Yikes: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners." Needless to say, we lead the world in imprisonment. This seems like a serious problem, especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards.
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Only in America
23 Apr 2008 01:11 pm
Comments (93)
Matthew, didn't you see the memo? Torture of prisoners, when instituted by our President or Secretary of Defense, is a war crime to be denounced in the harshest of terms. Torture of prisoners, when instituted by our Governors, state Attorneys General, etc., is a regular laff-riot, to be used as fodder for humour, year after year after year.
Just the sheer numbers are notable-- 2.3 million prisoners means that being in prison is a pretty common experience-- and policies about voting, employment, military recruiting & so forth among ex-prisoners are important.
It's finally time to start another massive protest boycott against China for its horrible police-state gulag, and the truly gigantic number of Chinese currently imprisoned!
After all, China's imprisonment rate is almost as bad as that of *England* these days---and England isn't called the "Gulag Island" for nothing!
(1) Everyone should snort at the phrase "Land of the Free"
(2) No one wants violent prisoners to go free. But often people who commit violent crimes get out much, MUCH faster than people who only sell significant amounts of marijuana. Our "justice" system should send a clear signal: violence is uniquely intolerable.
(3) If "fixing broken windows"/active law enforcement on minor problems actually works, we can increase the number of *citations*.
(4) Shout this from the rooftops: Imprisoning so many people is EXPENSIVE. Do you really want to provide food/shelter/supervision to someone b/c they're a dope dealer?
(5) We really need more opportunities. That means better schools. No parent--no matter how poor--should have their child TRAPPED in a bad school. We need more charter schools, more school choice, more magnet schools, more subsidized private schools. MORE SCHOOLING, LESS INCARCERATION!
(6) I am utterly ashamed to be an American. Every American with a conscience has to wonder if this is the best we can do.
Looks like we have 6 times as many prisioners as China. Where did that data come from, the Communist Party Statistics Bureau?
Sudan must be a great country to live in. I mean, 20 times less people are in prision than the US.
This should be a major issue in the election, but neither Hillary nor Obama refer to it very much. That's disappointing, because it has cross-over appeal. Many christians, for example, are in favor of prison reform (even if their objective is to harvest souls rather than sound public policy). Anyway, this issue can only become more urgent as the months and years go by and many of these prisoners (serving sentences 5 to 10 times as harsh as Europeans jailed for the same offences) get released...
More than 1% of American adults are behind bars, an unbelievable figure. Toss in the nearly universal celebration of prison rape among American barbarians, and we've got some nerve trying to claim that Bush/Cheney isn't what we wanted.
Is the problem that we imprison too many people, or is the problem that we produce too many criminals?
Maybe it's because we have a pretty harsh criminal justice system and we're good at putting away people who do wrong?
We also have some of the best offender due process rights in the world.
Not only that we are one top countries to execute. Bonus!
Woo hoo! WE'RE NUMBER 1!! WE'RE NUMBER 1!! WE'RE NUMBER 1!!
A big part of the problem is that our sentences for equivalent crimes tend to be a lot longer than in many of our peer countries (including of course crimes for which other countries may not incarcerate at all). That inevitably leads to higher overall incarceration rates, assuming roughly equal crime rates.
And of course there is little to no evidence that many of these longer sentences are actually serving any particular purpose--unless you count things like the political purposes of the officials who support them.
Looks like we have 6 times as many prisioners as China. Where did that data come from, the Communist Party Statistics Bureau?
The article's graphic indicates that China has 1.6 million prisoners versus our 2.3 million prisoners. Where are you getting your figures?
I don't think this is anything to get extremely worked up over. We have higher crime than the typical European country for a lot of historical reasons that aren't necessarily the fault of our criminal justice system per se. The elephant in the room is of course drugs, but last I checked other countries tend to have pretty draconian drug enforcement, too. But we're never going to be Scandinavia. Also, who the fuck knows how many prisoners China actually has? Or how many criminals are running free elsewhere? Seems like you would need those stats to do a proper comparison.
We have higher crime than the typical European country for a lot of historical reasons that aren't necessarily the fault of our criminal justice system per se.
Untrue.
We have lower crime rates and it may be because we warehouse a crazy percentage of our population, but European crime rates are higher than ours.
"The article's graphic indicates that China has 1.6 million prisoners versus our 2.3 million prisoners. Where are you getting your figures?"
It's probably a per capita number. If we have about 50% more prisoners and they have 4x our pop, it works out to a 6x incarceration rate.
We have lower crime rates and it may be because we warehouse a crazy percentage of our population, but European crime rates are higher than ours.
I guess I'm out of date then. I'm sure that we had higher crime rates until relatively recently.
The longer you incarcerate somebody, the less chance there is that they can assimilate back into society. I think it's time to re-institute "hard labor" as a punishment but reduce sentence length. I'd rather see some crimes punishable by, say, a year of hard labor than 3-5 years of sitting around just going bats*** crazy.
