You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.
>But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?
Okay. How? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.
So given that that are still criminals on the outside, the answer is that you need to become more efficient at apprehending the right people - not increase incarceration rates.
>I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?
Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.
>If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?
This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it's kind of confused.
Look up the statistics. Even if every person in the U.S. incarcerated for drug possession was released tomorrow, the U.S. would still have the highest incareration rate in the world. If every drug trafficker was released, the U.S. would still have an incarceration rate triple that of every Western European country. If every non-violent offender was released, the inceration rate would stll be double that of every western European country.
Also, note that many drug offenders have a violent history, but the police were only able to make the drug charges stick. Also note that in many cases the drug offenders were selling on street corners, playgrounds, and such, and residents were begging the police to move in and arrest the gang members.
America first and foremost has a crime problem. And it has a crime problem due to terrible law enforcement. The incarceration rate is actually at a point that is analogous to the famous Laffer curve in tax policy. If you have really good law enforcement, and predictably catch and punish felons, you have very low incarceration rates because so few people commit crime (see for instance Japan and Singapore). If your country catches nobody, obviously its incarceration rate is 0%. But if law enforcement is mostly lax, but is inconsistently and randomly harsh, then you get high crime and a very high total incarcerated population.
>Also, note that many drug offenders have a violent history, but the police were only able to make the drug charges stick. Also note that in many cases the drug offenders were selling on street corners, playgrounds, and such, and residents were begging the police to move in and arrest the gang members.
When we talk about the War on Drugs driving incarceration rates, we do not speak solely of drug possession. It's economics.
There is immense demand for narcotics because people love to get high. Since narcotics are illegal, engaging in their trade becomes a risky proposition, which in turn drives up prices. Since narcotics are such a lucrative endeavour, there is a lot of competition. Since competing groups lack the capacity to settle their differences through the judicial system, violence is often the answer they resort to.
By making the trade legal you will remove all of these problems overnight.
>America first and foremost has a crime problem. And it has a crime problem due to terrible law enforcement.
Convicting and incarcerating people has little to do with law enforcement and more to do with the laws they were accused of breaking and the judicial system at large. Police officers round people up; they have no responsibility in determining whether they get locked up.
> But if law enforcement is mostly lax, but is inconsistently and randomly harsh, then you get high crime and a very high total incarcerated population.
So, you agree with me then: large amounts of people who are correctly locked up shouldn't be locked up.
You seem to be evading his point: "Even if every person in the U.S. incarcerated for drug possession was released tomorrow, the U.S. would still have the highest incareration rate in the world. If every drug trafficker was released, the U.S. would still have an incarceration rate triple that of every Western European country. If every non-violent offender was released, the incarceration rate would stll be double that of every western European country."
Note how it's a conditional - drug possession OR trafficking OR (unrelated) non violent.
If we release all drug possession, what ratio would it be compared to W. Europe? Would the highest still be orders of magnitude higher?
--
I'm saying ending the War on Drugs would release drug possession AND traffickers AND a large percentage of violent crime would just not happen.
This is just one example. Criminal justice isn't my thing, but then there are a myriad things you can do to prevent recidivism. For instance, the barrier to participate in the regular economy as a convicted felon is absurdly high and, although I haven't statistics to quote for you, I would bet is a huge part of the reason so many people revert to crime (like, oh I don't know, dealing drugs again).
It sounds to me like you may be twisting the plain language of his statement. "If every non-violent offender was released" we'd be releasing a huge number of people who by any reasonable metric should be in prison. The "non-violent crimes" include burglary, grand larceny, fraud, vehicular manslaughter (yep!), "promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child", and conspiracy.
And yet, even if you release all those people, along with (obviously) all the drug offenders --- every drug offense is statutorily a non-violent crime --- you still have an incarceration problem.
You see his point, right? I'm confused about why you're trying to avoid engaging with it. He's not saying we don't have an incarceration problem; he's saying, "the drug war isn't the problem, because even after you factor it out, we still have an incarceration problem". According to Devin, this is apparent in plain, simple numbers. If I was making an argument that contradicted the basic statistics of the problem, I'd want to know.
I ignored his statistics because he was using an appeal to emotion with "residents were begging the police". I have now looked them up; he's not wrong - you could halve the incarceration rate and still put twice as many people in jail as in England.
I don't have an answer for that!
I suspect it has to do with a lack of leniency and a prison system set up for punishment and not rehabilitation - the problem behind that incarceration statistic are repeat offenders and long sentences. The TAL episode I linked above really digs into it. Incarceration rates have skyrocketed since 1980.
That said, reducing the prison population by half doesn't strike me as a half measure.
Sorry, his conclusion may be wrong, but it's simply not spurious.
If you release all the nonviolent offenders, what you're left with are the violent offenders, which is a convenient shorthand for "people who clearly should be in prison".
Conclusion: how ever much we may be over-incarcerating drug offenders, it is also the case that too many people are committing violent crimes.
Devin's hypothesis is that this is a result of half-hearted law enforcement: we have enough enforcement to lock up huge numbers of people, but not enough to make the risk of committing any one violent crime high enough to deter crime.
I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". Nobody in this discussion appears to believe that at all. We should get past that point.
>I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession".
I haven't been arguing about that all.
At the root of it, I have a hypothesis that a majority of violent crime in our present society stems from some kind of inter-institutional fracas, i.e. people committing violence do so, for the most part, as an attempt to further the goals of the social hierarchy to which they belong.
On a parallel level, I also believe that barring some seriously draconian shit, ala Singaporean death penalties, in a lot if not most communities we have basically reached peak law enforcement. (It's worth debating just what is "seriously draconian", though). We basically can't stop people from engaging in ludicrously profitable or enjoyable illegal activities, and at a micro level we can't stop dedicated individuals who want to hurt other individuals.
Given these two beliefs, I think your best bet is to shrink the organizations involved by drastically eliminating their profit margins on their most lucrative trade. (As a side tangent, also engage in more expensive deep independent investigations as done in the Wire, but as the Wire shows there are many institutional challenges with that approach also).
As it turns out, it's a complex question. What might be true for inner cities might not apply for port cities where you can make a dime doing something else illegal.
"Finally, his end conclusion is still spurious - if you lock up more people than everyone else clearly law enforcement isn't the problem."
Not true at all. The way to measure how lax law enforcement is is by what percent of crimes result in punishment. The U.S. has a very low clearance rate compared to other countries ( http://sowf.moi.gov.tw/stat/english/enational/j54.xls ). I don't have the stats on hand, but the conviction rate is also much lower. In many cities have about a 60% clearance rate (meaning an arrest with a warrant) and then about a 30% conviction rate for homicide (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-08-30/news/bs-ed-berns... ). In other words, in only 20% of murders is the perpetrator found and convicted for murder. In Japan and Singapore, the rate is in the 90%'s (arguably this rate is suspiciously too high). The U.S. has much less effective law enforcement. Not surprisingly, Japan and Singapore have very, very few murders, so their overall incarceration rate is much lower.
When you look at other crimes it's the same deal. When you talk to people in who live in urban neighborhoods in the U.S. the default expectation is that burglaries, armed robberies, car break ins, etc, etc will not get solved.
As hard as it is to believe, even drug enforcement is quite lax in the U.S. cities. The first dozen times someone is caught on the street corner dealing drugs, they get a day in jail and they are right back out there. And most of the time the police just drive by without doing anything. Think that happens in Singapore? In Sweden? In anywhere in the developed world outside of certain urban cores? Drug policing is incredibly lax. So the problem grows, turf wars break out, fighting breaks out, the population calls for the police to do something, there is a crack down, and all the drug dealers who were suckered into thinking the police didn't care get caught up and end up in prison for a long time.
The problem is that American policing is both too lax and too harsh. The best way to prevent crime is too have predictable, high probability consequences for crime. Harsh but low probability punishment is much less effective.
The type of policing in the Wire (which matches most of what I have read in real life about the problem) is the worst possible way to prevent crime. Remember how the police wait for months and months, watching the gangs, knowing everyone who is committing crimes, without doing a thing about it? That is what I mean by incredibly lax policing. In the 1860's Philadelphia had a gang problem. A certain gang notoriously controlled an area of town and was causing the people all sort of trouble. So the police chief sent in a force billy clubs and beat the gang down. The gang problem disappeared, the gang members did not have some permanent criminal record that prevented employment, it was quick and effective action.
Notice how in the Wire and in real life the police arrest someone for drug dealing, and then are back out on the street with no consequences a few days later. The police shrug it off, as if nothing can be done about it. But why not put every person who has been arrested for drug dealing under anti-loitering probation for the rest of the year. If you're caught loitering at that same corner again, you're told once to move along. Second offence you get 10 hours of community labor, and caught again you get ten lashes with the billy club. Baltimore has no shortage of community labor to be done, lots of trash to pick up and lots to clear out. I guarantee you'll have the streets clear of street dealing in no time. Youth won't fall in the drug gang trap as much and violent turf wars over corners will cease.
And then there is that whole issue of the schools. Again, school discipline is ridiculously lax. The default punishment is sending the kid to the principal's office, the harshest punishment is suspension or expulsion. None of these are even punishments to the types of kids committing the offense! See for example: http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-... and http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html neither of these situations is that abnormal.
America is like the abusive parent who mostly let's the kids do whatever they want, and then everyone once in a while gets drunk and beats the kid silly. Naturally the kids grow up to be criminals. What is needed is strict, firm, predictable law enforcement.
There's a very good treatment of these issues in the late Christopher Stuntz's book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Basically he blames a mixture of excessive criminalization/sentencing (eg drug laws), plea bargaining, and lax policing which prefers arresting people for easy-to-convict crimes - not least because law enforcement officers nowadays rarely live in the same communities where crime occurs, and so lack respect from, sensitivity towards, and intelligence about the communities that they police.
If I kill you over a bad drug deal, but none of us has drugs on us at the time, what crime do I get charged with?
The counterpoint offered by phillmv was that just because, on paper, the crime has nothing to do with drugs, doesn't mean that it wasn't motivated by the drug trade.
(2) It's likely that many crimes are caused by the black market for drugs; the black market for drugs can be suppressed by legalizing them. It's also likely that many crimes are caused by drugs; these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them. Drug dependency is devastating to economic well-being and to family systems and both those failures also give rise to criminality.
I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice.
"I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice."
That said, I think legalization is much less of a pipe dream than any of the solutions I'm proposing. Which is unfortunate, because I don't think legalization alone will do much of anything about crime, I think most of the major cities need a period of fairly draconian and strict law enforcement to bring back from essentially a state of civil war back to civilization.
Legalizing drugs is not a short-term solution to the incarceration problem. As bokonist pointed out (and you quoted), we'd still have record-high incarceration rates if everyone with a drug-related offense was released.
However, the idea behind legalization is that it would reduce the incentive to commit other crimes, and that in the long-term, fewer people would be incarcerated, and so the incarceration rates would drop over time.
I agree though that it is both a pipe-dream (unlike alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition is pretty popular) and a "magic bullet" (in that it sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is).
There are many other causes of our high incarceration rates, but legalization is an important step in the right direction (in recognizing that we have created the wrong legal incentives).
Like I hypothesized: some (maybe most) of the crimes involved in drug trafficking can be mitigated by legalization. But many of the crimes that knock-on from drug use are simply endemic from drug use. That intensive use of hard drugs destroys families and employability isn't simply a result of illegality.
> these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them.
Since we're all pro-legalization, then this is a little funny thing to be arguing about but I have a straight forward counter argument to the above.
There is a certain percentage of people who are straight up ruined by addiction. But they're a) a very small percentage of the population and b) since almost everyone has access to drugs (and at least in some of my social circles consuming drugs is totally normative) almost everyone who can be ruined by addiction already is.
This is bourne out by the experience of Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs, etc etc yadda yadda.
Violent crime in Portugal has been rising steadily. Even if it had simply held steady after decriminalization (which seems not to be the case), that would still refute the idea that legalization is a good way to stanch the rate of incarceration.
Alas, it gets complicated to isolate variables when you consider the whole economic meltdown they're experiencing. Public policy is hard, let's go programming!
I wonder: From what I understand, cigarettes are more strongly addictive than many "hard drugs", so do they give rise to many criminal acts? If we're just looking at the dependency factor and not the direct effects of the drug (e.g. "that stuff makes you violent"), it seems like it ought to be a useful model.
No. Intensive addiction to cigarettes doesn't destroy your career or your family --- at least, not until later in your life, when you contract lung cancer. In fact, from experience: smoking can improve your earning potential, by creating the additional networking opportunity of being a member of the community of smokers. The cost of smoking is mostly constant and manageable.
Intensive addiction to heroin is virtually guaranteed to destroy both your family and your career, leaving you and your dependents with neither an income nor a support system.
I think his point is that intensive addiction is more likely with cigarettes - the high from smoking tobacco is much less intense than that from many illegal drugs, but the high and the addiction potential are different things. You are quite right that intensive addiction to some drug like heroin can be worse, but part of the problem in the US is that being a heroin addict is almost de facto proof of criminality. While attempts to criminalize addiction itself have failed, if you are a police officer and you know someone is a heroin addict then you won't need to wait very long to bust the person for possession. On the other hand, if you become addicted to heroin in some other countries this will be treated as a medical problem and you may be able to manage your consumption in a clinical context at lower expense, social risk and so on.
> And it has a crime problem due to terrible law enforcement.
There is another side to that.
Yes, people will commit crimes if the probability of punishment (which is correlated with the probability of getting caught) is too low.
