If you publish a heatmap of percentages, then you will probably get something quite different (assuming that the percentage isn't linearly correlated with population).

If you'd like to download the raw data that this study is based on, I think you can grab it here: https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/search.jsp?s=NLSY...

It's a fairly convoluted set of forms you have to work your way through, but in the end you can download a CSV that includes the arrest counts (or a ton of other variables) for all of the nearly 9k people in the study (although not all of them continued to submit data to the survey through the years).

More about the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97): http://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy97

One key point with this study is that it only covers people who were born between 1980 and 1984, and follows them through their lives. The summary articles tend to ignore that, and imply the same stats apply to people born in all years.

Do you have reason to believe that people born during that window are particularly jail-prone?

A large number of other reasons than your suggestion exist which may alter that rate for other cohorts: the quantity of offenses which allow arrest may have changed, the attitude of law enforcement may be more or less lax, etc.

Crime is definitely way down in the last 10 years. If you assume that most people are getting arrested in their 20's, then that would imply the rates would change for different birth years.

> Crime is definitely way down in the last 10 years

violent crime is. I don't think arrests are, though...

There is one particularly well-correlated explanation for the higher rates of violent crime in roughly that time window: Ethyl (tetraethyl lead).

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

edit: as noted in neighboring posts, "arrest" != "crime"

That's very important to acknowledge, since it means that any and all public policy shifts over the last decade are discounted by this methodology.

Of course, it's still an alarming statistic, but I'd hope it's been going down (along with crime rates) since this data was collected.

A few wars to fight in, 2 widespread market downturns to lose jobs in, record high tuition, predatory loans, culture of easy credit/overspend without financial literacy education, American Dream indoctrination .... and all these lazy edge genX>Y "millennials" seem to want to do is go to jail then expect boomers to golden spoonfeed them the world from a silver platter! Instead of competing for boomer jobs, these convicts need to suck it up and fight boomer wars, feed boomer economic mess, and shut up about climate bogeymen. Just vote, consume, and live out your sentence until the hatchlings of the greatest generation are able to retire on value you create.

If this is even close to correct (and I'm betting it is) we have a serious problem in the country.

The solution seems obvious. Stop arresting for minor drug offenses and victimless crimes like underage alcohol possession. Watch the number go back down to reasonable levels.

Even if we could just stop charging people with felonies for victimless crimes, then that would be a good start.

If you are just arrested in the UK, without any charge or caution, you become ineligible for the Visa Waiver program for entry into the United States.

Interesting statistic, therefore, from this side of the pond, having strong links family, business and social in the US.

It has often been a double standard in many fields. The trademark laws are highly favorable to US companies versus Madrid Treaty Protocol countries, because the US did not ratify all that treaty. The UK does similar with EU/EC things, also. The trademark side is interesting, as the first enforcement of a trademark registered in a Treaty state against a US infringer, was Society des Baines de Mer, who own the Monte Carlo Casino, against various internet gambling sites, and I thought that may have had more allowance due to shifting policy about online gaming, than treaty affordances.

My general view, totally non specific to any country, is there needs to be a rebalancing of laws between genuine scrutiny and thoughtfulness of oversight, versus draconian penalties.

Are you a bot?

Oh man, thank you for asking this question.

If so, it's a pretty intelligent way to test chat bots, assuming you interpret karma as "votes" the the bot is human.

What's the fascination?

Edit: genuinely curious

Your comment seems coherent until you start to read it and realize that it doens't make any sense. If you didn't state that you weren't from the UK I could think that English may not be your first language. What does that paragraph about trademark laws have to do with this thread?

The abstract is at http://cad.sagepub.com/content/60/3/471.abstract (there's a paid link for the full study to the right.)

I'd like to see error bars, or at least a clear indication of the assumptions that went into the model.

http://scitr.com/a1j

Used to dream of living in the US, moving our business there.

Not just due to this, but the more I read and learn about the US, the more that is exposed about the US, the less I now want to live there.

Don't come here. It's terrible, I tell you. Just terrible.

Can't tell if sarcasm or serious

Whatever you do, don't come here to find out.

>moving our business there

That would be genuinely insane.

It would depend a lot on where he/she would be moving from how "insane" it would be.

