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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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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.

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".

And, correct me if I’m wrong, but Irish travelers are visually indistinguishable from your average Seamus, aren’t they? That would provide at least some evidence against discrimination as the main or proximal cause.

Irish people can tell pretty reliably by dress, accent, demeanour etc, and if you've lived somewhere for a while you'll get to know what the local families look like. Though illegal there's fairly universal discrimination against them in pubs, hotels, restaurants and the like. You can make decent money allowing a good traveller family to become regulars at your pub, that is until their cousins arrive..

Police and bouncers might give you some hassle for sharing a surname with a local traveller family, but there's so much overlap with normal Irish surnames (e.g Joyce, Barret, McDonagh) that it's only a useful clue in the context of other things. A friend of mine once got arrested after being jumped for answering yes when asked "are you one of the McDonaghs?" (ironically there's a good chance one of the McDonaghs was involved in jumping him).

But to answer your question, if a traveller drops the accent and exits the culture they can become indistinguishable from any other Irish person. I've got a programmer friend like that who lives abroad now.

Totally fair. If one were to lecture New Zealand based on their aggregate statistics that they ought to follow (say) Norway's criminal justice practices to obtain Norway's more favorable outcomes, it seems like a pretty obvious response that one ought to control (at the very least!) for the presence of Maori people before attempting to draw policy conclusions from differences in raw population outcomes.

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

A niggle, but:

aren't African Americans more like 10% of the population, with the other 2.5% that's black being mostly African immigrant

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.

Given their higher fertility rates, it probably gets you a lot higher than you’d naively expect.

So, there are 46.8 million black people in the US. That article says ~1/5th are immigrants, but 1.9 million are born in Africa, mostly coming recently. This suggests that 70-80% of black immigrants/children of immigrants are coming from other places, probably the Carribean, which matches my anecdotal experience. I meet many more people with Haitian or Jamaican accents than African accents.

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.

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.

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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