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.
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
More options
Context Copy link