I should point out to those not from the US that this is how Americans view the US. There is a lot of crime, the government and NGOs are on the side of the criminals etc. It is up voted to the top as well, with agreement in the replies, this is how Americans view the US.
The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people, but the view obviously is the incarceration rate needs to increase even more, as crimes are barely being prosecuted according to him. The US is off the charts in incarceration rates, but he thinks they are far too low and want them increased more, as he sees increasing incarceration even more as the solution to the problem which western Europe does not seem to have to this extent.
So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.
1.) Though this is becoming an increasingly popular viewpoint in many of the American cities that are experiencing these problems right now, it’s far from universally held.
2.) The U.S. is not a monolith, so looking at the prison population of the United States as a whole doesn’t tell you about what’s going on in an individual state or city.
3.) The number of people incarcerated has a long tail. In the U.S. in particular, many people received long sentences during the years following the ‘94 crime bill. Little if any effort is being made to commute these despite policies centered on new incarceration changing.
4.) In the places where reduced incarceration is being tried in the U.S. it’s important to recognize that it’s being tried effectively in a vacuum. In many other places which are able to sustain low incarceration rates, there are a lot of social programs that help make that possible, and also programs to help people rehabilitate after a conviction. The U.S. has little if any of that. Where reduced incarceration is being tried, it’s usually not replaced with something that’s more effective.
I consider myself a liberal, but while I think pretty much all drug possession charges should be dropped and decriminalized, violent crime? Robbery? Those folks should absolutely be in jail. I don't care if we have to build tent cities to incarcerate them. You hurt someone intentionally, you should not be breathing free air for a while.
The problem area seems to be property crime without direct violence.
It can ruin the victims life just as much as non-lethal violence (taking away a person's source of income, or transport required to keep a job, or wrecking a business they've spent many years building), but many take the 'it's only property, it's probably insured!' attitude.
And many at least see stealing from 'big nasty corporations' as relatively OK. But if people keep stealing from businesses until they close down or relocate and there's no easy shoplifting targets, will the thieves stop, or will they move on to stealing from homes?
Insurance increases the expected cost of loss! -- the insurer would go broke if they were charging less than that.
So yeah, sure, it can save you from the boundary effect of it instantly wreaking your life but only by putting you at a constant disadvantage to people who live in less crime prone areas or whom are wealthy enough to self insure against such loss.
People who say this don't have real jobs; not the type of jobs where they'll end up on pain killers when they retire. They have laptop jobs on the softer side of intellectual rigor.
Money is time traded from your life, health traded from your body to your employer. Stealing property is literally stealing the purpose of hours of grueling work.
I almost had to sit for a jury trial. Guy stole things worth less than $950, was likely homeless, the prosecution took 22 months to build a case and failed to leverage a plea bargain, named about 30 law enforcement officers and/or forensics specialists as potential witnesses, and jury selection started with 100 citizens and took 4+ days, then the judge claimed it would take 6 weeks to try the case.
The problem isn’t just insurance. It’s that prosecution is insanely slow and is far more harmful to society than the actual crime.
It also results in a disincentives for all parties involved to invest all the time and effort. You could either convince everyone that "don't be insensitive it's a lot of money for them", or you could try to make the process easier.
If people work for my living and see someone just steal for theirs with absolutely no consequence, what they learn is that social dysfunction is optimal, and that doing otherwise is being a chump.
Please re-read your parent. Same concept here. If you make it that comfortable, then why work? Keep in mind that there will always be people who want things the programs won't provide that they're literally willing to kill for - drugs, the newest iPhone, in-style basketball shoes, etc.
Now, I do agree in a parallel way, but with a different solution. If we fix structural problems preventing people from being, or having hope of being, productive members of society, than that can prevent some crime.
It should also be noted that locking people up puts them in contact with a bunch of convicted criminals. Making weed illegal put a bunch of otherwise harmless people in a situation where they wanted to do illegal business.
The liberal position—don’t make relatively harmless stuff illegal—is one way to reduce the amount of crime.
Sure, lock up people who do violent crimes (I mean, get them out of society while we try to figure out if we can get them psychological help), but instead of doing something dystopian like tent prison cities, just let out the people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
(All that is to say, I agree with you, just think we should focus on the part that will benefit society).
