[lr4444lr]

There seems to be this assumption that Americans are thrown into prison willy nilly for every small offense. Yes, it does happen in some egregious cases. A few decades ago, our zero tolerance drug laws were a real contributor here. Today however, for the most part, you have to commit either a major violent crime, or have a serial record of continual offenses to wind up in prison in most jurisdictions.

[jessaustin]

Why would you believe this? The awful drug laws didn't just go away. The guy who wrote many of them is President now. Vastly more people are in the system for drug offenses today than there were "a few decades ago".

Every arrest for drug sales, possession, or use is an injustice. 95% of cases end in plea bargain rather than a real verdict. We imprison more people, in both percentage and absolute terms, than any nation on earth, in history. The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

[n8cpdx]

I keep seeing violent criminals let out to repeatedly victimize my fellow community members. No jail. No prison.

I see people showing up dead who have booking photos (aka in hindsight, should have been imprisoned for their own safety). About once a month so far, but I don’t Google each case; the murders aren’t really news anymore in 2021.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/katu.com/amp/news/local/a-growi...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.koin.com/local/multnomah-co...

I know it’s tough to believe coming from a position of privilege (believe me, I used to hold similar beliefs) but there is actual serious social dysfunction in the world. There is violent crime associated with hard drug use. Meth is actually a big deal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

We’re seeing a massive spike in homicides so I think for some that is what is shattering the illusion of the post-90s quiet period we’re coming out of.

FWIW, I have personally been attacked by a person who was most likely experiencing meth-induced psychosis. I didn’t want to acknowledge how dangerous people can be.

Edit: and it’s not just the actual attacks being a sole problem. I can’t walk very far without having to dodge someone who is in full-blown psychosis, either screaming obscenities (if you said ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ sound like not nice things to say to passers by, I would agree) or violently brandishing construction materials or knives. Sometimes it is just destruction of public property, but that is less common, since they might actually be bothered if they cause too much damage in one place.

Sometimes the cops stop by, but they can’t do anything because being high on meth and making the public uncomfortable is not actually illegal and the jails won’t book anyone for anything less than murder or rape.

[confidantlake]

I have lived many places in the US and every one of them you will spend in the night in jail if you are caught DUI.

[dionidium]

> The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

Claims like this don't match observed reality. Practically every story about a violent crime that ends up in an arrest involves a look at the long rap sheet of the offender. Surely, a country that's trying to maximize its prison population would have people like that in prison already. Why are so many people with violent histories released, given that we live in a "mass incarceration" state that wants nothing more than to lock people like that up?

It looks to me like states try pretty hard to keep people out of prison; you have to commit a very serious crime and/or have a long history of arrests before you'll end up spending a significant amount of time in one.

I can easily imagine a state that wanted to "maximize incarceration" and it looks nothing like our status quo.

[jessaustin]

Reading the piece you linked in a sibling thread, I found this:

One of the big tragedies of mass incarceration in the United States is that while high levels of imprisonment are clearly a political and mechanical response to high levels of crime, they are not a very effective response. The basic reason is that soaring prison headcounts are mostly driven by long prison sentences, but the deterrent effect of prison is much more driven by the odds of getting caught. In other words, an 80% chance of needing to serve a two-year sentence and a 20% chance of needing to serve an eight-year sentence have the same expected value. But the former is much more deterring. And since it deters more effectively, it will lead to fewer crimes being committed and less incarceration. And that’s what we actually need — less crime, not harsher punishment for the minority of criminals who get caught.

Perhaps some "law & order" types believe that every crime should be punished by life in prison, but that isn't what other human societies do and they mostly have less crime than we have. Many of them focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment, leading to vastly lower recidivism. High recidivism is one of the techniques we use to maximize incarceration, and as Yglesias describes at your link astonishingly long sentences are another. The phenomena reinforce each other: a 17yo who spends 12 years in prison for robbery will generally not get a high-paying job at age 29.

Those who watch a great deal of CNN "headline news" and 11 PM local news might reject these observations, but those people are living in a nightmare false reality driven by the well-known "if it bleeds it leads" rule. Stop watching those evil TV shows! USA imprisons 65 out of 10,000 people. No other nation comes close. No other nation has come close in history. (That includes USA in previous eras.) We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

Don't "imagine" alternatives. Instead, examine what others do. Also, read that link you posted.

[dionidium]

> We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

This is actually an extraordinary claim that requires evidence. It can’t be stated as flatly true. But I have no problem acknowledging that our system is particularly cruel. Prisons should be safe, clean, humane, comfortable...but not empty. The reality is that there’s a lot of violence in this country and its causes are complex and inscrutable. “We have a lot of crime because we lock so many people up” is unconvincing.

[confidantlake]

"The World Prison Brief's data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018, or 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador (564 inmates per 100,000 people)"

[dionidium]

One note on this: the primary way that the U.S. system differs from the rest of the world is in the average length of sentence. At any given moment we have more people in prison because the people we put in prison stay there longer, not simply because we put more people in prison.

A startling fact: if you released every person in prison on a drug charge the U.S. it would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is both because the reality is that the U.S. has a lot of violence and because we tend to issue very long sentences for violent criminals. This is a good thread that covers some of this: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/1376971131039666177

The article I pulled that link from is also very good, but it might be only for subscribers (I'm not sure). This is that article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mass-incarceration

It covers a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to this thread -- what kind of people are in prison, what kinds of crimes did they commit, what works to deter crime, why do we have such a high incarceration rate, what effect does policing have on crime, are longer sentences a deterrent, and so on -- and I'm tempted to quote it at length, but I think the best thing I can do is just link it and leave it at that.