However, people will also commit crimes if the expected loss from getting caught is too little. I believe social inequality is to blame here. People in poor neighborhoods know that basically whatever they do, legally, they will never live a good life - have a place to live, have a car, eat good food, live in a safe neighborhood, maybe travel once or twice per year. They have poor access to schooling, which leads to poor access to jobs, which leads to poor access to money, ... unless they do crimes (e.g. rob a bank, sell drugs, steal cars, kidnap people and demand ransom). I cannot speak from experience, because I was born rather privileged, but I imagine they don't even see this as unfair/immoral - there is nothing moral in one baby being born into a rich family and having all the options, and another being born to poor parents and thus having none. When you think of it, it might actually be immoral. Some criminals simply seek to correct this imbalance, to award themselves, and their kids, the opportunities that the society denied them.
Note that I am in no way trying to justify their behaviour, I'm just trying to understand it. Only understanding can lead to an effective cure.
Perhaps someone else can parse this better than me.
I can make sense of one of these lines: "Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing." I think behind this line is lurking the belief that America's prisons are full of Humboldt County potheads, or something like that.
The typical American in jail for drug offenses isn't a system administrator who made the mistake of toking up one night. It's a gang member whose real offense is being a worthless thug. The prosecutors and LEOs who busted him are experts in the technical details of putting worthless thugs in jail, to the extent that this remains possible.
Nonetheless, all major American cities retain a very substantial population of worthless thugs. If you're unaware of this reality, I strongly recommend this Chicago cop blog: http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/. Or you could watch "The Wire" - I hear it's available on DVD.
Last month, my wife and daughter were leaving a child's birthday party in the outer Mission, SF, when bullets flew down the street past them, followed by a worthless thug who ran past them gun in hand. You can argue that Bayshore Blvd. is a lousy place to put a space that hosts children's birthday parties, and I'd agree. Still, it's my country - why shouldn't I feel safe in it, anywhere, day or night?
And the interesting thing is, all of that violence is directly related to overly harsh laws relating to narcotics. The problem comes down to economics:
There is an immense demand for narcotics. Since narcotics are illegal, they are risky to trade, which pushes up prices. Through a combination of the preceding two points, trading in narcotics is extremely profitable. Since the different trade groups engaging in the trade of narcotics have no legal means through which they can resolve their differences, they will instead turn to violence.
The gang member's real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources, and where engaging in the drug trade is a normative experience and one of the few sources of jobs. That at least The Wire really goes on about.
By eliminating mandatory sentencing, you will significantly reduce the amount of years people serve in prisons because the mandatory sentence lengths were established capriciously in an attempt to out grandstand political opponents (see http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s... ).
The world isn't quite as black and white. Eliminate the War on Drugs and overnight all of these problems will disappear as the underlying incentives vanish.
How about that gang members next door neighbor that he grew up with and used to be best friends with until junior high when that next door neighbor who made a choice to stay away from narcotics, went on to city college then on to a university and today is a somebody. Your saying "The gang member's real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources..." does nothing but enable this type of behavior. Why would you not demand that someone no matter what neighborhood they were born in has to accept personal responsibility for their actions and choices. You give them a pass like they have no choice. Well they clearly do. Some of them make the right choice while this fellow you are giving a free pass too clearly did not.
Do you think that there would be more prisoners in Africa if all of the rapists and murderers were somehow instantly apprehended tried and convicted? This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
Personal responsibility is an illusion afforded to those who grew up in certain environments.
The social structure of gangs is such that, when you grow up in a tough neighbourhood and you have crappy parents it's safer to join a gang.
When everyone around you considers the drug trade to be normative behaviour, you don't really see the downside.
It's not that we can't make choices for ourselves. It's that what we consider to be a good choice changes with our environments (and, frankly, our cognitive ability to make good choices also varies given your parent's income at birth - here's another TAL for a source on that last statement http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g... )
> This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
Well… a criminal is an invented category. A criminal is someone who broke a law, and we write new laws every day. The US just has more laws that put you in jail than any other country.
If you think the difference between these societies can be reduced to the availability and/or legality of intoxicants, you have a very one-track mind. Take another hit on the bong and perhaps your perspective will expand. Oh, and the subjects of both studies are predominantly white. So in case you're a racist, that's not an option.
A very easy way to expand your perspective beyond the ken of the average NPR intellectual is to read old (pre-1923) books. You know that feeling the medieval scholastics got when they realized they could actually read Virgil, Cicero, Homer, etc, in the original? Pretty much spoiled them on Church Latin.