And of course there is little to no evidence that many of these longer sentences are actually serving any particular purpose--unless you count things like the political purposes of the officials who support them.The fact that crime rates stabilized somewhat in the early 90's after mass incarceration began would appear to be evidence of something, wouldn't it?
We have lower crime rates and it may be because we warehouse a crazy percentage of our population, but European crime rates are higher than ours.If true, doesn't this prove that prison works? Sure it's expensive, but crime is expensive, too, even if its costs don't show up as a budget line item.
According to Steven Levitt, the dramatic increase in the prison population in the 1990s was one of the reasons for the dramatic decline in the crime rate during the same period.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf
He also suggests that there is likely a net benefit to this increased incarceration
Annual expenditures on incarceration total roughly $50 billion annually. Combining this spending figure with the cost of crime to victims and elasticities noted above, expenditures on prisons appear to have benefits that outweigh the direct costs of housing prisoners, subject to three important caveats. First, a dollar spent on prisons yields an estimated crime reduction that is 20 percent less than a dollar spent on police, suggesting that on the margin, substitution toward increased police might be the effcient policy. Second, it seems quite plausible that substantial indirect costs are associated with the current scale of imprisonment, such as the adverse societal implications of imprisoning such a large fraction of young African American males. Finally, given the wide divergence in the frequency and severity of offending across criminals, sharply declining marginal benefits of incarceration are a possibility. In other words, the two-millionth criminal imprisoned is likely to impose a much smaller crime burden on society than the first prisoner. Although the elasticity of crime with respect to imprisonment builds in some declining marginal returns, the actual drop off may be much greater. We do not have good evidence on this point. These caveats suggest that further increases in imprisonment may be less attractive than the naive cost benefit analysis would suggest.
And of course there is little to no evidence that many of these longer sentences are actually serving any particular purpose--unless you count things like the political purposes of the officials who support them.The fact that crime rates stabilized somewhat in the early 90's after mass incarceration began would appear to be evidence of something, wouldn't it?
We have lower crime rates and it may be because we warehouse a crazy percentage of our population, but European crime rates are higher than ours.If true, doesn't this prove that prison works? Sure it's expensive, but crime is expensive, too, even if its costs don't show up as a budget line item.
These statistics always baffle me. Are we really supposed to take the Chinese government's word for it as to how many people it has in prison?
That said, we obviously have too many prisoners. Anyone in prison on drug crimes should be released yesterday. But there are plenty of people who ought to be in prison. I don't think it's a matter of "the fewer prisoners, the better." Hell, the Europeans don't even believe in life sentences for genocide. Look at the punishments that some of Milosevic's henchmen got.
too many steves:
These statistics always baffle me. Are we really supposed to take the Chinese government's word for it as to how many people it has in prison?
Well, of course China is totally lying about their imprisonment rates---after all, they're EVIL, aren't they?
And how do we know they're evil? Well, we're sure they imprison an absolutely gigantic fraction of their population, aren't we?
Back in the Reality-Based World, I've never seen a single piece of plausible evidence the that the official Chinese imprisonment statistics are substantially different from the actual ones, any more than their economic statistics are fictional. If you have, please do share...
LFC, I agree. More sweat and discipline, less time. It may sound like a porn concept, but worth a try.
TOC, we had two trends working the crime rate in the '90's: more folks in the slammer, and fewer young men. I suppose a raft of studies attempting to tease out the effects of each are but a search term away.
While I think Californians did themselves a favor with "three strikes, you're out", I don't think the nation is doing itself any favors for the vast number of weed-related lockups. Up to a certain magical quantity, I think heavy financial penalties would be more efficient.
And crime has been steadily going down for 30 years. What we do is apparently working.
Sorry you like crime, I understand it's hard being in the minority on that.
I thought the rap against China wasn't that it imprisons too many people, but that it imprisons people for all sorts of political reasons.
Uh Cyrus, you might consider what else happened in the 90s, a booming economy will tend to reduce crime as well.
And crime has been steadily going down for 30 years. What we do is apparently working.
It's called "Getting Older". Yeah, we're real savvy to have figured that one out.
The elephant in the room is of course drugs, but last I checked other countries tend to have pretty draconian drug enforcement, too.
Untrue. Not only do we have about the cruelest penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, we also have the highest drug use rates.
Still, can't afford to surrender on the war on drugs, right? No, surrender = bad. Always.
"Looks like we have 6 times as many prisioners as China. Where did that data come from, the Communist Party Statistics Bureau?"
Whereas your assumption is that a dictatorship that is much larger than we are should automatically have more people in prison?
