This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Here's a little bit of incomplete thinking about the classic "13/53" number, which is a ballpark figure (varying year to year) that represents the fact that black people are overrepresented by a factor of about 5x in crime. I see a lot of people tend to interpret this number as "black people are 5x more likely to commit crimes", but that might not actually be the case.
Concretely, there's two ways this stat could come about:
a. There are 5x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 1x the rate of white criminals.
b. There are 1x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 5x the rate of white criminals.
There is of course a continuum between them, but I think it's useful to focus on the two endpoints because the endpoints have totally different policy responses and also suggest totally different causes.
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
They also suggest different causes. Scenario (a) suggests something (HBD, special kinds of poverty not reflected in census stats) causes blacks to have a higher criminal propensity, whereas (b) suggests police might just be extra lenient towards black criminals thereby giving them more time on the street in which they commit more crimes.
Interestingly, while the theory of police abandonment will get you cancelled today, it was very much the theory pushed by black community leaders in the 90's. It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I have recently discovered some weak evidence in favor of theory (b) while going down an internet rabbithole on a totally different topic. Specifically, look at the first graph in this analysis:
https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Compas%20Analysis.ipynb
The "decile score" of the x-axis is a reasonably predictive index of a convicted criminal committing new crimes. The dominant features in the model generating the index are things like "# of previous crimes", "was the current crime violent", etc. As can be seen from the graph, white criminals are overrepresented on the left tail (little repeat crime risk) of the graph, whereas black criminals are spread evenly. Of course, this evidence is very weak - it's only about criminals up for parole in a certain region of Florida.
Does anyone know of more data on this?
I've posted about this before, but this doesn't actually follow. The US already has very long prison sentences, and a lot of prisoners. Our justice is already quite punitive; the problem is that we don't actually arrest anyone for most crimes. Generally having a highly certain and rapid pipeline from crime -> arrest -> trial -> punishment is a stronger deterrent than just a longer sentence. The policy response should depend on the reason why 1 person is doing a lot of crimes (and I believe that crime does roughly follow an 80/20 rule, with a few people having a rap sheet many pages long). Are they doing a lot of crimes because we find them and let them off easy, or because we never find them in the first place? If the latter, then the solution to b) is also to hire more/more competent police (and more lawyers and judges to speed up the legal system).
I'm somewhat skeptical about looking at the data this way. I think you could also interpret the data as saying, "whether black criminals recidivate is less predictable based on the observables that are included in the score." If you scroll down a bit, you'll see results for the "violent recidivism" score, which shows a consistent decrease for both groups, although it is more extreme for whites.
It would probably be much easier to just look up recidivism rates directly. This paper finds a recidivism rate of about 44.8% for whites and 50.6% for blacks, which isn't an enormous difference given the wide range of other factors that probably affect who ends up in prison in the first place or the other causes of recidvism (e.g. white ex-prisoners have an employment rate of about 66% to 60% for blacks, which is an almost identical difference to the difference in recidivism. Of course, causality could run the other way--if you are in prison, you aren't employed). It's also worth noting that recidivism is pretty high in both cases.
Anyway, I haven't read the whole thing in detail, but the abstract does claim that education level and post-release employment are the most important predictors of recidivism. And black prisoners tend to have lower education than white ones (they're also slightly more male and young, which are also predictors of criminal activity in general), although the differences in all 3 cases aren't enormous.
I do some back of the envelope arithmetic here, based solely on example numbers involving many crimes/criminal, and get totally different results: https://www.themotte.org/post/329/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/58654?context=8#context
Can you be quantitative about what, specifically, you disagree with in that analysis?
We may have long prison sentences, but violent criminals do not spend much time in jail.
If as you say they have a "rap sheet many pages long", that means we did in fact let them off too easy the first time. How could a crime be on their rap sheet if we didn't find them earlier?
The paper you link is entirely unrelated to the question I'm asking, namely "how fat tailed the distribution of number of crimes per criminal?"
At any point, did you google to see if there is any empirical research on what deters criminals? This is an empirical question. All you have done is model the direct effect of incarceration, without accounting for whether the threat of punishment (or the memory of past punishment) might prevent a crime from taking place to begin with. In fact, you explicitly assume these effects to be 0. If you had searched around, you might have found something like https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/670398 which summarizes a bunch of research, and which says in the first sentence of the abstract:
If you tweak the parameters of your napkin math, how much does the conclusion change? What if you assume that a criminals' chance of being caught is not independent for each crime (i.e. some criminals are better at getting caught)?
A rap sheet includes arrests, which doesn't mean there was enough evidence to convict. If you get arrested for 20 different crimes in 2 years, it's likely you're guilty of at least some of them, but you may not be able to be convicted of any one of them.
The distribution is probably similar for crimes where no arrest is made, which is most of them. Smarter serial criminals may even be able to avoid getting arrested entirely, which of course only makes it easier for them to commit even more crimes.
The thing you linked to is primarily about recidivism probability. What is its relevance in this context? And why is it evidence for your hypothesis?
It's also a question of only peripheral importance to the actual topic of discussion, namely that of incapacitation. The paper you linked is irrelevant because it's not even attempting to measure the crime prevented by incapacitation.
Given how many misinterpretations of my comments you seem to be making, I'm beginning to think they might be deliberate.
Just on the off chance you are discussing this in good faith, let me quote a sentence in which I very explicitly do not assume deterrence is 0: "In this scenario, for doubling clearance rates to work even as well as harsh prison sentences, it would need to cut num_criminals [deterrence] by 70%."
You could try reading the first comment I wrote, which explains clearly that a) I'm looking at one particular graph which is an approximation of P(crime/criminal) b) it's weak evidence and c) I'm asking if someone has better data.
I did dig a bit deeper and found this somewhat dated study: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpr94.pdf
Basically the 272k criminals released from jail in 1994 are believed to have committed 100k violent crimes and 208k property crimes within 3 years.
As per table 12, 55% of people who were released from prison in 1994 had 7 or more arrests previously and about 75% of this group would be arrested again within 3 years. 44% of the group had been in prison at least once before, and this group also has a 75% 3 year rearrest rate after getting out.
These numbers sure seem in the same ballpark as my napkin math, which you haven't stated any particular disagreement with.
The word "incapacitation" does not appear in your original comment, but it does include . Maybe you should be more explicit.
You wrote:
You can't talk about policy response with such an incomplete picture. (The real correct response to an 80/20 rule of crime is to focus on finding the serial criminals, not harshly punishing everyone).
Moreover, your napkin math has nothing whatsoever to do with how crime is distributed among criminals--it just compares different policing and sentencing strategies. The distribution of crime at no point enters into your calculation.
What is P(crime|criminal)? The probability that a criminal committed a crime is 1. If you mean probability of recidivism, that is exactly what the study I gave you measured. Someone may be commenting in bad faith here, but it's not me.
I asked some questions about them, like how sensitive they are to the parameter values or what happens if you allow for criminals to be better or worse at not getting caught. Do you want me to disagree? I can do that. 2/3 is not that high of a clearance rate; on the flip side, 1/3 is not that low. You state that the effect of deterrence would have to be 70% (although only account for prospective criminals, not those who have already been arrested in the past), but don't actually give any reason to suggest that this is unrealistic. 20-35 is probably too wide of an age range; something like 17-25 would be more realistic.
I'm sure your math returns the numbers you say they do. I just don't think they're very useful. They're also so rough that I fail to be impressed by the alleged matching to the data. I don't follow the logic from the stats you quoted to your estimate; can you make this argument in more detail?
The concept however is clearly spelled out: "...we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes."
"Suppose the average criminal commits crimes at a rate of 3/year between age 20 and 35, meaning that in the absence of policing his career will consist of 45 crimes."
I suppose it was slightly badly phrased, I should have described it as a "representative criminal" instead of "average criminal". But yes - my napkin math shows that in the regime of high #s of crimes/criminal, locking them up forever is a very effective strategy.
The question of distribution of crimes/criminal is how much crime actually comes from that regime. You previously said you think it's a lot:
Interesting - it looks like my 33% is not too far off from the actual number of 41% for violent crime. The "high" numbers you're providing are only for murder, which is a red herring - most crime isn't murder.
You're the one making the claim deterrence is the best. Kind of strange how you haven't actually provided any estimates of elasticity here.
Not in this thread, because I don't see any reason you wouldn't ignore what I say and misrepresent me as you've already done repeatedly.
Among many other things, yes. You might have been thinking primarily about incapacitation, but your post covers a wide range of points, including speculation on the cause of the long tail and the difference between black and white crime rates (which isn't explained by the mere existence of a long tail). You need to chill out with the accusations of misrepresentation until your writing improves.
Is 3 a year that high? My impression was that the "long tail" included people with hundreds of crimes in their career but for some reason I can't find good data.
By raw numbers, most crimes are never going to get a sentence of "lock them up forever" anyway so it's not a very good hypothetical. (Although, you aren't really locking them up forever-your math for total prison time only counts the time they spend in prison before turning 35; if we could know exactly what age each person stops being a criminal, our job would already be much easier!).
Yes, but the numbers actually matter.
It's not wildly off for violent crime, but I think it's pretty high for property crime (at least in the US). Of course it's true that most crime isn't murder, but murder generally has the best data (lots of other crimes aren't reported to the police). Anyway, the point was not that 1/3 and 2/3 are individually wildly wrong--the point is that the difference could easily be much more extreme, which would have obvious implications for your napkin math. Hence why I asked, 3 times now, for any discussion at all of how your estimates change based on parameters.
Murder also gets a lot of attention for being so bad. You've mostly been discussing "crimes" as a monolithic entity, but is 1 person with 50 misdmeanor charges for public intoxication, loitering, and petty theft as important as 1 murderer?
Again, you are the one who made an argument and said that it supports your hypothesis. I think there are a lot of very large gaps in this argument. One of those gaps is that you acted like the number you got for what deterrence would have to be is unreasonable, but didn't provide any evidence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And, to note, whites are more likely to have access to social networks which can get them employed and knowledge of how to use them. This probably explains the difference in post-release employment rates.
I would not be surprised if that were a significant contributor. Gangs pulling people back to crime might be another. But the data make it difficult to tell.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, both can be true. It is true, for example, that black homicides have much lower clearance rates than white homicides. So we do need to catch more black criminals, but that doesn't know whether hypothesis a or b is more correct.
More options
Context Copy link
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
I took a college class that claimed that black drug users were much more likely to purchase and use drugs in public, where the cops eventually catch them. White drug users buy and use illegal drugs in private residences. White and black Americans have comparable drug use rates, but the black ones are caught more.
This obviously doesn't explain differing homicide rates. And take stuff a college class asserted with a big grain of salt. But to some degree maybe white people are better criminals and cops don't typically crack down on upstanding whites.
This data is self reported, so is very questionable. Even then the self reported rates are pretty significantly different IIRC. Something like 20-30% higher for black people.
The difference in jail time/convictions for drug use is mostly down to a difference in dealing anyways. IE black people aren't actually caught for personal use that much more, but are a disproportionate amount of dealers (or at minimum, dealers who are caught)
More options
Context Copy link
Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
I'm kind of with @TIRM on this one but have a slightly different theory on the mechanism. I think a good chunk of the difference comes down to public housing, which due to reasons both historical and economic skews overwhelmingly black. When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans. This also conveniently explains a lot of the victimization statistics as Gang wars tend to happen in areas where the gangs hold sway and methed-out psychos generally have issues with bus fare.
What we have is a situation there are certain geographical pockets of violent crime that are so extreme that they are skewing the statistics for the entire population.
Edit to Add: this also ties in with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment below.
Rural South has a lot more shootings and murders than rural Washington, Vermont, or Idaho. There are indeed pockets of extreme crime, but it is by all means false that all “crime problem” is concentrated there.
Yes, the rural south may have more shootings per capita but I don't think that proves as much as you think it proves. Two murders in Smallville might be statistically equivalent to 500 in Metropolis but the latter is going to show up in the national statistics more than the former.
Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:
The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a greatly underpowered answer. While the study shades at blaming racism, the fact is affluent black young men appear to commit a lot more crime than white peers in the same income and housing.
Black people have a much higher propensity to crime at every income level, but single motherhood alone makes up almost all that difference. The problem is much clearer than people often let on.
The father is usually alive. Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children. Doesn't neccessarily mean that forcing parents to live together will eliminate the gap. Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.
Obviously the parent is still alive, the question is if they are contributing to child care in any meaningful way. Just splitting the time between households is probably not meaningfully different than having 1 parent. The benefit of nuclear family is probably mostly in having more child rearing labor at any time. You actually see the same effect in Japan, except with traditional multi generational families having better outcomes vs nuclear families.
This may have some effect, but given that even significantly heritable factors like height and intelligence aren't that inheritable (I think IQ is roughly 30%?), it really doesn't fit.
Pre ~1950 data isn't that good in the first place, (EDIT: actually even now I don't think the data is excellent) but there is a pretty huge uptick in crime that fits very well with the adolescence of the first generation of single parent children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're looking at different parts of the elephant. Suppose propensity to commit violence has a distribution that, like the normal distribution, has the property that a small shift of the mean results in a large change at the tails. If that's true, if black people overall have a slightly higher mean propensity to commit violence, the tail of black people with a VERY high propensity to commit violence will be much larger than the same tail of white people, and will account for most of the staggering numbers like 13/53.
That, plus a tendency for blacks to live in conditions(eg, single motherhood, poverty, drug use) where that propensity is more likely to be realized.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Firstly that's not what the study says, secondly in order to actually rebutt my hypothesis you'd have to first answer the question; where are these "affluent black young men" coming from?
Prince Georges County, Maryland is the wealthiest predominantly-black county in America, but its crime rate is pretty high.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, they appear largely to be too young to have made the money themselves...
There may be studies that show a zip code breakdown that says that within zip codes there is no difference. I am not aware of such a study. This Times article appears to make the claim that living in wealthy neighborhoods does not protect black men from the devil of racism, which would seem to rebut your theory to an extent.
I never said it was poverty asshole, It's culture. As much as wokesters and their fellow travelers like to make hay out of blacks making up 38 percent of those incarcerated despite being only 15 percent of the general population, the fact remains that "is the son of a single mother" remains a far stronger predictor of whether someone will spend time in prison than their skin color, and that's a big part of why establishment liberals would rather make it about race.
Thing is that woke left and alt right have both made rolling their eyes at and talking down "boomer social-cons" a major component of their identity, and the last thing any of them want to do is admit that the Republicans were right about anything.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Iirc, Scott looked into this at one point. The takeaway was that the "within the last year" rates were reported to be similar, but the "within the last week" rates showed a large discrepancy. And anecdotally similar to the "in public" point, when I encounter people out in the world who show signs of drug use, such as blatantly smelling like weed, they are almost always black, wildly in excess of any plausible discrepancy in use rates. I assume the real difference is how much people worry about being caught.
