<story><title>The Caging of America</title><url>http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goggles99</author><text>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 &quot;The gang member&apos;s real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources...&quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>phillmv</author><text>Yes.&lt;p&gt;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:&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;The gang member&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/sentencing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s...&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;p&gt;The world isn&apos;t quite as black and white. Eliminate the War on Drugs and overnight all of these problems will disappear as the underlying incentives vanish.</text></item><item><author>moldbug</author><text>Perhaps someone else can parse this better than me.&lt;p&gt;I can make sense of one of these lines: &quot;Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.&quot;  I think behind this line is lurking the belief that America&apos;s prisons are full of Humboldt County potheads, or something like that.&lt;p&gt;The typical American in jail for drug offenses isn&apos;t a system administrator who made the mistake of toking up one night.  It&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, all major American cities retain a very substantial population of worthless thugs.  If you&apos;re unaware of this reality, I strongly recommend this Chicago cop blog: &lt;a href=&quot;http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/&lt;/a&gt;.  Or you could watch &quot;The Wire&quot; - I hear it&apos;s available on DVD.&lt;p&gt;Last month, my wife and daughter were leaving a child&apos;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&apos;s birthday parties, and I&apos;d agree.  Still, it&apos;s my country - why shouldn&apos;t I feel safe in it, anywhere, day or night?</text></item><item><author>phillmv</author><text>This is why you are being downvoted:&lt;p&gt;You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?&lt;p&gt;Okay. &lt;i&gt;How&lt;/i&gt;? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;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?&lt;p&gt;Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;If what we need isn&apos;t more social justice, what is it?&lt;p&gt;This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it&apos;s kind of confused.</text></item><item><author>moldbug</author><text>But what if our system is actually erring in the &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; direction?&lt;p&gt;There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn&apos;t be.  There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren&apos;t.  (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.)&lt;p&gt;In either case, 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?&lt;p&gt;For instance, one commonly quoted &quot;root cause&quot; is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem?  Let&apos;s consider some evidence.&lt;p&gt;Robbery is a pretty good &quot;index crime.&quot;  For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...&lt;/a&gt;).  This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol&apos; Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG&apos;s statistics.  And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell.  (example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuy-s-81st-precinct/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-i...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis.&lt;p&gt;Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime.  Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards.&lt;p&gt;But why?  If what we need isn&apos;t more social justice, what is it?&lt;p&gt;(edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn&apos;t the right one for my robbery numbers - I&apos;ll have to look.  Still, money graf - &quot;The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1.&quot;  Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesotas-determinate-sentencing-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota&apos;s maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state&apos;s criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don&apos;t include prison time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phillmv</author><text>Personal responsibility is an illusion afforded to those who grew up in certain environments.&lt;p&gt;The social structure of gangs is such that, when you grow up in a tough neighbourhood and you have crappy parents it&apos;s safer to join a gang.&lt;p&gt;When everyone around you considers the drug trade to be normative behaviour, you don&apos;t really see the downside.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that we can&apos;t make &lt;i&gt;choices&lt;/i&gt; for ourselves. It&apos;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&apos;s income at birth - here&apos;s another TAL for a source on that last statement &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/going-big&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g...&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Caging of America</title><url>http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goggles99</author><text>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 &quot;The gang member&apos;s real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources...&quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>phillmv</author><text>Yes.&lt;p&gt;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:&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;The gang member&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/sentencing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s...&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;p&gt;The world isn&apos;t quite as black and white. Eliminate the War on Drugs and overnight all of these problems will disappear as the underlying incentives vanish.</text></item><item><author>moldbug</author><text>Perhaps someone else can parse this better than me.&lt;p&gt;I can make sense of one of these lines: &quot;Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.&quot;  I think behind this line is lurking the belief that America&apos;s prisons are full of Humboldt County potheads, or something like that.&lt;p&gt;The typical American in jail for drug offenses isn&apos;t a system administrator who made the mistake of toking up one night.  It&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, all major American cities retain a very substantial population of worthless thugs.  If you&apos;re unaware of this reality, I strongly recommend this Chicago cop blog: &lt;a href=&quot;http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/&lt;/a&gt;.  Or you could watch &quot;The Wire&quot; - I hear it&apos;s available on DVD.&lt;p&gt;Last month, my wife and daughter were leaving a child&apos;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&apos;s birthday parties, and I&apos;d agree.  Still, it&apos;s my country - why shouldn&apos;t I feel safe in it, anywhere, day or night?</text></item><item><author>phillmv</author><text>This is why you are being downvoted:&lt;p&gt;You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?&lt;p&gt;Okay. &lt;i&gt;How&lt;/i&gt;? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;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?&lt;p&gt;Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;If what we need isn&apos;t more social justice, what is it?&lt;p&gt;This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it&apos;s kind of confused.</text></item><item><author>moldbug</author><text>But what if our system is actually erring in the &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; direction?&lt;p&gt;There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn&apos;t be.  There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren&apos;t.  (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.)&lt;p&gt;In either case, 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?&lt;p&gt;For instance, one commonly quoted &quot;root cause&quot; is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem?  Let&apos;s consider some evidence.&lt;p&gt;Robbery is a pretty good &quot;index crime.&quot;  For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...&lt;/a&gt;).  This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol&apos; Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG&apos;s statistics.  And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell.  (example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuy-s-81st-precinct/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-i...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis.&lt;p&gt;Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime.  Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards.&lt;p&gt;But why?  If what we need isn&apos;t more social justice, what is it?&lt;p&gt;(edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn&apos;t the right one for my robbery numbers - I&apos;ll have to look.  Still, money graf - &quot;The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1.&quot;  Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesotas-determinate-sentencing-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota&apos;s maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state&apos;s criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don&apos;t include prison time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icebraining</author><text>Yes, it&apos;s their personal responsibility. No, it&apos;s not about absolving it. It&apos;s about recognizing trends that condition people (including those who haven&apos;t even been born yet) and finding a pragmatical solution that benefits both you and them.&lt;p&gt;Your argument is that of a designer of a nuclear missile control panel who puts the &quot;disarm&quot; and the &quot;launch&quot; buttons both side by side with the same size and color and without labels and then excuses himself that it&apos;s the operator&apos;s responsibility to learn which is which. And the really stupid part, is that in this case the designer is in the missile&apos;s impact zone.</text></comment>