Having spent a considerable portion of my adult life imprisoned, I don't think the contact with other criminals increases a person's penchant for criminality. I think the incarceration itself does though by essentially fucking your entire life up and resetting you to a hard zero. And while you are inside you are not making any improvement to your life, e.g. skill building, improving your emotional intelligence; and in fact you are usually letting any skills you might have had stagnate and deteriorate beyond use.
I think some of this political conflict is over what constitutes a harmless or victimless or nonviolent crime.
In the past year I've seen different people claim that hemp consumption, property crime, and even intimidation with a firearm were nonviolent and that their perpetrators were merely marginalized individuals who need social assistance rather than prosecution.
I think GP's point is that even property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone, it makes society worse, and it likely hurts the people at the bottom of society disproportionately.
But I may add, then, that the reformers have the burden of showing evidence for their position: they need to demonstrate that it is possible to have a low-crime, low-prosecution, high social net city somewhere in the US. I'm beginning to suspect that they are missing some critical component which is required to make such a system work for everyone.
That's my point, that some people will draw the line at things that are objectively nonviolent, and others will draw it at things that are objectively very close to violent. Actually come to think of it, violence is really just a proxy for harm to others.
Well, good thing is that rehabilitation is the central goal of correctional systems; so you can send thiefs/etc to prison without feeling guilty. This is not a problem that requires a novel solution; almost every other rich country has this sorted out. The central issue US has to fix is reorient prisons around this goal, instead of trying to exploit the slave labor loophole in your constitution.
The fundamental problem is that the misguided attempt to criminalize drugs destroyed respect for the law for generations. Once you're at risk of being locked in a cage for decades for engaging in behavior that would otherwise just be called running a small business, then robbery isn't a huge leap. Especially after your industry ends up creating its own parallel justice system because the usual courts have been made unavailable.
So yes, while drugs should be deillegalized and those crimes expunged, this is only but a first step on a long road to repairing the severe damage that was done to actual law and order by the very people fallaciously rallying behind "law and order" in the 80's and 90's.
I don’t have a problem with some drugs being state regulated and I know it would reduce violence but the harder drugs should never be state sold we already have huge issues with alcohol which is a very hard drug. Acting as if lone actors serving narcotics or prostitutes are regular small business owner is an insult to legitimate entrepreneurs
There are other ways to handle abuse and addiction besides trying to prohibit a widely-desired substance. You rightfully point out that some people have huge problems with alcohol. The solution isn't just to blanket make it illegal (with the ensuing chaos that would/did cause), but rather directly address the acute harm caused by the people with the problems.
Ultimately the reason we consider some things natural rights isn't to create some prescriptive model that we imagine as the shape an enlightened society will take. Rather it's due to the inevitable ugliness when government attempts to legislate into individual autonomy, and people react en masse. And the results of the "drug war" have most certainly been quite ugly!
Aside from the legality, what’s different between a liquor store owner and a weed dealer? You may disagree with their breaking the law, but commerce is commerce, and this is victimless except with regard to the rule of law.
I thought GP was being ridiculous and hyperbolic when I first read their comment, but on second thought it's more technically correct than not. Regulating what substances people can use to affect their own bodies is totalitarian, as it presupposes a state/societal ownership interest of individuals' bodies. Mass surveillance plus parallel construction most certainly constitutes secret supervision. And any attempt to reform the system is met with a strong lobby from police and prison guards, who have long ago succumbed to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It's not the stereotypical power-trickles-down-from-a-small-cabal-to-control-society, but rather an analog in the framework of inverted totalitarianism.
Of course there are different degrees, and throwing out these characterizations in a thread about even more totalitarian societies would be inappropriate whataboutism. But as domestic societal critique they do have some truth.
The thing is that some people don't have the same experience with police leading them to believe that there is no issue with our current system, that's why you see such denial of the damage caused
The police unions have a crazy amount of influence over politics where the basically just cry if they don't get their way and threaten to not go after criminals, it's happened in multiple states iirc
Basically every step of the way, whenever some sort of reform comes up they fight it tooth and nail while simultaneously grabbing every bit of extra power that they can.