More options
Context Copy link
Is this based on self-reports, or actual research?
This is exactly why OP with homicide rates, and not drug convictions. In fact, it is Black murder victims that have lower clearance rate, which combined with the fact that most crime is intraracial, implies that, if anything, it is Black people who are likely to get away with murder.
What would you expect other than self reporting? These are illegal acts done (by sensible people) in private. Other than asking people or performing random drug testing we aren't going to get use rates.
I mean, given that blacks have both higher rates of mental illness and lower average iq, we can expect far fewer of them to be sensible people(hence, public drug use).
Low effort, highly inflammatory, no argumentation or evidence. Don't post like this, please.
More options
Context Copy link
This does nothing to address TIRM's point. It's just a low-effort swipe at black people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Counter point to that theory is crime victimization surveys. Arrest rates match rather closely with self reported victimization rates. If there were any relevant amount of white criminals going underpoliced you would see that discrepancy in the victimization surveys.
I'd also argue, as a counterweight to the idea that black criminals are more policed relative to white criminals, that black criminals are more likely than white criminals to get away with serious crimes without being arrested due to the sheer amount of crimes being committed in the areas that make up the bulk of black crime rates. Like, for example, in Chicago where the majority of homicides go unsolved.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think so too. I made a couple of posts a while back arguing that this may be misleading due to:
The black-white IQ gap could mean that whites are less likely to get caught. It's reasonable to assume smarter criminals will take precautions to avoid being caught. Also, taking plea deals to dismiss a serious charge for a lesser one. It's likely that smarter criminals will avail themselves of more legal options.
Smarter criminals are likely to engage in crimes which have a lot of victims and a smaller per-incidence risk of arrest, such as fraud. The crime stats only look at arrests, not the # of victims per crime. A single fraudster can have hundreds of victims, for substantial sums of money, versus a black who robs a store and is arrested afterwards, yet these are counted as a single entry in the crime stats. .
If you just look at homicides, excluding serial killers, then blacks are way overrepresented.
There's a lot of reasons crimes like murder go unsolved, and criminals being particularly clever isn't really one of them. Distrust of the cops and "snitches get stitches" mentalities in urban black communities really cuts down on the ability of police to investigate crimes, and the ability of DAs to secure evidence and testimony to convict the murderers even if they are identified. The existence of a large black market in handguns (which are used in an increasing numbers of murders over time) makes solving cases harder in several ways also. It's easier to solve a crime where one person is standing over the other with a bloody knife than it is to identify all parties in a shootout. Also, we've seen a decrease in the number of cops in particularly-crappy and crime-ridden neighborhoods recently, which increases case loads, thus decreasing clearance output.
And on, and on.
More options
Context Copy link
Crime victimization surveys cast shade on this theory. Arrest rates match rather closely with self reported victimization rates. If there were any relevant amount of white criminals going underpoliced you would see that discrepancy in the victimization surveys.
I would also say that it's reasonable to assume that a lot of white criminals are not very bright. I'd also argue, as a counterweight to the idea that black criminals are more policed relative to white criminals, that black criminals are more likely than white criminals to get away with serious crimes without being arrested due to the sheer amount of crimes being committed in the areas that make up the bulk of black crime rates. Like, for example, in Chicago where the majority of homicides go unsolved.
Of the total % of serial killers by race whites are underrepresented at around 30% whilst black are overrepresented at around 60%.
Outside of that point #2 is valid. Though I have reservations about considering violent crime on the same level as financial crime, for various reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Two thoughts
Someone mentioned below of 35 being a big age where people just become less criminal and lose their young male behavior
Tabarrok has done a lot of work on America having far more people in prison and less policing than the developed world. And higher crime rates. More policeman= higher chance of getting caught versus locking career criminals up long term. Theoretically what works elsewhere would seem to be shorter jail sentences but vastly increasing the chance of being caught
That matches my recollection of both being a young man and relevant psych studies. People, in particular young men, tend to be intuitively bad at expected value considerations in risk assessment. A 1 in 500 chance of going to jail for 50 years is more favorable from their perspective than a 1 in 100 chance of going to jail for 5 years. So increasing the probability of penalty, even with a reduced severity, would be a greater deterrence.
Is it not actually more favorable? When we’re talking about ‘low probability of very bad outcome’, the way most sensible people make decisions is to disregard differences in badness and focus on actual probabilities of suffering them.
Assuming the potential payoff is the same, then no, the 1 in 500 scenario is worse. .002 * 50 = .1 years of lost freedom. .01 * 5 = .05 years of lost freedom. Twice the expected negative value.
Mathematically, going from 1 in 100 chance of 5 years to 1 in 20 chance of 2 years, the first one is a better risk. But I suspect most people would hesitate more at the 2nd one. What's sensible, I guess that depends on how you like to structure your risk, how many times you plan to take said risk, expected positive value, lots of factors really. But from a public policy perspective, it's more important to understand how criminals (mostly young men) structure their risk. Probably not utilizing game theory, so increasing enforcement rather than penalties makes sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this approach is optimal. I think America's police are much more effective compared to foreign police, such as being better trained and having more firepower, as much as both sides complain about American policing (either being inadequate, corrupt, etc.). This means fewer police are needed. The UK or French police seem inept and doesn't evoke the sort of fear or intimidation compared to American policing. In Europe, short sentences means lots of recidivism and a need for a lot of police to keep re-arresting the same criminals.
"The Bundeskriminalamt trains its own CID officers. Officer candidates receive their training during a three-year course of studies at the Federal College of Public Administration as preparation for service. The course of studies is broken down into 21 theoretical and 15 practical training months."
Swedish police training requires 2.5 years of training, including 6 months of paid internship.
I think Japan has the lowest training time at 6 months if you have a university degree and 10 months if you don't.
Compare this to the US training times:
"All special agents begin their career at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for 20 weeks of intensive training at one of the world’s finest law enforcement training facilities. During their time there, trainees live on campus and participate in a variety of training activities. Classroom hours are spent studying a wide variety of academic and investigative subjects, including the fundamentals of law, behavioral science, report writing, forensic science, and basic and advanced investigative, interviewing, and intelligence techniques. Students also learn the intricacies of counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, cyber, and criminal investigations to prepare them for their chosen career paths."
Washington, D.C., requires the most police academy training hours in the nation, at 1,120. That's 28 weeks of training.
So, there's an overlap between the hardest training in the US and the easiest training in the rest of the first world, but most foreign police are better trained than most American police.
That's not something you should use as a metric for police.
It is more effective as a deterrent
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The more policing thing is political over here. A person dies during an arrest the cops go to jail and the videos on YouTube. Someone sits in jail is unseen. It’s a better route but has no political future.
More options
Context Copy link
In the UK's case at least, that's on purpose. In Sir Robert Peel's Policing Principles the point is stressed that the need for force in policing increases in proportion to the loss of respect and approval from the public towards the police. The 5th principle even mentions the importance of preserving public favour "by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am not sure about the evidence of a black/white split but people generally underestimate how much crime is committed by career criminals.
Crimes of passion are rare compared to a murder committed by someone with a long criminal record. Here's a liberal-leaning site which says just that.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/19/edward-flynn/85-percent-shooting-suspects-and-victims-milwaukee/
How much crime does one have to commit to be arrested six separate times? Dozens or hundreds of incidents, I would imagine. By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime. Unfortunately, as this goes against the prevailing political dogma, we are unlikely to see studies that back up this claim. Anyone who put it forward would become persona non-grata in the academic community.
My prediction is that as strict sentencing laws are rolled back we will see higher violent crime rates over the next 10 years. I believe that mass incarceration can explain most of the reduction in violent crime from 1990–2015 and most of its subsequent rise.
I mean I'd imagine there's few private citizens who haven't committed 100s of what could be charged as misdemeanors if they were observed by a sufficiently disgruntled law enforcement officer.
More options
Context Copy link
Mass incarceration, war on drugs, abortion, better surveillance and detective technology, etc. Some will argue that European countries have less crime despite more lenient conditions, but this may fail to take into account demographics and unreported or unsolved crime.
What’s the murder rate like among, say, the Afro-French, or Turks in Germany?
Luckily the Danes have done this. They've got categories for convicted persons from "Denmark", "Western Countries" and "Non-Western Countries" as well as "Persons of Danish Origin", "Immigrants", and "Descendants" (of migrants).
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, they're trying to obscure data. Which tells me it probably points to discrepancies between Germans and at least a few other large groups(that is, not just gypsies that everyone already knows are all criminals, or a few small ethnicities that are common in the mob).
As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.
It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.
I know an Irish traveller (not mixed) who has quit the culture and done very well for himself becoming a programmer, but yeah the generalisation is still a very accurate one.
Roma gypsies seem completely set in their ways while Irish traveller ways have changed quite a bit over the decades, the culture may have become even more criminal as a result (though maybe reading John B. Keane plays has given me a mistaken impression of how it was in the 50s), but change opens up the space for a few ambitious people to make it out.
Ah, the import of rap culture?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder how Gypsies would do if they were all moved onto a planet of their own, with nobody except each other to victimize.
I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.
More options
Context Copy link
While I have no fondness for gypsies, that kind of comment really doesn’t add anything to the discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's conceivable for mixed ancestry people, but you won't consider that person a gypsy. Moreover, that person will overwhelmingly likely not consider themselves a gypsy. Imagine someone from a mixed-race marriage saying, "Black? Fuck this ghetto shit, my mom's white, my dad hates his childhood in the hood, and has no love left for it, so I'm just American. All this racial heritage bullshit is just keeping people like me down."
This sounds like a direct description of Thomas Chatterton Williams (albeit taking a rough tone to his more genteel one), more or less. He describes himself as an "ex-black man", criticizes aspects of "ghetto" black culture, and encourages people to move towards a world beyond self-identification with racial categories.
Kmele Foster isn't from a mixed-race marriage, but he approaches things similarly.
More options
Context Copy link
In practice that person would be a professional conservative grifter because in all other circumstances identifying as black(but not actually being) is advantageous and this is recognized by nearly all functional people. Which is even more different from gypsies, aiui.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I just don't think there's that much evidence that harsher punishments actually do explain the crime reduction to a very large extent. For one, Britain (and probably most other Western countries) also saw a similar rapid decline in crime rates over the New Labour governments, and while Blair wasn't 'soft' on crime he didn't oversee anything like what happened in America. The prison population did increase, but that increase wasn't really sufficiently faster than the pre-1990s rate of increase to explain the enormous drop in crime. Same goes for Canada. While it may have played a role, I'm not convinced that it could be the central factor.
Comparisons of crime rates between US and other Western countries need to control for racial demographics to be worth the keystrokes it takes to make them. Compare Canadians with Canadian Americans, or white Canadians with white Americans. ADOS people in America are an unusual demographic, not even obviously comparable to merit-selected African immigrants to Canada.
Actually given that southern descended whites have an elevated murder rate, white Americans and white Canadians aren't directly comparable on that standard. White Canadians and WASPS, yes, but no one cares about that comparison.
Realistically if you're comparing crime between countries, "oh we have black people" is a cheap cop out.
I mean, when 13% of the population commits >50% of the murders, focusing on that demographic seems more to me like rational triage than a cop-out.
Other countries have minorities which commit extremely high percentages of violent crime, too. Koreans in Japan for another ethnic example. And people that grew up in poverty everywhere- there's no obvious reason that we should silo out ethnic groups(and anyways, aren't African Americans more like 10% of the population, with the other 2.5% that's black being mostly African immigrant communities with extremely low crime rates) specifically. People with tattoos are way overrepresented among serious criminals. So are children born out of wedlock- indeed, from many perspectives, bastards are the obvious group to blame for American crime rates, not blacks.
In any event, given that among European-descended white ethnic groups white Southerners have one of the higher murder rates, just triaging out blacks gives you other large ethnic minorities that you can make the numbers look better by excluding, and you've already set the precedent. It's better to take countries as a whole for comparisons on things like the overall crime rate.
I'm open to evidence that any of those disproportions are as dramatic as the black/white gap in the US, if you have it. If not, this is just so much ducking and dodging.
Anyway, no matter; if you don't like focusing on blacks, then by all means draw a more finely targeted apples-to-apples demographic comparison. Compare Swedes to Swedish Americans, or white Canadians to white American descendants of Canadians. But I think we all know that those more finely targeted comparisons are going to put the lie to any attempt to pin the differential on some detail of the two countries' respective criminal codes and criminal justice practices.
https://www.fixfamilycourts.com/single-mother-home-statistics/
Children of single mothers are far more over represented among criminals than blacks.
More options
Context Copy link
In Ireland you've got traveller gypsies (distinct from the Roma), who despite making up only 0.6% of the population account for 10% of the male and 22% of the female prisoner population. And this is with them being underpoliced given that it's fairly hard to catch them since they've got tightly knit communities across Ireland and the UK to disappear into and if they come to your house telling you not to talk to the police you're best off taking that advice.
That linked article also mentions New Zealand, "where Maori people accounted for about 14 per cent of the population" and "represented 50.8 per cent of prisoners".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's also the formally abolished class/caste of Burakumin as far as Japan is concerned. They are allegedly a supermajority of yakuza.
More options
Context Copy link
A niggle, but:
It seems intuitively incorrect to me that one in five black Americans have even recent African ancestry. I would guess it's more like one in ten at most. Can any Americans vouch for the likelihood of this?
One in ten are foreign-born. Adding their kids and grandkids probably doesn't get you to one in five, but it's higher than I'd have guessed before checking.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't compare those countries with the US. The US murder rate is more than 3x that of Canada and 6x that of the UK.
For the record, my claim is not that harsh prison sentences disincentivize crime. It is that harsh prison sentences physically remove serial criminals from the population, thereby making it impossible for them to victimize people.
It would be nearly impossible for mass incarceration NOT to lower the crime rate.
Very easy to imagine a society where half are incarcerated for things which have since been legalized etc.
There are many hypotheticals like arbitrary imprisonment of random people etc.
In reality, our model arbitrarily imprisons certain demographics in certain areas, randomly enforces some laws in certain areas, randomly ignores certain criminals in certain areas, randomly believes crime shouldn't be punished in certain areas... So it's very difficult to actually map.
We have countless true stories of people in Alabama or whatever being in prison for 20 years for stealing 5 dollars, or for people falsifying evidence for decades etc. We also have countless true stories of rabid monsters committing 500 crimes while people wax poetic to free them immediately.
Maybe there are true examples out there, but every time I've seen a story about someone being imprisoned for 20 years over something trivial and read past the headline they turned out to have done a lot worse stuff or are a career criminal and this was the last straw.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder what role rising worldwide obesity rates could play. It's possible fatter, sedentary youths are less likely to engage in crime.
AFAIK obesity lowers testosterone in men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is plausible but doesn't follow inevitably from the rest. Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it. Consider an analogous claim that, because 1% of people (fast food workers) do 90% of the deep frying in the US, we could improve obesity stats by removing a small number of people from the streets.
Your prediction is a useful one to distinguish between these hypotheses, but also hard to differentiate from a deterrent effect making crime less attractive (which we would also expect to see if we arrested all fast food workers).
I have not ever seen a progressive claim there is a social niche of being a violent criminal. Can you explain where you got this idea?
Not with that phrasing, perhaps, but the idea that crime is caused by systemic issues and social conditions is equivalent to saying that those things create a social niche which someone will fill.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, that seems like a strawman. A progressive would more typically claim that violent criminals are mostly driven into it by their social conditions and locking people up won't fix those, so removing people from the street doesn't drive down crime rates because people still in terrible conditions will continue to commit crime. At least it seems to me.
There's lots of flaws with that idea- it fails to grapple with the fact that the severe crimes in poor communities really are the same few people- but it's not like it's inconsistent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The 13/53 figure is for murder not crime in general. Which is something the rest of your post should be taking into account. For instance there aren't a lot of murderers being let out of prison to commit murder again 4 more times, though I suppose you could have an altered but similar hypothesis like "failing to sufficiently catch and punish black criminals before they commit murder" or black career criminals being more severe in that they escalate to violence more often.
Are you claiming 13/53 is not representative of non-murder crimes? Or are you merely claiming the data isn't easily available?
In any case, criticizing the lack of data in a comment that explicitly acknowledged incomplete data and asked where to find better data is a little silly. It's adding nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
Also murder being the single most reliable stat for tracking crime rates since it's close to (definitely not entirely) impossible to cover up or mistake for something else. It doesn't get under OR over-reported as much as other crimes might, and as you mentioned, it's usually not the case that one person commits a dozen murders over the course of months or years.
Mostly agree, but few nitpicks.
Some African countries report very low homicide. On another hand, more functional ones (South Africa and Botswana) report very high ones. Chechnya seemingly reports a lot of killed as 'missing'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We can look at a plain “percent population imprisoned for homicide” rate to loosely determine whether the cohort does indeed contain more violent members (versus, contains violent members who are much more violent). But remember that the chance of a black American getting away with a violent crime is actually much higher than that of a white American, contrary to popular belief. That’s because the cities with the lowest homicide clearance rates are also the cities where a supermajority of homicides are committed by black americans. (If 60% of cleared homicides are black perpetrator, and the city has a homicide clearance rate of 50%, and the uncleared homicides are mostly gang-related, then we can be sure that true (cleared + uncleared) homicide rate is >50% black perpetrator, and we can estimate it would be considerably more). Note that the FBI data on homicides is perfectly fine (pre-change 2021 changes) because while not every town reports their homicides, every high population area does, and the towns that don’t usually just don’t have homicides. My town of 10,000 hasn’t had a homicide since the 80s.
What changed in 2021?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wanted to comment on this bit specifically because it's reflective of the conflation that happens everywhere on this subject with criminal justice policy and policing policy. I think under-policing in deprived neighbourhoods actually is a problem, and as you say most black leaders and the black public broadly did and do agree with this. Getting more police on the streets is a good thing. However, this is a completely different area to criminal justice policy. The academic consensus seems to be that, within reason, what really deters crime is not harsh punishments but the high clearance rates - actually catching more criminals. So more police is definitely part of the solution to crime, but once criminals have been caught I think the evidence in favour of meting out very harsh punishments is minimal.
There's two methods of stopping crime: deterrence (not committing a crime due to fear of getting caught) and incapacitation (not doing crimes because he's in jail). Most of the "harsh sentences don't work" arguments are based on ignoring incapacitation.
But this is exactly where it's important to distinguish between scenario (a) and (b) in my comment above.
Suppose the average criminal commits crimes at a rate of 3/year between age 20 and 35, meaning that in the absence of policing his career will consist of 45 crimes. Two methods of policing:
a. Put a lot of effort into clearances, solve 2/3 of crimes, and lock him up for a year. He commits an average of 1.5 crimes before getting locked up for a year, meaning every 1.5 years he commits 2 crimes and then spends a year in jail. He commits 10 crimes before age 35. Total crimes = num_criminals x 10, total jail time = 10 years.
b. Solve 1/3 of crimes and lock them up forever. The criminal successfully commits 3 crimes before getting caught on average. He's locked up forever and has committed 3 crimes before his 35'th birthday. Total crimes = num_criminals x 3, total jail time = 14 years.
