[danaris]

Catching and prosecuting criminals does approximately nothing to actually reduce crime.

If you want to reduce crime, ask the government to do one of its other jobs: Provide a stable foundation for every member of the country, so that they don't have to fear being left destitute if they can't get someone richer to agree to support them (in exchange for labor).

This will make an immediate difference to many (those who are committing crimes purely because they can't otherwise survive), and will, within a few generations, eliminate many other categories of criminals—those whom the current system has failed, and whose criminality has to do with finding a different kind of dignity, or sticking it to the man, or just joining the criminal economy as an alternative to the one that dropped them through its gaping cracks.

[refurb]

This is a bit of an idealist view of criminality. Plenty of criminals are criminals because "real work is for suckers". Look at the theft rings in San Francisco (catalytic converters, shoplifting), it's not some poor destitute victim, but rather a part of a criminal organization that rakes in millions of dollars.

They could certainly get a regular job like most of America, but they'd rather make easy money.

More social services ain't gonna fix that.

[danaris]

I'm not talking about "more social services"; I'm talking about UBI, which would absolutely remove most of the incentive to participate in such things.

I realize I forgot to actually put that in the GP, though. Sorry about the lack of clarity.

[onlycoffee]

What happens if 100% of people decide they don't want to be the chump paying for UBI and we all go on UBI? With no one left making money, there's no way for the country to make pay UBI payments.

Using UBI as an argument to eliminate theft crime is like paying terrorists, it doesn't work in the long run; you only end up funding a future, more effective terrorist or criminal who will demand more and more.

[bnjms]

I assume it would be much like it currently is where we have a lower class subsisting on a low barely livable wage because that’s how they prefer to exist while the rest of us work and the payment for our extra work to them is that we don’t have to deal with them in day to day society. This sounds a lot like SSI for some of the people on it. Unfortunately I don’t think people actually work like that and instead you get shiftless youth.

[buck4roo]

> we have a lower class subsisting on a low barely livable wage >> because that's how they prefer to exist << while the rest of us work...

Citation required.

Show evidence a population exists, anything close to as large as you're intimating ("lower class" as you called it), that actually wants a "low barely livable wage"?

[whatshisface]

>Catching and prosecuting criminals does approximately nothing to actually reduce crime.

I know it's wrong to be biased towards mainstream thinking, but it is fair to ask for sources for statements like that.

[QuarterReptile]

>I know it's wrong to be biased towards mainstream thinking,

Why would this be wrong?

[micromacrofoot]

the US has the highest rate of incarceration and still has a high rate of violent crime compared to other wealthy countries

[rsj_hn]

You are assuming that all that matters is wealth, which isn't the case. Bangladesh has lower homicide and robbery rates than the U.S. Even Vietnam has much lower homicide and robbery rates.

The US incarcerates a lot because we have a lot more crime compared to other wealthy countries. The US has the same homicide rate as Argentina, about 5 per 100,000. That's a decent proxy for the overall size of our criminal class. In many cases, Argentina is a good proxy for the U.S. -- a formerly wealthy nation that has declined, suffers from corruption, and has quite comparable demographics and income distribution to the U.S. (although a lower level of absolute income).

The US incarcerates 3.5x more people than Argentina, which drives the robbery rate to be about 1/10 that of Argentina. We can see what happens when some localities like SF or CA decide not to prosecute non-violent crime -- you get an explosion of robberies. So poorer nations like Argentina that also have a large criminal class end up just forced to tolerate higher levels of robbery.

Whereas nations that don't have such a large criminal class - be they wealthy like Japan, middle income like Vietnam or poor like Bangladesh -- simply don't need to make a decision to warehouse so many people or face an explosion of crime.

Unfortunately the US does need to deal with this and make some tough choices. Either we go the Argentina route and only incarcerate the most violent offenders -- basically taking the SF approach nationwide -- or we pay for a carceral state to warehouse our criminals. When you go the Argentina route, you get a lot of walled compounds, armed guards, as the wealthy have to spend money on personal security while the middle class and poor are just robbed a lot more.

But pretending that we arrest people for no reason at all, and that this does not result in lower crime rates -- I think this is an inaccurate description of the trade offs. There are real trade offs here.

[thefaux]

Besides homicides, I take all crime rates with a heaping grain of salt, although it's probably fair to consider them to generally be a significant undercount.

It does not seem entirely intuitive to me that mass incarceration would drive down crime rates in the long run. Prisons are themselves maladaptive institutions that are harmful to most inmates and indeed are certainly hardening people who could otherwise have been steered in a more productive direction. There is also the fact that taking people out of their families and communities has terrible downstream effects that get passed on to the next generation, causing the cycle to continue.

Also, you say we don't arrest people for no reason, but there are a lot of people in prison who did not commit the crimes they were convicted of. Probably not a majority but I'll bet it's a non negligible minority. How would you feel about a society that locked you up in brutal conditions for something you didn't even do? What about people locked up for drug possession with the same people locked up for violent crimes? Does that make any sense?