There are a lot of reasons for the fact that we have more prisoners, some of them bad for China, some of them bad for us. China, for example, executes several thousand people per year. We also have more jailable offenses, a lot more money directed at investigation and prosecution, and a massive number of Americans use or sell illegal drugs. So it's not surprising to me that a poor country with better things to do that build prisons and support people for free has fewer prisoners than we do. It's also not a surprise that a dictatorship that imposes order through a variety of non-judicial remedies and deterrents has fewer people sentenced and locked up.
"But often people who commit violent crimes get out much, MUCH faster than people who only sell significant amounts of marijuana. Our "justice" system should send a clear signal: violence is uniquely intolerable."
How often, exactly, do violent offenders get out before pot users? This is complete baloney.
"No one who has not been in prison knows what the state is like" --Leo Tolstoy
"Looks like we have 6 times as many prisioners as China. Where did that data come from, the Communist Party Statistics Bureau?"
Whereas your assumption is that a dictatorship that is much larger than we are should automatically have more people in prison?
There are a lot of reasons for the fact that we have more prisoners, some of them bad for China, some of them bad for us. China, for example, executes several thousand people per year. We also have more jailable offenses, a lot more money directed at investigation and prosecution, and a massive number of Americans use or sell illegal drugs. So it's not surprising to me that a poor country with better things to do that build prisons and support people for free has fewer prisoners than we do. It's also not a surprise that a dictatorship that imposes order through a variety of non-judicial remedies and deterrents has fewer people sentenced and locked up.
"But often people who commit violent crimes get out much, MUCH faster than people who only sell significant amounts of marijuana. Our "justice" system should send a clear signal: violence is uniquely intolerable."
How often, exactly, do violent offenders get out before pot users? This is complete baloney.
"No one who has not been in prison knows what the state is like" --Leo Tolstoy
According to the Levitt paper I linked to above, these factors do NOT explain the drop in crime in the 1990s:
1. Strong economy
2. Demographic changes in the population (age, race)
3. Better policing strategies
4. Gun control laws
5. Concealed weapons laws
6. Increased use of capital punishment
According to the paper, the following factors DO explain the drop in crime:
1. Increases in the number of police
2. Increases in the prison population
3. The receding crack epidemic
4. Legalization of abortion
How often, exactly, do violent offenders get out before pot users? This is complete baloney.
You quoted his line right above this, and yet you entirely distort his point - which makes me question either or both of your intelligence or intellectual honesty. He didn't say "pot users". He said people who *sell* significant amounts of marijuana.
TheOtherCyrus,
First, the reduction in the violent crime rate in the 1990s occurred after many possible causes, and the incarceration rates actually started going up well before the beginning of the violent crime rate drop.
Second, the causal hypothesis you are suggesting is less plausible than you might think. The increase in sentence lengths has occurred largely because of longer sentences for nonviolent crimes. So, the hypothesis would actually have to be that longer sentences for nonviolent crimes were leading to lower violent crime rates.
In other words, as an alternative hypothesis you could isolate the violent crimes, assume better enforcement (which is likely), and get to higher incarceration rates specifically for violent crimes leading eventually to lower violent crime rates. And even if you ignore all the other possible causes, that may be a sufficient explanation for the 1990s violent crime rate drop.
The Levitt paper isn't particularly convincing in discounting the effect of the aging Boomers.
Crime rates are for obvious reasons notoriously hard to compare, but if you take homicide as a rather unambiguous point of reference the US is miles ahead of many countries (homicides per 100k):
US 5.56
Canada 1.77
England/Wales 1.61
Germany 1.15
France 1.73
Italy 1.5
Japan 1.05
Australia 1.87
The prison population statistics for the same countries (rate per 100k):
US 686
Canada 102
England/Wales 139
Germany 96
France 85
Italy 95
Japan 48
Australia 116
So unsurprisingly there seems to be some sort of correlation, but the devil is in the details. But either way, neither a high crime rate, nor a large prison population is something to be particularly proud of.
Homicide rates should not be taken as indicative as general crime rates.
The prison system is the welfare system that white conservative Americans want: i.e. if the government is going to feed and house black folks, make sure they're locked up, ideally on the outskirts of 95%-white small towns for the economic bennies.
So, the hypothesis would actually have to be that longer sentences for nonviolent crimes were leading to lower violent crime rates.
This is a pretty plausible hypothesis (I say this as a criminal lawyer, albeit a Canadian one).
If you lock up enough people for a long enough time - even for non-violent crimes, you will likely see the crime rate drop. Since there is a correlation between anti-social behaviour (eg. non-violent crime) and violent crime, you will achieve lower violent crime rates even through indirect methods of locking up people for non-violent offences. One need only see some of the examples arising out of the 3 strikes laws, where the 3rd strike comes via a non-violent property offence (but where the earlier predicate offences were for violence).
I think the argument is not whether or not it is *effective* in reducing crime to have a high incarceration rate (with correspondingly long sentences) - because it likely is. Rather, the argument that I am partial to is that this is not an *efficient* (nor humane) crime prevention method.