In this scenario, for doubling clearance rates to work even as well as harsh prison sentences, it would need to cut num_criminals by 70%.
In a "few criminals, lots of crimes/criminal" scenario, even a low clearance rate results in any individual criminal eventually getting caught.
More options
Context Copy link
Incapacitation shouldn't be overlooked. A small percentage of people is undeterrable and will commit a hugely disproportionate share of total crime if they are able to do so. They need to be identified and locked up as long as they remain undeterrable. Roughly, this cohort is largely male, aged 16-35, and disproportionately black. The main benefit of 3 strikes laws is that it is a mechanical fallback that achieves this objective in a way that is immune to special pleading and undue sympathy from judges. It's a hard thing to give a 19-year-old a 20+ year sentence when you're faced with the tear-stained face of the kid and his sobbing family all dressed in their Sunday best and clutching the kid's old teddy bear, surrounded by earnest ACLU types unloading the best emotional weapons that the entire field of social justice has developed, but there are many cases where it is absolutely vital to do so.
Every cop I've ever asked for their take has told me the following story- these kids don't make it to 18 without committing crimes that would be worthy of harsh punishment if we were willing to carry it out. Most of these crimes are relating to substances, firearms, or assault. That 19 year old armed robber has lots of juvenile charges that were dismissed because juveniles don't get prosecuted unless they do something horrible.
Most will proceed to blame this on broken homes and a lack of corporal punishment. But it seems like being willing to lock up juveniles is a necessary patch if we can't bring back 50's families.
When you live in the city adjacent a high crime neighborhood (like I used to) you constantly notice people doing things that would be an immediate arrest in the suburbs. Teens drinking and smoking marijuana around garbage can fires, for example. Contrast this with a suburb where 11 teens being a little loud inside of a house at 9:30 results in 4 squad cars pulling up and arresting everyone involved. Heck, I was once tackled and handcuffed at the age of 21 for "underage drinking" in my friend's backyard. The difference is stark. And the enforcement gap seemingly grows as crime gets worse. Armed robbery in that area of the city happens weekly, if not daily, and happened once in my hometown during my 4 years of high school. And it wasn't a small town, certainly 2-3x the population of this particular crime ridden neighborhood. Its like a 1000x incidence rate.
The thrust of these cops’ story is that after they’ve been arrested for a beating, or carrying a gun in a burglary, or whatever, they’re subsequently let go without charges by the people who actually make charging decisions. A lack of arrest for public marijuana use is probably a symptom of that, not a cause.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think Becker was probably wrong that criminals would do an EV calculation on getting caught and therefore reasonable punishment is probably not itself a deterrent (most criminals are dumb and therefore wouldn’t do the right EV calc).
But is there a lot of evidence that incapacitation doesn’t affect future crime? That is, I can buy that harsh punishments have little effect on a particular criminals decision BUT I can buy that harsh punishment can affect the population of criminals.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the academic consensus is wrong. If we lowered the punishment for shoplifting to a $1 fine with no other consequences do they really think we'd see the same amount of shoplifting? Criminals respond to incentives just like everyone else. I think the conclusion that we should lower prison sentences is driven by political preferences and the studies follow from that.
Walmart has this policy or always calling the cops. more stores should adopt this, but perhaps in some areas cops are busy and do not get involved for such small crimes, so criminals target those stores and areas. It depends if the DA actually files charges.
I would imagine that someone involved in more serious crimes might be persuaded to avoid shoplifting if it at least means that the police arrest them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is why I said 'within reason'; clearly, if you decrease punishments enough you'd get to the point that potential criminals would not see it as a considerable deterrent. However, the point is that above a certain point you get diminishing returns, and the 'tough on crime' sentencing policies usually touted like three strikes laws are at the point where your returns have diminished to almost nothing.
As others have said, 3 strikes isn't about deterrence. The cohort subject to 3 strikes have already shown to be non-responders to intervention. Thus incapacitation via long term incarnation to protect the public.
More options
Context Copy link
The tough on crime policies of the early 90s, including three strikes laws, correspond with a massive and sustained decrease in crime rates that lasted until the latest wave of support for soft on crime policies in 2020. I'm sure higher clearance rates help, but not if you just catch and release.
Sure, but is that because of a deterrent effect scaring Johnny the cop stabber into cleaning up his life, or is that because of long prison sentences meaning he just doesn’t spend enough time on the street to commit the same number of cop stabbings?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is especially true when the criminal community is high in narcissism and fractured into competing gangs, as they see themselves as fundamentally different than their opps (opponents) in character and predestination. The music that they listen to celebrates criminality and are essentially odes to egomania. Once they learn that a single opp committed a crime and got away with it, their competitive egomaniacal drive tells them that they can do the same, even if they know of many instances where other perpetrators were caught.
More options
Context Copy link
Another factor in favour sterner punishment, is that it prevents recedivism even if it has no deterence effect. A criminal behind bars can't predate on the innocent, even if would be criminals do not see him as a cautionary tale.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link