That's not to say there aren't good or interesting writers in the present era. The range of discourse is much narrower, however. You won't find a lot of present-day perspectives that did not exist before 1923, but you will find an enormous quantity of pre-1923 perspectives which are completely alien to you - and in many cases quite distasteful. Also, the price is right!
As for Pinker, though, _The Blank Slate_ is pretty good...
Doing exactly that has led to the US being in exactly the position it's in. Clearly it's not working.
Anyway, what's missing from your self-righteous spiel is that not everyone has access to a mentor who can show them the way out of poverty - and the first part of the battle is even knowing it's possible. Overall, it's a far more complex issue than you paint it to be.
Do you think that there would be more prisoners in Africa if all of the rapists and murderers were somehow instantly apprehended tried and convicted? This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
Africa is a big place, much, much bigger than the US and with far more people and varied cultures. But it doesn't really matter, because you're bottom-feeding. The US should be compared to its contemporaries, rather than the worst possible example that can be found.
Yes, it's their personal responsibility. No, it's not about absolving it. It's about recognizing trends that condition people (including those who haven't even been born yet) and finding a pragmatical solution that benefits both you and them.
Your argument is that of a designer of a nuclear missile control panel who puts the "disarm" and the "launch" buttons both side by side with the same size and color and without labels and then excuses himself that it's the operator's responsibility to learn which is which. And the really stupid part, is that in this case the designer is in the missile's impact zone.
You're ignoring the will power it takes to overcome these situations. Yes, people do. They're called "exceptions". Why do you think it's always celebrated when someone breaks out of this cycle?
And no one is talking about giving dangerous people a free pass. Prohibition never works. How can something that grows in the ground naturally be illegal?
I loved your comment at the end that seems to hint that it's not that the US has too many people locked up but rather that everyone else isn't strict enough!
"And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States." This was admittedly addressed to a graduating class at Yale, but certainly circumstances matter. Doing poorly in school and experimenting with drugs generally ends much worse if you're in a terrible environment than in a safe, secure environment where lots of second chances are available.
Being a "worthless thug" is not a crime in itself. Running down a street while firing a gun and endangering bystanders is (or, at the very least, should be).
If what you took from "The Wire" is that many gang members are "worthless thugs," then you sort of missed the point of the show.
"The Wire" is as much a commentary about the social conditions leading to crime (broken education system, blighted cities, etc.) as it is a commentary about criminals and law enforcement.
David Simon, the show's creator, has gone on record as stating that the show is really about three things: 1) the pointlessness of the drug war; 2) the social conditions of the underclass in America; 3) society's misguided obsession with simple, reductionist statistics (i.e., judging police effectiveness by "clearance rates," judging teachers by student test scores, etc.) at the expense of more complex and nuanced systems analysis.
It's funny that you mention "The Wire". Did you miss the episodes where a captain made a section of Baltimore a drug-free-for-all zone and crime dropped to almost nothing?
I also like how you judge people you don't know to be "worthless".
I'm sorry to hear what happened to your family, that's really awful. Still, I wonder what your reaction would have been if that "worthless thug" had been wearing a police uniform.
Cops, you'll be surprised to know, generally know how to use their weapons. Still, shit happens. For every innocent American whacked by a cop, there are probably a hundred whacked by a "worthless thug." What kind of defender of the innocent worries more about the former than the latter?
Hampsterdam was a huge success. Until politics got involved and caused the whole thing to be shut down. In fact it worked so well that a Governor lost job because he wasn't willing to shut it down when he found out about it.
>For every innocent American whacked by a cop, there are probably a hundred whacked by a "worthless thug." What kind of defender of the innocent worries more about the former than the latter?
You do realize that cops have no obligation to protect you right? That was a supreme court ruling. Being between a cop trying to shoot someone is exactly as dangerous as being between a "worthless thug" trying to shoot someone.
Are you feigning ignorance here or did you actually think the original comment's repeated pejorative of 'worthless thugs' was talking about white people?
Not in San Francisco, but there are plenty of white "worthless thugs." See under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav. The American equivalent starts around 80 miles east of here and doesn't let up until Westchester County - I exaggerate, slightly. See under: "Winter's Bone."
Except people don't casually malign them as "thugs". "Rednecks", maybe. In the context of the original comment, there was definitely a racial component and liberal use of the word "worthless".
You can dispute whether that's racist, maybe, but being shocked at the suggestion? It quite clearly has a racial element.
You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.
>But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?
Okay. How? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.
So given that that are still criminals on the outside, the answer is that you need to become more efficient at apprehending the right people - not increase incarceration rates.
>I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?
Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.
>If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?
This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it's kind of confused.