"...especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards. "
So, I follow the link to read Tyler Cowen's information about the unusually dire circumstances our prisoners face. I find no such information, just the same assertion. I read through all the comments -- there's a brief mention of "Was there widespread prison rape 40 years ago, for example? Did you have gangs fighting it out right there in prison? "
I read the Times article -- no mention of prison conditions at all. I read all the comments here -- the only mention is "Toss in the nearly universal celebration of prison rape among American barbarians, and we've got some nerve trying to claim that Bush/Cheney isn't what we wanted."
I look at the helpfully linked to Wikipedia article on prisons in the US: ah, a section on prison conditions! In addition to prison rape, the section raises questionable health care and gang violence. There is no comparison to other countries or indication that the conditions are "unusually dire by developed world standards."
I follow Wikipedia's links to source material on prison conditions: one regards poor healthcare at a particular Alabama prison; one is a study surveying the extent of prison rape in seven US facilities; and it is only at Wikipedia's internal link to its entry for "Prison Rape" that I find this nugget of evidence that prison conditions in the US might be different from the rest of the world:
"By contrast, prison rape is not a stock topic of jokes in most other Western cultures."
All of which is to say: Tyler Cowen mentioning it doesn't make it a "point". If anyone (Matt, for instance) wanted to substantiate the comment, then it could be made into a point. But as it stands it's a meaningless link.
I'd be happy to believe that prison conditions in the US are uniquely bad, but none of this blogitude has given me any reason to think they are.
(Oh, and from a stylistic point of view, without the echo of Tyler Cowen's unsubstantiated comment, Matt's post consists of a link to an NYT article. Which would be punchy, if it just stopped at "Yikes!".)
Uh Cyrus, you might consider what else happened in the 90s, a booming economy will tend to reduce crime as well.The US economy did better in the 1960s than in the 1990s, and with more opportunities for the men without college educations who commit most crimes, to boot, yet crime went up massively. The economy doesn't explain all.
I can believe China has a lower imprisonment rate than the U.S. After all, what's the imprisonment rate for Chinese-Americans? I don't know specifically for Chinese-Americans, but in the first three years of this decade, Asian-Americans in general were imprisoned per capita at only 22% of the white rate, 1/13th of the Latino rate, and 1/33rd of the African-American rate.
A more focused comparison would be to compare to the arrest and imprisonment rates for non-Hispanic whites in America to those in Britain. To make the comparison even more interesting, you could limit it to whites in the American South, where most whites are of British descent.
There is a lot of evidence that suggests that the American white working class has a lower overall crime rate than the British white working class, especially for things like burglary and drunken assaults. On the other hand, I would guess that white Americans tend to be imprisoned longer, for two reasons --
1. The longer sentences imposed in America in the wake of the huge crime upsurge that began in 1964.
2. Unlike the Brits, we own a whole bunch of guns, so dispute are more likely to wind up with a dead body instead of just a battered one. In the U.S., a big fraction of prison inmates are there on homicide charges.
"China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes." -- NY Times
It might help to read the article.
The Times piece, also, argues that because judges in America are elected they're much more responsive to the community, which in turn craves tougher sentences. In Europe where they're not elected this isn't the case. More democracy leading to harsher sentencing here.
Crimes like burglaries are, also, now much more common in England than here. (That leads to thoughts about guns and self-defense laws, but not one progressives always care to explore.)
democratically elected judges = tougher sentences, more people in prison
Guns + Texas-like attitudes towards self-defense = less robberies
But, yeah, then you, also, get ridiculous drug laws and a lot more homicides overall.
Colatina's points about Chinese executions and the like would seem to be pretty valid too.
Anyone who thinks we're anywhere near as bad as China in many of these regards (prisoner rights, appeals, etc.) is just delusional.
Still, the conditions of our prisons (the acceptance of rape, etc.) are pretty damning. This regardless of how much worse (or equivalent) other nations are or are not.
By the way, keep in mind that a lot of the folks in prison on drug possession charges are gang members who are in on drug possession charges for the same reason Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion: they couldn't be put away on more serious charges requiring eye-witness testimony because all the eye-witnesses in their neighborhoods are terrified of their gangs.
For example, as LA Times reporter Sam Quinones recently wrote of the Glassell Park neighborhood in LA:
"Finding a witness to testify is almost impossible, police said. So gang members are rarely charged with violent felonies. Without witnesses, police must rely on cases they can make themselves, usually for narcotics possession."
Physical evidence can't be intimidated, so a lot of the perpetrators of unsolved violent crimes are cooling their heels in prison on drug possession charges.
Why would Steve Sailer read the article in question and risk knowing what he was talking about (re: the rates of crime for Brits vs. yanks for various crimes in recent years, the correlation between electing judges and longer sentences, etc.) when he can just push his racial theories and dubious stats on multiple posts?