Though I agree there are better jurisdictions than the US to move a business to.

Does any other jurisdiction ban one's company from leaving? None that I'm aware of.

Just losing that future option value is sufficient to deem such a move insane regardless of original jurisdiction - unless for some reason there is zero other option.

Every country has its problems, but among western nations it's an outlier in many ways: the police state, militarisation, surveillance, car dependence, obesity, love of guns, poverty, crime, absolute zero trust in government, culture of suing, lobbying, "democracy", horrendous health-care system etc. For me it was just too much, I couldn't take it so I moved back. It's not that my life was bad or directly affected by most of these things except in a few instances. As a healthy, young, childless engineer I was truly privileged in this kind of society, but I realised I don't want to live in a society where almost everybody else suffers. I always enjoyed American culture, that's one of the reasons why I tried living there in the first place, but I think I can enjoy it better from afar.

I've little experience in apply statistical analysis to this data (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018014, thank you to that user), so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would it be possible to remove poverty as a confounding factor?

I am guessing, based largely on American television I've consumed growing up, that a higher proportion of black males grow up in poverty than white males?

In a proper non police-state democracy, on the other hand, e.g some western european country, less than 5% of males/females have been arrested by age 23.

I think people need to take a good hard look at where the society in general is heading. I've heard from older folks that they used to be "disciplined" by parents and teachers alike in the 50's, 60's and 70's (and I'm sure the arrest percentage wasn't 40% at the time). And now it's "I don't want a lawsuit so let's just call the police". A book on Asian "Tiger mom" is lambasted by the popular media and people in general. But Asian kids aren't being arrested in such shocking numbers, are they? Isn't it obvious that there is some merit in the "Tiger mom" philosophy? If kids are allowed to do whatever the hell they want without any repercussions ("Mr./miss you're grounded" is not one of those) then what do you expect they're going to do?

So am I alone thinking that this is insane?

I don't think there's a single person on this website who is ok with this.

Any ideas how this compares to other nations?

well... given our vast population in jail I'm guessing it's much higher than other countries?

Slightly different, but surely related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

Getting on for nearly 1 in 1,000 people in jail! wow!

Worse, nearly 1 in 100.

Oops. Clearly I needed more coffee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

I would love to see a breakdown of what they were most arrested for.

I agree, and you nailed it: State has slowly stolen authority to parentd. Either you allow slap and spank nor you let other call the cops...

Something is severely broken.

Wow. That's order of magnitude more than where I live.

Wondering what is the histogram of these arrests look like.

I get a 403, could someone post the contents?

Black isn't a race, neither is White, where do Hispanics fall on this spectrum and Asians?

*In the US

There are far too many laws in the u.s. and you can never know when you're breaking a law. And enforcement is often arbitrary and based on if the police want to harass/check you, or if they want to pile charges on top of another charge to get you to deal on a plea.

Some countries view laws as a failure of society. You don't pass a law until your society has failed in that way, and instead you use social norms/controls. For example, Switzerland has no minimum wage but has a moral minimum wage of around $50K (except for a few worker types)

The u.s. seems to view laws as a way to mold society into a vision. But you end up with way too many laws that you could never know.

> enforcement is often arbitrary and based on if the police want to harass/check you

This. Absolutely this. So many laws are only enforced if and when you've irritated a cop. There are so many laws in the US about so many stupid things that they can ALWAYS bust you for something if they want to. Always.

There's probably a handful of things they could charge me with on my drive home.

It doesn't take much to irritate a cop. Sometimes, the sight of or bare minimum interaction with you is enough to trigger irritation in a cop for reasons. So many laws are enforced solely because a cop thinks you don't look the part and look suspicious for, erm, reasons.

Unfortunately, these reasons are pervasive throughout the justice system so make sure you don't irritate a cop or it could cost you money, time and freedom.

I find it interesting that I know no one in any of my immediate or extended family who has ever been arrested and I'm 62 years old. The closest I ever had that happening to me is when I was 20 and didn't know I was breaking a law* .

I'm no preacher's kid. I just live my life and try to enjoy myself. I don't bother anyone even when others bother me. I just don't get it.

* I was working at a place that went on strike. Picketers took our picture when we walked into the building so they could show who was crossing their line. To be funny, one morning I took their picture. They called the police to say I was harassing them. One young, rookie cop came in ready to haul me off until his sergeant showed up and had a conference with my boss.

No Asian mentioned. Do we exist????????

Only 160 of the 8904 survey respondents are Asian or Pacific Islander. That's probably too small a sample to get valid data.

4.8% of Americans are Asian Americans, but only 1.7% of their respondents are Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders?

I wonder what went wrong with their surveying method.

Their surveying method is perfectly fine. The study is based on a cohort of kids who were born between 1980 and 1984 (in USA); and in 1980 Asian Americans were only 1.6% of USA population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_de...).

It does disregard (relatively) recent immigrants in that regard, though; but if it's to be used as analysis of gov't policy/parenting/schooling/etc circumstances, then you'd want to look at people who grew up in USA policies and environment.

Also over 50% of violent crimes go unsolved and over 80% of property crimes. Looks like there could be more arrests if they solved more crimes.

Or maybe they might be able to solve more crimes if they arrested fewer people and used the resources for investigation.

Sounds bad, but assuming an arrest under 23 can happen any time between the ages of, say, 7 and 22, that's actually 2.7% in any given year, or roughly 1 in every 40 male children.

It almost certainly points to police officers arresting children en masse in order to discover the real perpetrator rather than any child criminality epidemic.

Most people consider it pretty bad to be arrested at any point in their life. 2.7% per year is also a pretty awful number considering.

It's not the rate that makes it bad , but the effects. In other words, it's not that there is a crime epidemic or a major problem with youth, or that every year only 1 in every 40 male children get arrested but that over all their youth-time taken as a whole 40% will have been arrested. But even that is not the key point from the abstract. The key point - what makes it bad are:

1) "Criminal records that show up in searches can impede employment, reduce access to housing, thwart admission to and financing for higher education and affect civic and volunteer activities such as voting or adoption. They also can damage personal and family relationships."

2) "A problem is that many males – especially black males – are navigating the transition from youth to adulthood with the baggage and difficulties from contact with the criminal justice system,"

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the arrests are not evenly distributed betweeen the ages of 7 and 22. In fact I'd guess that a statistically insignificant number of arrests occur before the age of 10, and that they cluster around 16-22.

"Sounds bad, but [...] It almost certainly points to police officers arresting children en masse in order to discover the real perpetrator"

... seems to me like a horrible counterproductive thing.

It is probably higher than 2.7%. The 40% statistic concerns probability of arrest, not expected number of arrests. In plain english, if a kid got arrested twice, he'd just show up once in the 40% figure.

The high school graduation rate in the US's big cities floats around 50-60%. The way I see it about half the kids growing up don't become white collar over-educated cubicle jockeys. I imagine these two groups strongly overlap. You can get a trade job with a endless arrests or even a conviction.

Wow. Most trade jobs require at least a high school diploma; many require some additional training (not necessarily an associates degree, but often a certificate of some sort, and enrollment in those courses requires a diploma).

I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.

I wanna see the data.

I agree. I come from a nice area, but I know maybe 10 people out of 2000 who have ever been arrested. And it was just underage drinking for them. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but this is suspiciously high

While it is suspiciously high to me too, I am also skeptical that you know 2000 people well enough to know if they have ever been arrested

Yes, but there are vasts swaths of the country were arrest rates are much much higher than 10 out of 2000 people (not that they would all tell you anyway).

I understand living in a bubble.... but you are not at least aware of the vast scale of these areas? If not, you should drive around more in my opinion.

I have a lot of friends that have been arrested. So for me this number is very believable. It's actually not a very hard thing to get arrested. I had friend go to jail for not neutering his cat.

That being said.. It's always nice to see the data.

> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?

The narrow-mindedness of this is breathtaking. An article about a peer-reviewed paper containing basic survey results asserts something about the entire US and your response is: "Well, that doesn't line up with my circle of friends so it must be bullshit?"

> Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.

Assuming you're in a "high/squeaky-clean socio-economic", then, yes, that class is much larger than yours. If you live in the US and make $100k or more (which is likely true for many HN readers), there are four times as many people who make less than you.

> I wanna see the data.

