[bismuthcrystal]

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.

[martopix]

> 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?

[thanatos519]

> 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.

Reminded me of this quote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[boring_twenties]

OT but does anyone have this quote in what I presume is the original Russian?

edit: Found it: Если б это было так просто! — что где-то есть чёрные люди, злокозненно творящие чёрные дела, и надо только отличить их от остальных и уничтожить. Но линия, разделяющая добро и зло, пересекает сердце каждого человека. И кто уничтожит кусок своего сердца?

From https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D0%B8%D0%BF...

[nverno]

> Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence.

This is certainly not generally true. There are many countries with much greater poverty, inequality, and ignorance (at least measured by education) than the US that have much less violent crime. I'd imagine having more drug users per capita has a significant effect on violent crime everywhere however.

[balls187]

Can you provide a source for assertion?

The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.

Any country with those two factors will have a problem with violence; the fact that the US is the most civilized country among that list (and likely sits atop that list) is what is so damning.

[dsfyu404ed]

The largest single chunk of the violence is just the settling of drug industry business disputes. If the people doing the shooting had badges and got their pay stubs on state letterhead most people here wouldn't blink twice.

Whereas you may lean on an expensive and complicated court system to send an employee of the state to apply violence (or threats thereof) to someone who had wronged you until they right their wrong people in the drug industry has no such luxury since their disputes will not he heard by a court. Likewise they must DIY it. That means home invasions, shootings, etc, etc.

Back before people in these lines of work shot at each other (have you ever tried doing a drive by on horseback with a 6 shooter, doesn't work very well) over these sorts of disputes people would round up friends and beat each other up or people would torch houses.

Bringing our massive illegal economy out of the shadows would clean up a huge fraction of the violence by replacing a lot of it with threat of state violence. See prohibition for an example of the reverse case.

[nverno]

> Can you provide a source for assertion?

I was thinking of Indonesia, only because I lived there for a while, but those are factors in nearly every country.

> The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.

I don't think either of these are what cause the violence (maybe they throw fuel on the fire as you're saying though). People can be just as violent without weapons, and just as greedy when they are on the top. They just become more dangerous with money, guns, and lawyers.

[armitron]

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).

[ch_sm]

It’s interesting that you bring up theses specific questions. Ask yourself: why is the U.S. riddled with violent gangs? Why is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states? Why do large chunks live in inner city crime-infested ghettos (and why are there ghettos in the inner cities in the first place)? Many would argue that all these are home-made problems. Imprisoning the victims of this system can’t conceivably be the solution, and might in fact only make it worse (mass imprisonment has many bad societal effects).

[ClumsyPilot]

Your government policy has turned your cities into crime infested ghettos. Even diverse and poor countries like India are managing to avoid this problem.

US doesn't have some magical and unique set of challenges, apart from political disfunction, that can't be found anywhere else in the world.

> We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF

I must have missed something - SF solved the housing crisis, everyone could get a an education and a decent job but crime remained?

[qlm]

> 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]

Would you mind sharing sources on what was done and what the (un?)intended consequences were in SF, Chicago, Seattle and LA?

[cestith]

Chicago, San Francisco, and LA are far from the most dangerous cities in the United States. Why are they your talking points?

[isolli]

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]

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]

> 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]

"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.

[int0x2e]

You might be interested in listening/reading a recent Planet Money episode (https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124477182/federal-judges-eco...), which explains how for ~20 years or so, many US federal court justices went to an exclusive, all expense paid economics bootcamp, taught by some of the most well known economics thinkers of the time. That sure sounds great in theory - why wouldn't you want to have judges to have a deeper understanding of economics when they can have impact on financial matters?

Well, as it turns out, some of the key ideas taught focused on the rational economic theory, and extrapolated from there to crime and punishment - e.g.: a criminal makes a cold economic calculation before commit each crime, taking into account the expected gain from this crime, the likelihood of getting caught, the expected punishment if caught, etc. - and therefor, if we make the "cost" higher, by opting for harsher prison sentences - crime will become less attractive and therefore happen less.

When the data is analyzed, justices that went through this program appear to hand out harsher sentences to offenders, and often rule in favor of corporations and against government agencies when compared to the control group. The effect is most evident for judges that used to learn more to the liberal side, which is surprising to me, but it definitely is interesting.

[_trampeltier]

Also, I think after jail, you are not allowed to vote in most us states. Also to get a job after jail seems almost impossible in the us.

[sokoloff]

Voting is conditioned on not being a convicted felon in some states.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...

[ravel-bar-foo]

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]

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...

[lazyasciiart]

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.

[pessimizer]

> 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]

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/ and 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.

[rippercushions]

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]

> 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]

> 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.

[theautist]

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.

[lm28469]

> 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"

[bena]

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