Right, rural Britons living in isolated farm houses are frequently subject to home invasions by urban criminals who drive 50 to 100 miles out from council flats in the city to break into homes -- not just homes where the occupants are out for the evening, but ones where their at home -- a psychologically horrifying experience. But what are the homeowners going to do? Shoot the criminals? Sorry, that's against the law in Britain.
In contrast, exurban areas 50-100 miles from Los Angeles have some of the lowest crime rates in the country. Guns play a big role in that.
McKingford,
You write:
"Since there is a correlation between anti-social behaviour (eg. non-violent crime) and violent crime, you will achieve lower violent crime rates even through indirect methods of locking up people for non-violent offences. One need only see some of the examples arising out of the 3 strikes laws, where the 3rd strike comes via a non-violent property offence (but where the earlier predicate offences were for violence)."
To address the second point first, obviously in that case you have limited the issue to a subset of nonviolent offenders, namely nonviolent offenders who have also been convicted of two violent crimes. If there is a correlation between such people and future violent crimes, I suspect a lot of that correlation would be explained by those two violent crime convictions, as opposed to the non-violent crime conviction.
Generally, I was addressing someone who suggested that the general increase in incarceration rates explained the decrease in violent crime rates in the 1990s. Now, it could be that incarcerating people for longer periods for nonviolent crimes contributed to that effect, but my point was that it could easily be that most of that effect was explainable by better enforcement with respect to specifically violent crimes.
Indeed, I'm not sure why you even need to limit your point to people who committed nonviolent crimes. You could incarcerate a large group of people you randomly grab off the streets and slightly lower the violent crime rate.
rural Britons living in isolated farm houses are frequently subject to home invasions by urban criminals
Got a cite for that, Sailer boy?
Or are you just extrapolating from the Tony Martin case to whatever you can pull out of your rear? After all, in that case, it was a jury that determined the 'reasonableness' claim of self-defence didn't apply.
Homicide rates should not be taken as indicative as general crime rates.
Well, I didn't say they were equivalent. But you can't brush them aside either, since they are, well, crimes and the worst crimes. They're also obviously indicative of the level of violence in a society. Comparing lesser crimes and minor crimes is difficult, because there are different legal systems and laws, as well as different levels of law enforcement. Homicide, however, is a crime everywhere and you can be pretty sure that most of them will be reported, investigated and punished.
Not only that we are one top countries to execute. Bonus!
Well, sounds like we've found a solution to prison overpopulation ...
Here's one hilarious quote from Adam Liptak's NY Times article that shows how the topic off race functions as a black hole for intelligent thought:
"Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States."
Why is this incredibly stupid? Let's count the ways.
First, it's not true that generic "minorities" raise the crime rate. Asian-Americans, for example, have an imprisonment rate less than 1/4th of non-Hispanic white Americans. So, they lower it.
Second, yes, it's true that people of African-descent in Canada and Britain have higher violent crime rates than whites do, but ... there aren't very many of them! Duh ...
Australia, of course, has almost no people of African descent. Only 2% of the Canadian population is black, compared to 13% of the U.S. population. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics website, since 1976 that 13% of the U.S. population has committed 52% all homicides.
Not surprisingly, African-Americans make up about half of the prison population. Hispanics make up another large chunk.
Steve Sailer -- You are an idiot.
Moving on, minority groups, in particular one minority group, is disproportionately imprrisoned in Canada. Manitoba is about 10% aboriginal, and aboriginals made up more than 60% of the prison population.
In the US, Canada, and Australia, minority groups are disproportionately imprisoned. It just happens to be different minority groups.
The NY Times reports:
"The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England."
(I'm not sure I'd define robbery as a non-violent crime, and the Brits also come out high compared to Americans in non-lethal violence, such as drunken beatings.)
I've looked at the numbers and it's pretty clear that the higher crime rate in Britain for burglary and home invasion crimes is largely the fault of white people. Minorities are only about one-fourth as numerous in the U.K. So whites must shoulder most of the blame.
Jamaicans do dominate the urban mugging business in Britain, but what's distinctive about Britain compared to America is Britain's large number of semi-professional white thieves and hoodlums.
This is interesting because in large parts of the U.S., people in the white working class tend to be distant cousins of white working class Brits. I speculate on reasons why white working class Americans tend to be better behaved than their distant relatives in Britain here:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/050410_ruin.htm
A public service announcement:
If you just ignore Sailer, he will post a series of increasingly desperate comments, then go away.
Jesus H. Is there some kind of Stevebot?
Triggered by keywords know only to the Stevebot, it spews out different random combinations of race verbiage in genial tones, ignoring any counterarguments, factual errors, or general mockery.
The Stevebot is state-of-the-art SpamAdvocacy, diesgined to crowd out any intelligent commentary with a flood of irrelevatn commetns on your own crank pet cause. Buy the SteveBot today!
Stick to badly written movie reviews.
What's amusing, of course, is that neither Adam Liptak nor the commenters here who are so outraged ignore the relationship between crime and race in making decisions like where to find a home for their families or where to send their kids to school.
We're just supposed to ignore our lying eyes for the purposes of public discourse. And if anybody is so uncouth as to cite the voluminous statistics confirming everybody's private judgments, then we're supposed to get very, very mad at him.
Right, rural Britons living in isolated farm houses are frequently subject to home invasions by urban criminals who drive 50 to 100 miles out from council flats in the city to break into homes
Ah, yes. As I recall, Malcolm McDowall was excellent and Kubrick's direction was--as in most of his work--technically beyond reproach. I concur with Steve's taste in movies!
pseudonymous in nc: "rural Britons living in isolated farm houses are frequently subject to home invasions by urban criminals
Got a cite for that, Sailer boy?"
Here is something about burglaries while occupants are home in England vs the US.
An Englishman's Home is His Dungeon
UK Telegraph:
"But the trouble is that this kind of burglary - the kind most likely to go "wrong" - is now the norm in Britain. In America, it's called a "hot" burglary - a burglary that takes place when the homeowners are present - or a "home invasion", which is a much more accurate term. Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are "hot" burglaries, and in my part of the world it's statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it's more than 50 per cent and climbing."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/07/do0702.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/12/07/ixopinion.html
DTM,
Just to make myself clear: I think high rates of incarceration and lengthy sentences are poor public policy, an inefficient way to reduce crime, and generally inhumane. Having said that, I don't deny that they have *some* impact on the reduced crime rate.
I take your point that you could reduce the crime rate by simply sweeping a sufficiently large group of people off the street and imprisoning them. But that does not detract from my point about more and lengthier sentences for non-violent offenders, except with that group (ie. non-violent offenders) you actually have some correlation (perhaps not perfect, but at least positive) between the people you are imprisoning and their likelihood of committing a violent offence. I didn't mean to cherry pick with my 3 strikes example, but only wished to also point out that non-violent offenders do not *only* commit non-violent offences.
I guess to sum up, the increased rates of incarceration and lengthier sentences have had an impact on the reduction in crime rates. It is not good policy, nor an efficient means of spending money to reduce crime, but I can't argue that it isn't partly responsible (admittedly not wholly responsible, as you point out there are other relevant factors as well) for the drop in crime.
Ikram writes: "Moving on, minority groups, in particular one minority group, is disproportionately imprrisoned in Canada. Manitoba is about 10% aboriginal, and aboriginals made up more than 60% of the prison population.
In the US, Canada, and Australia, minority groups are disproportionately imprisoned. It just happens to be different minority groups."
Sure, that statement above is correct. But the US is almost 30% black and hispanic. You need to keep in mind the huge caveat that those "different minority groups" that are disproportionately imprisoned in those other countries are also a far tinier percentage of those countries populations compared to their US counterparts. That probably doesn't account for 100% of the higher US incarceration rate vis a vis other first world countries, but it is still a *huge* and probably dominating factor in that difference.
McKingford,
Well, I did specify picking people up from the streets. I would hazard there is a positive correlation between people who can be found on the streets and people who commit violent crimes (e.g., because people in comas won't be found on the streets and also won't commit violent crimes).
But I don't mean to be snarky. I just think in addition to your point, it is important to note that we need to separate out the possible effects of sentences for violent crimes on violent crime rates from the possible effects of sentences for nonviolent crimes on violent crime rates, with a plausible assumption being that the former will tend to have substantially more explanatory power than the latter.
The British are trying to reduce crime by a sort of Big Brother strategy of putting video cameras everywhere in public. Does anybody know if that's proving effective? It's an interesting potential alternative to stiff sentences.
I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that Americans have a more democratic punishment system than we Europeans. Things like "three strikes and you're out" or mandatory minimum sentences for drug abuse are pretty well unknown over here, because the penal code isn't an electoral issue (unlike enforcement). So what we have on this side of the Atlantic is parliamentarians deciding the maximum punishments for crimes, and judges deciding the actual punishments, and the voter kept pretty much out of it.
Crime, like terrorism, provokes a gut reaction. It know it's an antidemocratic thing to say, but maybe these things are better left to the professionals. When thinking of crime, the elector wants to punish, and he/she won't be moved by the bigger picture. Unlike the lawmaker and the judge.
Hans,
It is true that the punishment regime in the US is largely politically driven - but this doesn't make it good policy. After all, most voters are not criminologists.
The US punishment regime is a product of fear, and few countries sell fear like the US.
The point is that you can't intelligently compare different crime-fighting approaches used by developed countries without taking differences in racial demographics into account. As everybody knows from daily life, race is the elephant in the living room in crime statistics. You can't even begin to think about things like the British Big Brother approach versus the American Lock 'Em Up approach without making a rough adjustment for racial demographics.
For example, the NYT makes a big deal about how America's imprisonment rate is five times as high as England's, but the majority of that difference is due to racial demographics.