The article links to the paper (behind a paywall). If you want to see the data, get off your butt and look at the data.

I know plenty who sat in the drunk tank in college, or were busted on minor drug or shoplifting offenses or other teenage nonsense. I feel that the number is plausible.

I remember tons of people getting arrested for underage drinking in college - much more so than in high school where getting caught by parents was a bigger concern than cops.

Wow! I had exactly the opposite experience. Although by high school was very working class and my college very white.

Offhand I can't think of any of my friends who haven't been arrested.

I believe it, most arrests would fall into:

  - truancy (skipping school)
  - petty theft
  - underage drinking
  - DUI
  - drug possession (mostly marijuana)

Now think about how many people you know who have ever done one of those things.

Good list, I'd also add:

- trespassing - political protests

Reckless driving too. (Bill Gates for one)

Not implausible at all.

I'm probably in the squeaky clean category. On a day of a meteor shower, I went with some friends to take pictures of the sky. A park ranger arrested us, for being in a national park after dark. After arresting us, he spent 5 mins talking on the radio with some other ranger, then spent 5 mins writing a citation. Paid it in the mail a few weeks later, never heard of it again.

It doesn't take much to be arrested. 40% is a bit high, but then again my group of friends at the time was Harvard/Princeton/Stanford/Berkeley students. The socioeconomic status of the population really doesn't matter.

Did he arrest you or give you a citation?

This survey is based on interviewing people, not on arrest statistics, so if you think you were arrested, it counts as an arrest.

Receiving a citation is a non-custodial arrest.

edit just to make it clear: This is not my opinion. This is the legal definition. The study includes citations as arrests. This is why they make sure to point out that they do not include minor traffic offenses.

ok, that's a little weird. I got a ticket once for cutting through a park after dark. I would never have considered that being arrested, but hurray, today I learned I'm part of the 40%. I have also received a ticket for speeding, which all things considered, was a more serious offense/penalty. It's weird that the speeding ticket is excluded but not the walking ticket.

To me the more bizarre thing is that there is such a thing as getting a ticket for walking through a park after dark. WTF...

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-parks-c...

There is a such thing as a non-custodial address, but that does not make every detention encounter with the police that doesn't result in you being taken into custody a "non-custodial arrest". By way of example: if you're issued a speeding ticket, the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle. But they do have that right if they arrest you.

Not every detention encounter with the police results in a citation. If it does result in a citation, they have preformed a non-custodial arrest. If they want to search you, they can perform a full-custody arrest even if it's for a misdemeanor that is only punishable by a fine(Atwater v. Lago Vista).

I very strongly agree with Janice Rogers Brown's opinon here: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1125942214.shtml

edit: Hmmm after reading a few things, I now think it depends on the jurisdiction whether they define receiving a citation as a non-custodial arrest.

> the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle.

Depends. Just need probable cause. Motor vehicle exception.

>But they do have that right if they arrest you.

Depends. Search incident to arrest exception with automobile caveats. After Gant, if the arrestee no longer has access, or no reason to believe that evidence of the arrest offense will be found, not ok. (But still maybe ok to impound and inventory.)

"Probable cause" is all an officer needs to arrest you, too.

Right, but the "probable cause" is technically different -- for a search without arrest, they need probable cause to believe that there is contraband in the car, for arrest they need probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. Given that possession of contraband is itself a crime (though generally one with a mental state requirement), there is quite a lot of overlap between the two kinds of "probable cause", but they aren't equivalent.

Yeah, that seems like an important distinction. Thanks.

I won't repeat dragonwriter, but I wasn't criticizing, just pointing out that your statements aren't absolute rules. They just tend to be the simplest statements of the rules that exist.

Also with arrest, lower standard for if they think evidence will be found. It's the RAS-like "reasonable to believe" that evidence of the crime will be discovered.

It doesn't sound like you were actually arrested...

Are you sure you were arrested? It sounds like you were not actually placed into custody, eg cuffed and in the back of a police car. You may have been detained rather than arrested, not withstanding the issuance of a ticket.

Hi, I'm a long-time HN user, and I've been arrested.

(I also know lots of others who have.)

