[zo1]

I find it disturbing how those two tiny stats "sum" it all up for you, yet you make no mention of the third and elusive stat that makes the biggest difference of all:

"The percentage of criminals in the United States"

Like I said, drawing and inference from the two stats you posted is disturbing because both of those stats say nothing of the actual amount of valid criminals/lawbreakers.

[intopieces]

The point here is that the justice system is not just, that there are too many criminals not because we're a nation of people who like to do bad things, but because the system profits from making criminals out of people. If you believe that the system for imprisoning people is just, then I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this question:

Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?

Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.

[vog]

> "The percentage of criminals in the United States"

Not sure how this is really an additional fact. If you defined criminals in the sense of "criminals as defined in the US", you have almost by definition a direct correlation to the number of prisoners.

BTW, here in Germany we also have politicians who think that Europe's criminals concentrate in Germany. Probably every country has some people believing that all criminals come to them. The difference between countries is how much influence those voices have.

[zo1]

The point I'm making is that it's implicit that they are "not" criminals by virtue of there being such a huge discrepancy. This needs to be addressed in a clear, and concise manner instead of making sweeping generalizations about the discrepancy.

[tim333]

Who is 'criminal' is fairly arbitrary in many cases. Say you sell some hash to a friend. Legal in some states, can lead to 30 years in some others, generally not a huge crime in the sense of harming others.

[a8da6b0c91d]

Find me one specific example of a person in state or federal prison for small time marijuana dealing or possession. No other crimes involved. Doesn't happen.

Often, the DA will structure a plea bargain on drug or weapons posession (over a long list of more serious charges) because those are very easy to prove.

This idea that the prisons are full of good guys caught up in the system is detached from reality. Most guys doing hard time are guilty of about twenty other things that they haven't been prosecuted for.

[brianlweiner]

Three strike laws in certain states can result in long prison sentences despite relatively minor crimes being committed - including simple possession - http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm#cr... justice system

Furthermore black offenders receive sentences that are longer than white offenders - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873244320045783044...

And white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar - https://www.aclu.org/news/new-aclu-report-finds-overwhelming...

A prisoner deserves to be sentenced for the crime they were convicted of, not for any possible crimes that we think they may have committed. To behave otherwise is completely antithetical to a society that supposedly values justice

So no, prisons aren't "full of good guys", but they're full of people serving sentences that are longer than any rational policy would dictate who have been prosecuted in a system that has been shown time and again to have deep issues with bias and inequality.

Not to mention the violence and overcrowding endemic in the prison system. It should be a source of national shame that it has continued this long without real reform.

[a8da6b0c91d]

> white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar

This is an oft repeated lie. Blacks use narcotics at well over double the white rate. Claims that rates are similar are based on surveys, as opposed to test data.

Anyway, you are missing the point here that prosecutors know exactly who they're convicting. Sentences now are almost all plea bargains. They get serious criminals to plea out on narcotics charges rather than go to court and face the full set of charges and a 25 year sentence. They don't even bother prosecuting some kid with some drugs. This is how the system works. It may be problematic, but it's not as broken as naive people assume.

[DanBC]

You should probably edit your original post, because this point is not at all clear from that post.

[zo1]

Unfortunately, it's not letting me.

[theorique]

In Europe, as well, there's a significant and rising problem of crime associated with migrants from the Middle East and Africa, right?

[Xylakant]

If controlled for factors such as social status, income, education statistics indicate that migrants are neither more nor less criminal than germans - a fact that I personally do not find surprising. Certainly there's now more crimes in absolute numbers since there are more migrants, but well - that's not surprising either. We also do have sufficient "european" crime to around, the mafia, east european gangs breaking into flats etc, and on top we have sufficient amounts of good old german crime - we're good at tax evasion, cheating on libor rates etc. All in all I'm not afraid that migrants will push german criminals out of their jobs.

[ghostberry]

Out of interest, why do you think there are so many valid criminals and lawbreakers in the US?

[yummyfajitas]

Among other things, our murder rate is higher than that of most other western nations. Assuming murder rate is a good proxy for other "valid" crimes (it's hard to hide a body), we would expect to have 5x the incarceration rate of the UK or France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[jacquesm]

The murder rate is that high because of easy access to weapons that make murdering people relatively easy. Shooting someone is a lot easier than knifing someone, point-and-click.

[yummyfajitas]

That's far from clear - even the rate of non-shooting murders is vastly higher than most of the western world (only ~1/2 our murders are done with firearms).

Along the same lines of reasoning as yours, approximately 1/2 our murders are committed by black Americans, and the proportion of people who are black are well correlated with murders. So one could equally well say that the murder rate is high because of the presence of black people. Would you endorse this conclusion? If not, why not?

(Let me emphasize I'm not endorsing the conclusion I derive here - I simply plan to repeat whatever argument jaquesm has against the above conclusion back at him w.r.t. guns.)

[mellavora]

Ummm, no.

IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally.

Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.

[thucydides]

There is a correlation between gun access and homicide rates. "Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and...

[at-fates-hands]

>> There is a correlation between gun access and homicide rates.

There is a correlation, albeit a negative one:

http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.”

The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.

[tomgallard]

Where do you get that information? This Harvard review - http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and... suggests a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide, both nationally and internationally

[Lawtonfogle]

Per the official numbers, Sweden has the highest rate of rape in the world.

Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.

[mellavora]

He got that information from the source article.

[Lawtonfogle]

This is especially true when you look at murders and count out suicides. The effect that gun ownership has on murder rates is a separate topic from the effect it has on suicide rates, but many stats conflict the numbers, enough so that I've begun to doubt it being accidental in all cases.

[maze-le]

Switzerland for example has liberal gun-ownership laws too, but the murder-rate is by far lower than in the US. This is soley one of many factors...

[twowordbird]

Switzerland often gets bandied about in these discussions, because people see gun ownership rates and ignore the subtleties. All adult males are required to own and keep a rifle at home (with some minor exceptions). There is no "gun culture" here, people in general are very unenthusiastic and see it as a burden.

In the last 20 years they have stopped giving ammunition to keep with your military rifle, exactly because they started having problems with shootings. Switzerland is the worst possible "example" of gun ownership reducing violent crime.

[Rovanion]

Every prisoner in the US is a convicted criminal under US law. The amount of criminals outside of US prisons could then be speculated to be much higher than in other countries because the US criminalizes more things than other countries. Determining the number of criminals outside of prison then becomes a hard task since you can't use the state supplied numbers if you want to do a fair comparison between countries. It could also be that an equal amount of things are criminalized in other countries, but not punishable by prison sentence.

Note however that this is wild speculation, just things you have to take into account.

[shakethemonkey]

Not every prisoner. There are also prisoners awaiting trial, and prisoners held for contempt of court.

In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].

[1] http://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons