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This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? A similar argume

This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more. Glad to hear any thoughts about this.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
The US also doesn't have mandatory inpatient mental health care (or at least this has been severely downsized since the 1970s). How much of the numbers can be explained by other countries have higher rates mental health care institutionalization, while the US has shifted most of these people to prisons?
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  I found some numbers: according to Statistica, Europe has 275 mental health 'hospital admissions' per 100,000, whereas the Americas have 41.8. That could be entirely enough to explain the difference in prison populations, but of course one would need data on the length of the average mental health hospitalization. It also doesn't explain the comparison to other regions with lower incarceration and lower mental health treatment rates, which is pretty much the entire rest of the world. Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in-mental-health-hospitals-by-world-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in...
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  The US also doesn’t have optional inpatient mental health care, for many people. There are simply no beds available, even for people who have been ordered there by a court.
lm28469 4y ago
> This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society Either they are overly violent or overly incarcerating people, both are "something bad"
martopix 4y ago
> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad. Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?
- armitron 4y ago
  Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence". We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
  - qlm 4y ago
    > Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? Why does the US have these problems? They didn't come from nowhere. > We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. Can you expand on this?
  - meigwilym 4y ago
    Would you mind sharing sources on what was done and what the (un?)intended consequences were in SF, Chicago, Seattle and LA?
isolli 4y ago
I think both points, while reasonable, are wrong. If memory serves, the rise in incarceration rates can be traced back to the failed war on drugs, which incarcerated many non-violent (often black) offenders. There is also a tough-on-crime stance, in part due to the fact that US sheriffs and judges compete in local elections, leading to aberrations such as mandatory minimum sentencing. As for health spending, a lot of the spending can be traced to inefficiencies, and predatory pricing by hospitals, drug companies, and medical device manufacturer. The lack of centralized information for insurance and payments (note that I don't blame insurers) also creates huge administrative costs. Those are both complex topics, so I don't claim to have captured all aspects, and I may have some of the details wrong, but I would say it's a good first approximation.
luplex 4y ago
The US is probably more violent than other western countries, but I think the real problem are the much harsher sentences for comparable crimes (citation needed). There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. The legality of the death sentence is a clear violation of human rights, for example. I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. Yup, this is a cultural thing. In the US, people (in general) want criminals to be punished, they don't put too much value in rehabilitation. It's very different from many European countries which is visible in sentencing. > I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others. On the contrary, there's much more crime in the US than most western countries. Whether this has anything to do with punishment vs rehabilitation is impossible to say though. I personally think that lack of many social services is more to blame. Things like social security, public housing mixed with private, health care, workers rights, et cetera mean less people end up in criminality in the first place. Recidivism rates unfortunately are extremely hard to compare due to the methods and sentencing being extremely different.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    "There's more crime" is a meaingless claim unless you define what "crime" is and how you measure how much there is of it. Jaywalking is a crime in some countries. Does a country that criminalizes jaywalking have more crime than one that doesn't if it has any people jaywalking? How do you measure crime which is underreported or not enforced consistently? If the US has a higher incarceration rate it's extremely likely that it has "more crime" because incarceration is supposed to be a punishment for doing crimes. The question is how the definition of those crimes compares to other countries. E.g. do you consider possession of cannabis a crime because it is illegal on a federal level? Former US President Bill Clinton used cannabis before it was legalized in any US state, so was that a crime? For a real world case of this nebulous concept of "crime" as an opaque quantity consider immigration: even if they commit fewer violent crimes, it's still entirely possible for an immigrant to be more prone to crime simply because they are subject to additional legal requirements citizens aren't and failing to comply with any of them may qualify as a criminal offense. Just by their legal status they are able to commit an entire category of crimes others can't. Whether you think that is justified or not, they can literally be criminals for behaving exactly the same way as a non-criminal citizen would.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
[dead]
rippercushions 4y ago
For comparison, number #2 on the list (Rwanda) had a genocide involving tens of thousands of people hacking each other to death with machetes, and 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. They also like to imprison anybody even vaguely suspected of opposing the current government. So you have the double combo of lots of genuine genocidaires plus a paranoid police state, and they still have less people in prison per capita than the US.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. This is a general charge in Rwanda, which is a dictatorship still run by the commander of the ethnic army that sparked the genocide by killing the president and massing at the border to invade. They recently imprisoned the guy Hotel Rwanda was about as a terrorist. And like you say, they're still less of a police state than the US.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> but perhaps the US is a violent society Perhaps it is a violent society because of a deeply-ingrained fear of violence. Frightened people are more likely to assume a situation is threatening, and respond with violence. And imprisonment is a form of violence; nobody voluntarily takes themselves off to prison on judge's orders. The more likely you are to be imprisoned, the more likely you will risk a shoot-out with cops. There seem to be a lot of people in the USA that take a strongly retributive attitude to justice: e.g. "Close the prisons, criminals should just be shot like mad dogs". The purpose of a criminal justice system is to protect the public by enforcing the law, not to embody some moral posturing about the fruits of wickedness.
pessimizer 4y ago
> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? Most crime pays terribly, being a street drug dealer barely pays minimum wage and involves immense risk. Opportunities for some in the US are so bad that they choose terrible jobs (high risk, bad pay) at far higher rates than people do in other countries. Jobs that, in addition, come at a moral/reputational cost (your family is angry at you, other careers are closed off to you once you have a record.) > perhaps the US is a violent society What does this even mean? Of course it is a violent society. This is just a vague innuendo that this violence is impossible to fix and intrinsic to the US; it's just question-begging.
kevingadd 4y ago
The US is perhaps a "violent society" but our crime rates have been trending down over the last few decades, while spending on prisons has not trended down accordingly. We could be spending that money on valuable social programs. See https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ and https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-population-trends-massive-buildup-and-modest-decline/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... for some numbers - prison populations massively spiked over the course of a couple decades, but while crime rates have come down massively prison populations have not declined nearly as much. Based on the number of people in US jails and prisons who are awaiting trial - not even convicted of a crime - or there for minor offenses due to policies like "three strikes", it's hard to argue that massive incarceration is actually what's making us safer.
bena 4y ago
We can compare spending to outcomes however. The US spends more money for worse overall outcomes than other countries.
theautist 4y ago
I have always thought that the US should lock less people and start handing less harsh sentences, but having lived in the bay area for almost 6 months, I came to the conclusion that the US should lock up even more people. I understand that prisons don't necessarily fix the crime problem, but the thing we probably all agree on is that fixing crime is not something trivial at all, and until we know the exact causes of crime, and start to tackle them one by one, we need to do something immediate about crime because life here is frankly unbearable. Random shootings, shoplifting, assault, hate crimes, and muggings are all too common here. I'm unable to even think about starting a family in this environment.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago

The US also doesn't have mandatory inpatient mental health care (or at least this has been severely downsized since the 1970s). How much of the numbers can be explained by other countries have higher rates mental health care institutionalization, while the US has shifted most of these people to prisons?

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
I found some numbers: according to Statistica, Europe has 275 mental health 'hospital admissions' per 100,000, whereas the Americas have 41.8. That could be entirely enough to explain the difference in prison populations, but of course one would need data on the length of the average mental health hospitalization. It also doesn't explain the comparison to other regions with lower incarceration and lower mental health treatment rates, which is pretty much the entire rest of the world. Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in-mental-health-hospitals-by-world-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in...
lazyasciiart 4y ago
The US also doesn’t have optional inpatient mental health care, for many people. There are simply no beds available, even for people who have been ordered there by a court.

lm28469 4y ago

> This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society Either they are overly violent or overly incarcerating people, both are "something bad"

martopix 4y ago

> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad. Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?

armitron 4y ago
Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence". We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
- qlm 4y ago
  > Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos? Why does the US have these problems? They didn't come from nowhere. > We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. Can you expand on this?
- meigwilym 4y ago
  Would you mind sharing sources on what was done and what the (un?)intended consequences were in SF, Chicago, Seattle and LA?

isolli 4y ago

I think both points, while reasonable, are wrong. If memory serves, the rise in incarceration rates can be traced back to the failed war on drugs, which incarcerated many non-violent (often black) offenders. There is also a tough-on-crime stance, in part due to the fact that US sheriffs and judges compete in local elections, leading to aberrations such as mandatory minimum sentencing. As for health spending, a lot of the spending can be traced to inefficiencies, and predatory pricing by hospitals, drug companies, and medical device manufacturer. The lack of centralized information for insurance and payments (note that I don't blame insurers) also creates huge administrative costs. Those are both complex topics, so I don't claim to have captured all aspects, and I may have some of the details wrong, but I would say it's a good first approximation.

luplex 4y ago

The US is probably more violent than other western countries, but I think the real problem are the much harsher sentences for comparable crimes (citation needed). There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. The legality of the death sentence is a clear violation of human rights, for example. I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.

donkeyd 4y ago
> There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. Yup, this is a cultural thing. In the US, people (in general) want criminals to be punished, they don't put too much value in rehabilitation. It's very different from many European countries which is visible in sentencing. > I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others. On the contrary, there's much more crime in the US than most western countries. Whether this has anything to do with punishment vs rehabilitation is impossible to say though. I personally think that lack of many social services is more to blame. Things like social security, public housing mixed with private, health care, workers rights, et cetera mean less people end up in criminality in the first place. Recidivism rates unfortunately are extremely hard to compare due to the methods and sentencing being extremely different.
- hnbad 4y ago
  "There's more crime" is a meaingless claim unless you define what "crime" is and how you measure how much there is of it. Jaywalking is a crime in some countries. Does a country that criminalizes jaywalking have more crime than one that doesn't if it has any people jaywalking? How do you measure crime which is underreported or not enforced consistently? If the US has a higher incarceration rate it's extremely likely that it has "more crime" because incarceration is supposed to be a punishment for doing crimes. The question is how the definition of those crimes compares to other countries. E.g. do you consider possession of cannabis a crime because it is illegal on a federal level? Former US President Bill Clinton used cannabis before it was legalized in any US state, so was that a crime? For a real world case of this nebulous concept of "crime" as an opaque quantity consider immigration: even if they commit fewer violent crimes, it's still entirely possible for an immigrant to be more prone to crime simply because they are subject to additional legal requirements citizens aren't and failing to comply with any of them may qualify as a criminal offense. Just by their legal status they are able to commit an entire category of crimes others can't. Whether you think that is justified or not, they can literally be criminals for behaving exactly the same way as a non-criminal citizen would.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

[dead]

rippercushions 4y ago

For comparison, number #2 on the list (Rwanda) had a genocide involving tens of thousands of people hacking each other to death with machetes, and 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. They also like to imprison anybody even vaguely suspected of opposing the current government. So you have the double combo of lots of genuine genocidaires plus a paranoid police state, and they still have less people in prison per capita than the US.

pessimizer 4y ago
> 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. This is a general charge in Rwanda, which is a dictatorship still run by the commander of the ethnic army that sparked the genocide by killing the president and massing at the border to invade. They recently imprisoned the guy Hotel Rwanda was about as a terrorist. And like you say, they're still less of a police state than the US.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> but perhaps the US is a violent society Perhaps it is a violent society because of a deeply-ingrained fear of violence. Frightened people are more likely to assume a situation is threatening, and respond with violence. And imprisonment is a form of violence; nobody voluntarily takes themselves off to prison on judge's orders. The more likely you are to be imprisoned, the more likely you will risk a shoot-out with cops. There seem to be a lot of people in the USA that take a strongly retributive attitude to justice: e.g. "Close the prisons, criminals should just be shot like mad dogs". The purpose of a criminal justice system is to protect the public by enforcing the law, not to embody some moral posturing about the fruits of wickedness.

pessimizer 4y ago

> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars? Most crime pays terribly, being a street drug dealer barely pays minimum wage and involves immense risk. Opportunities for some in the US are so bad that they choose terrible jobs (high risk, bad pay) at far higher rates than people do in other countries. Jobs that, in addition, come at a moral/reputational cost (your family is angry at you, other careers are closed off to you once you have a record.) > perhaps the US is a violent society What does this even mean? Of course it is a violent society. This is just a vague innuendo that this violence is impossible to fix and intrinsic to the US; it's just question-begging.

kevingadd 4y ago

The US is perhaps a "violent society" but our crime rates have been trending down over the last few decades, while spending on prisons has not trended down accordingly. We could be spending that money on valuable social programs. See https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ and https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-population-trends-massive-buildup-and-modest-decline/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... for some numbers - prison populations massively spiked over the course of a couple decades, but while crime rates have come down massively prison populations have not declined nearly as much. Based on the number of people in US jails and prisons who are awaiting trial - not even convicted of a crime - or there for minor offenses due to policies like "three strikes", it's hard to argue that massive incarceration is actually what's making us safer.

bena 4y ago

We can compare spending to outcomes however. The US spends more money for worse overall outcomes than other countries.

theautist 4y ago

I have always thought that the US should lock less people and start handing less harsh sentences, but having lived in the bay area for almost 6 months, I came to the conclusion that the US should lock up even more people. I understand that prisons don't necessarily fix the crime problem, but the thing we probably all agree on is that fixing crime is not something trivial at all, and until we know the exact causes of crime, and start to tackle them one by one, we need to do something immediate about crime because life here is frankly unbearable. Random shootings, shoplifting, assault, hate crimes, and muggings are all too common here. I'm unable to even think about starting a family in this environment.