Here in the U.S., Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs) account for about 30% of the population but about two-thirds of the prisoners.
So, arithmetic suggests that if the U.S. were a virtually all white country like Finland, the imprisonment rate would be only about 1/3rd as high. (I don't, however, think you can confidently extrapolate quite that far -- I think more whites in America would go into the crime business if there wasn't so much competition from NAM gangs).
Then again, Steve, it's just maybe possible that law enforcement and the justice system embraces the same zeal for associating racial phenotypes and behavior that animates you.
No, Steve, people are mad at you becuase you hijack comment threads with drivel. If, like others here, your obnoxiousness was at all intelligent, insightful or even humorous, you'd just be a pet troll. It's your aggressive stupidity that makes people mad.
Mckingford -- Look you're not Sailer, -- so go look up the statistics Canada publication Juristat, which compares crime rates in Canada and the US. Note the comparable non-violent crime rates (Canada fares very poorly in car theft) and the differences in overall crime rates -- even with US states that are almost all white (idaho, maine, montana, wyoming). Bigots like Sailer answer every question with "niggerniggerniggerniggerni...". That doesn't make it so.
So, what we see when we work through the numbers and come up with something approaching an apples to apples comparison is that white Americans of British descent tend to be imprisoned more but commit fewer crimes than white Brits. Not surprisingly, there's a trade-off: longer prison terms seem to be found with less crime.
Which country is making the right choice? Well, that's partly a matter of personal opinion.
The British Labour government is trying to get off that trade-off between imprisonment and low crime by reducing privacy in public with millions of video cameras in the hopes of ending up with low crime and low imprisonment at the cost of constant government surveillance. It will be interesting to see if this effective and what the costs are -- but, to reiterate, we can't begin to think about cross-national comparisons without making rough adjustments for race.
The British are trying to reduce crime by a sort of Big Brother strategy of putting video cameras everywhere in public. Does anybody know if that's proving effective?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2071496.stm
It sounds like they have helped solve some crimes, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence that they have helped reduce the crime rate or that they are a cost effective crime solving tool. My guess is that the money would be better spent hiring more police officers.
Does anybody know if that's proving effective?
Can't cite anything but IIRC, successful prosecutions haven't risen. Apparently, 92* pixels don't a successful ID make.
*Made up number.
Now, here's another way to look at it: According to the NYT article, the imprisonment rate in Japan is about 1/12th the U.S. imprisonment rate. But the Asian-American imprisonment rate is a little less than 1/10th the overall U.S. rate.
For example, the NYT makes a big deal about how America's imprisonment rate is five times as high as England's, but the majority of that difference is due to racial demographics.
I don't see how you can draw that conclusion. The UK has an overall higher crime rate than the U.S. The difference appears to be that the U.S. imprisons more of its criminals than the UK.
Ed Marshall says that maybe the huge racial differences in imprisonment rates are caused by police, judge, and jury bias:
"Then again, Steve, it's just maybe possible that law enforcement and the justice system embraces the same zeal for associating racial phenotypes and behavior that animates you."
Practically every social scientist in the U.S. would love to come up with a semi-plausible statistical analysis showing that the black-white crime gap was caused by law enforcement bias. It would make his career. He'd spend the next two decades giving well-paid speeches. That's one of the perpetual motion machines of American social science -- it's been tried over and over again and it never comes close to working.
For example, take the 50 states plus D.C.. Where is the black to white imprisonment the highest? In the Old South, of course, where all those white racist Repuglicans run things! It's simple logic.
Sorry, the black to white imprisonment ratio is actually lowest in the Old South of any major region.
By far the greatest racial disparity was found in the most liberal spot on the map: the black-run District of Columbia, where Bush won only nine percent of the vote. Blacks in Washington D.C. are 56 times more likely than whites to wind up in the slammer.
The next biggest gap was 31 to 1 in Minnesota, which has normally been quite a bit more liberal than the typical heartland state.
Overall, the two regions with the biggest racial differences in black-white imprisonment rates are the Old Northwest and the Mid-Atlantic.
States with relatively high black vs. white imprisonment rates tended to vote for Kerry—the correlation was a strong r = 0.62
Obviously, the discrimination explanation for the racial gap does not hold water.
For details, see:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/050213_mapping.htm
If I can drag the thread away from racism for a moment, can I raise a question that's always puzzled me? The US has approximately 2% of the population either in jail or in the prison admin, when most other nations have 1/2 a percent; and it has 3% of the population in the armed forces, when most other nations have one percent. That's at least an extra purely American three percent of what in economic terms is surely unproductive friction. That's a lot of lead in the saddlebags. How come the US can even pretend to keep up, economically, with unhandicapped europe?
