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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 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 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.
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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".
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There's also the formally abolished class/caste of Burakumin as far as Japan is concerned. They are allegedly a supermajority of yakuza.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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