Personally I think we are at an inflection point. What we have been doing in the US is not working. The illusion that we can maintain increasing levels of inequality by just locking up more and more people is fading fast. This problem can't be solved long term with more incarceration. I am not convinced that the people you've characterized as the "criminal class" are inherently so. It's also dehumanizing to describe them in this way. Many, if not most, are reacting to difficult situations bordering on the impossible. That's not to be pollyanna and pretend that there aren't some very dangerous people locked up. This is a very difficult problem.

We obviously aren't going to just empty our prisons tomorrow. But we should all be thinking about what kind of society we want to live in and how we might make progress towards that vision. In many ways, even wealthy America is already beginning to feel like a luxury penal colony. The existence of the brutal penal colonies distracts us from that fact.

I want safer cities and communities than what we presently have, but I don't believe that our current incarceration system is effectively getting us there, even if it looks somewhat effective compared to Argentina. Even then though, I ask at what cost? Do "criminals" not matter at all? I think they do, even if they have committed crimes.

If you actually believe that there is a large class of people who are inherently worse than others, you should really think through what the implications might be.

[ch4s3]

The clearance rates on violent crimes in most major cities in the US is abysmally low, as low as 1 in 10 in some places. So yeah a 10% chance of getting caught is a poor deterrent.

[jrockway]

I think the chance of getting caught factors into people's mental assessments of whether or not to commit crimes. If every criminal had a 100% chance of being caught and convicted, that would probably lower the crime rate. But if people think it's 99%, then they'll believe that they're the 1%, and it probably wouldn't change much. The US certainly doesn't provide the illusion of 100% of crimes solved, so that feeds into people's mental calculus. (Plus, I'm sure people think they could beat the charges even if they were caught. As long as there are juries and not Fact-o-Bot Model 9000 All-Knowing Oracles deciding the facts of the case, some of them are right!)

I think you could potentially observe a microcosm of this effect when comparing speed cameras to police officers with radar guns. People hate the speed camera tickets and fight vehemently to have the cameras removed. I've seen a lot of pictures of smashed speed cameras as well. Much less hate is directed at actual police cars pulling people over; maybe I'm reading the wrong forums, but I've literally never heard anyone say "we shouldn't have speeding tickets anymore". The chance of talking a human out of the consequences of your actions makes people feel comfy; a robot that issues you a fine whenever you speed is really scary, though, because you know you speed from time to time with a good reason.

(Sure, there can be other effects. You don't want a database of your location to exist. You had a good reason for speeding; there was a tornado chasing you and your partner went into labor and you were driving to the nearest hospital. And, the police officers will shoot you if you smash their car as a speeding enforcement protest. So maybe these confounding factors make my comparison irrelevant. I think it's interesting to think about, nonetheless.)

[_-david-_]

Doesn't prove anything? Perhaps the US has a disproportionate number of criminals.

[micromacrofoot]

why would the us have more criminals than every other country on the planet

[ch4s3]

We’ll we certainly have more homicide than any OECD nation. It’s probably relevant that the US is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and religiously pluralistic democracy born in violent revolution. That’s really unusual for a highly economically developed nation. In fact the US is super different from other OECD nations on almost all fronts.

[mhoad]

Certainly nothing to do with the ridiculous gun laws. No sir. It’s multiculturalism.

[_-david-_]

It doesn't matter why. Unless you can show that the US has the same or less criminals you can't show that high incarceration does not lower crime.

[micromacrofoot]

but "criminal" depends almost entirely on how a country defines and polices crime, does it not? so all you can do is look at numbers like incarceration rate, no?

[from]

> If you want to reduce crime, ask the government to do one of its other jobs: Provide a stable foundation for every member of the country, so that they don't have to fear being left destitute if they can't get someone richer to agree to support them (in exchange for labor).

This is may be true in the case of things like street level drug sales but most of these scams are perpetuated by people in other countries using bank accounts ("drops") set up with stolen American identities. America can't really influence social policy in Nigeria or India or Russia on the scale you are talking about. The scammers only need one success every couple months to make the average salary in their country and the smarter ones are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[pencilguin]

Probably making white-collar, and elected, police and prosecutor corrruption illegal, and prosecuting that, would engender greater respect for the law.

[_-david-_]

This makes no sense. Some people commit multiple crimes. If everybody who committed crimes were in jail then only new criminals would commit crimes.

Don't get me wrong, doing certain other things may also help reduce crime, but it is not the only way to reduce crime.

[ashwagary]

If everybody that committed crimes was in jail, there would also be less "street justice" which would further reduce crime.

[gruez]

>Provide a stable foundation for every member of the country, so that they don't have to fear being left destitute if they can't get someone richer to agree to support them (in exchange for labor).

Your argument is that people on craiglist won't be scamming if they had a job? I'm sure that's true in the sense that there exists some people that fit the category, but how much % of criminals does that account for? I searched up some figures[1] and your theory doesn't appear to hold water. US has around the same property crime rate as columbia and vietnam, but I doubt anyone thinks that those two countries do a better job at providing "a stable foundation for every member of the country".

[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Percei...