Mckingford -- Look you're not Sailer, -- so go look up the statistics Canada publication Juristat, which compares crime rates in Canada and the US. Note the comparable non-violent crime rates (Canada fares very poorly in car theft) and the differences in overall crime rates -- even with US states that are almost all white (idaho, maine, montana, wyoming). Bigots like Sailer answer every question with "niggerniggerniggerniggerni...". That doesn't make it so.
Whoa.
How the hell did I get dragged into this? Nothing that I've said has, or has meant to, reference race.
My only point has been that locking up a lot of people for a long time, while very bad policy and an inefficient expenditure of resources, has had some impact (but is not solely responsible) on reducing crime rates.
I haven't responded to anything Sailer said, and I haven't talked about race.
Chris, part of the reason that the US can compete well with Europe is that we have far more ashkenazic jews than europe, a population the highest average IQ of any race on earth. One example of Ashkenazic Jewish achievement
An extremely high percentage of US and world nobel prizes are won by jews:
"At least 176 Jews and persons of half-Jewish ancestry have been awarded the Nobel Prize,1 accounting for 23% of all individual recipients worldwide between 1901 and 2007, and constituting 37% of all US recipients2 during the same period. In the scientific research fields of Chemistry, Economics, Medicine, and Physics, the corresponding world and US percentages are 27% and 40%, respectively. (Jews currently make up approximately 0.25% of the world's population and 2% of the US population.)"
http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html
How come the US can even pretend to keep up, economically, with unhandicapped europe?
Well, just consider our gigantic budget and trade deficits, and our plummeting dollar.
I'd argue that a considerable fraction of America's economic advantage over the last fifty years came from "first mover advantage", basically Europe and Japan were bombed into rubble during WWII, and our industries gained huge initial advantages, which tended to feed upon themselves. But over the last couple of decades---sharply accelerating under Bush---we've squandered many of those advantages.
Also, our non-productive imprisonment rate has been skyrocketing over this same period.
I have been monitoring these kinds of discussions all over the Internet. In every single one, Steve Sailer comes armed with facts, statistics, and cites. Then cheeky liberals glibly call him a "moron" and a "racist" all the while being completely ignorant the data.
I came as a cosmopolitan libertarian - much more likely to agree with progressives on social issues. But the complete ignorance and lack of willfulness to engage the data is frankly embarrassing to an objective observer.
That's because Sailer's "facts" are never what he presents them to be and his overt racism undermines what few things one might imagine he brings to the table. He is an idiot and a racist, not because liberals are meanies, but because he is an idiot racist with an axe to grind.
Chris,
America's prison population is only "lead in the saddlebags" dragging down productivity if the majority of our prisoners would otherwise be productive workers in some capacity. Since most of these prisoners would otherwise be out on the street robbing and killing other people, including our productive workers, we probably aren't losing any productivity keeping these guys locked up, and we may in fact be gaining some. Europe, incidentally, has plenty of lead in its saddlebags: twenty-somethings nursing unemployment for two years, African immigrants living off of the generous social welfare programs, large swaths of the population of various countries on disability, paternity leave, or otherwise on the dole, at any one time, etc.
Circus Freak,
By spewing accusations about Steve Sailer without backing them up at all, and without engaging or attempting to refute any of his comments in this thread, you have proven Billare's point. Nice work.
"No one who has not been in prison knows what the state is like" --Leo Tolstoy
Got that right. When you're in prison, you see pure, unadulterated state. Pure maliciousness, pure incompetence.
The reason you had Abu Ghraib is because many of the persons involved were National Guard correctional officers. And the people who set up the Iraqi prison system were correctional officials from states with numerous court sanctions for cruel and inhumane conditions in their prisons.
Read the descriptions of the torture going on at Guantanamo. The exact same things happen in the US prison system every day. Not to every prisoner, but to some.
Every single member of the prison system should be executed - and they will be, in due time.
Bravo Richard for stating the unequivocal truth. If anyone cared to spend 5 minutes looking at the true state of our prison system and the brutality of the state they would realize why massive, not incremental, changes are needed.
I once gave Sailer a fair chance to respond to criticisms and contrary facts. That once was plenty for me: he refused to acknowledge factual errors even when pointed to reliable sources, and generally refused to engage with good-faith criticisms of his views. So, as far as I can tell, Sailer is just not interested in a real discussion of his views.
Conversely, I have noticed that when ignored, he tends to get increasingly desperate and angry about the fact that people are not responding. That suggests to me Sailer is at least part troll: not only is he not interested in a real discussion of his views, but he is also not just engaging in soapbox-style self-expression. Rather, he actually wants to draw the negative reactions, even though he isn't interested in engaging in a civil discussion with those people. That is troll behavior, and the only reason I say "part troll" is that I suspect he also believes what he is writing (so this is also in part, but not completely, a soapbox exercise for him).
So, what do you do with such a person? Long experience on the internet has taught me (and many others) th
See? We have a comparative advantage useful for Free Trade!
Posted by El Cid | April 23, 2008 1:30 PM