I grew up in a mostly white, rural, middle class setting, and I would estimate that at least 25% of my male friends have been arrested. There are probably enough "other classes" (e.g. non-white, urban, or poor) that are sufficiently populous with sufficiently higher arrest rates that I don't have much difficulty believing the statistic.

I aligns to previously known data and studies that >50% of all black men in the age group 18-60 were in US prisons.

I didn't know about the rates of young whites and hispanics. But given the enormous prisoner numbers in the US it also sounds plausible.

> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?

The group of people I know is irrelevant. The group of people I currently know is but a small subset of the US population. Upper-middle class, white suburbia. Double income household, with both in the six figures. Yeah, we're just a slice of typical Americana right there. (Though I have been arrested...several times. I was a bad boy once.)

But, hey, if you want to talk anecdotes then we can talk about the group of people I used to know. Lower class, much higher percentage of blacks (I currently have no black friends, and barely a few acquaintances). Though it's been a few decades, there were plenty from that group that had been arrested (some of whom I bailed out). Notice how I mention black folk? Yeah, in Indianapolis at the time that was important because the county prosecutor decided that a car full of young black males was probable cause for a traffic stop (swear to $DEITY, that's all that was needed for a stop). So race might skew those numbers a bit through no fault of the folks involved (other than the fact that they were young, male, and "driving while black").

And hence we render anecdotal data useless, which is why we use peer-reviews studies with much larger data sets. Because when you take data just from a redneck city with a redneck prosecutor, race might just make a teensy bit of difference. Or maybe the environment of that particular city. Or maybe it was just the ne'er-do-well friends I hung out with.

> I wanna see the data.

And you're not looking at those data with your own eyes because...? Platter's not silver enough? Have to hold the spoon yourself?

The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"? Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested. Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.*

Given the journal, that seems like an odd error to make. I could have that wrong, but it would make sense given that article specifically mentions truancy and underage drinking, two charges which seldom result in arrest.

Maybe that makes the statistic a little less shocking to those surprised by the number? Again, I certainly could be wrong, but it really would be surprising if the 40% refers to people actually having been read Miranda rights, hand cuffed, placed in a police car, etcetera. Even for other common crimes for that age group, like possession (generally marijuana), usually a citation is issued and the drugs are seized but no arrest is made. This is all said from the perspective of a judicial clerk in Portland, Oregon, who works a lot with the dockets related to citations related to minor misdemeanor offenses. Perhaps it is different in other states.

Anecdotally: almost everyone I know well has been convicted of a misdemeanor of some sort for which they could have been arrested but only one person I know has ever been taken in to police custody.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest#United_States_2

I would say you're is the most insightful comment in this thread. I am biased towards thinking you are correct in that when one publishes a paper, there are incentives towards a more dramatic interpretation/presentation of the data. So, a study that said 10% of all males have been arrested, would not have gotten as much notice as the current presentation.

I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.

Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.

The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:

> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.

For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.

> The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"?

No, it uses it to mean arrested.

> Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested.

Legally, a citation issued for a crime is a non-custodial arrest. [1]

> Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.

No, it comports quite exactly with the legal notion of arrest, which can either be non-custodial (the type you report having experienced) or custodial (the type which tends to involve handcuffs.) To the extent the Wikipedia article you cite is inconsistent with that (and you seem to have linked to an irrelevant section of the article, though I do so material earlier which, though it is inaccurate, supports your presentation), it is simply wrong.

[1] See, e.g., http://www.waprosecutors.org/manuals/search/May%202012%20%20.... @ p. 252: "A non-custodial arrest occurs where the defendant is issued a citation for a criminal offense at the scene of a stop."

Anecdotally, at my Ivy League college that has recently gotten some lovely press in Rolling Stone, I would estimate that at least 40% of male students have been arrested at one point or another for underage drinking. There are a couple of law firms in that town that do a thriving business in defending underage possession and disorderly conduct cases.

Actually, you should generally expect that ANY statistical analysis will give significantly different results than what you'd see of people around you.

Many of such parameters exhibit clustering; so if 50% people are X; then you'd expect most people to say "hey, that's wrong, that's not what I see" - since there would be many people that would see that 80+% of their friends would be X; and there would be many people that would see that 20-% of their friends are X, but virtually noone would have a circle of friends that would have the "true" 50/50 split.

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