These powers include things like surveillance and literal highway robbery in the form of civil forfeiture. In the way of surveillance, they can now purchase peoples data and there are companies selling services to police which analyze and track citizens movements without a warrant. Combine this with a story I saw on HN earlier today about a company purchasing live footage feeds from citizen surveillance cameras for cops to, again without a warrant, use at will.
But wait, there's more!
There are also electronic communications surveillance programs such as prism (NSA) and hemisphere (DEA) combined with the magic of parallel construction to obfuscate the fact that any surveillance was even used to spy on citizens illegally.
Cops basically get to do whatever they want without any sort of punishment when they do harm to citizens, which they do regularly including murdering innocent ones. Perhaps you've heard of the LASD gangs that terrorize the communities they're supposed to be protecting? It's well documented and has been going on for years, it still is.
Prosecutors and judges generally side with the cops because they need them to do their jobs, they have undue influence not only over prosecution but also legislation in the form of strikes and union lobbying.
Police unions are probably the only union I think should be dismantled, all other unions for workers are great but police unions are actively harmful to society.
I agree police unions are awful and cause more harm than good. Everything you say is true (to some degree) but I don't think this qualifies the country to be a police state. I'm not afraid of the police coming to my door because the police have a problem with me. I don't like them but I don't fear them and neither does anyone I know. There is still a due process and even though even one incident is too many, most times the police acts out of line they are punished even if it takes a while (again, due process). The punishment is usually far, far too lenient but at the very least, for the sake of this conversation, shows that they do not have the ultimate power.
There is a lot that can be done about the quality of policing in this country but we are really far off a police state. We are simply a state with an incompetent perpetually afraid power hungry police, likely due to the prevalence of guns. It's tragic as is.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Maybe you aren't the target now but who's to say you won't be in the future? Consider your perspective versus those who live in predominantly Black communities
You hurt someone intentionally, you should not be breathing free air for a while.
Genuine question; is that only physically? If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally? I tend towards not giving people a free pass simply because their weapon of choice is words, but (amongst other things) the US has a reputation for being very permissive with the spoken word.
> If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally?
No, you shouldn't be incarcerated for that. You would be an asshole if you intentionally caused people anguish with your words, but being an asshole is not a crime (and shouldn't be).
Prison is where criminals go. Jail is where people not convicted of a crime go.
Drug Offenses are nearly half the prison population [1]. So the prison population can decrease by significant amounts without releasing any violent criminals.
> So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.
No, everyone outside of your head can get insights into your willingness to cherrypick a single comment and extrapolate to fit your pessimistic, hyper-critical mental model.
It's also interesting how you talk about incarceration rates independently of crime rates, and act as if the US is prosecuting and incarcerating broad swathes of innocent people. For those of us who have had loved ones murdered or assaulted, or been mugged/beaten, we don't have the luxury of thinking of this in an abstract way fitting a bong rip session in a dorm room. Take off the Che Guevara t-shirt, take a walk outside, and realize that the world isn't a neat little theory straight from a professor being interviewed on Democracy Now!.
It is interesting that you reject his observation (which I agree with) that many people do, in fact, believe, at a visceral level, that crime is out of control and many more people must be added to our already substantial pool of incarcerated persons... But then tack on another paragraph that starts from that exact premise.
> This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testilying. Judges and juries generally trust police officers, especially in the absence of footage disproving their testimony. As courts reopen and convene juries, many of the same officers now confronting protesters in the street will get back on the stand.
> Defense attorneys around the country believe the practice is ubiquitous; while that belief might seem self-serving, it is borne out by footage captured on smartphones and surveillance cameras. Yet those best positioned to crack down on testilying, police chiefs and prosecutors, have done little or nothing to stop it in most of the country. Prosecutors rely on officer testimony, true or not, to secure convictions, and merely acknowledging the problem would require the government to admit that there is almost never real punishment for police perjury.
Police and DAs, the parties who do most of the investigating of police perjury, are not exactly eager to share their internal findings for reasons we can probably guess, but the article does offer one striking anecdote:
> One NYPD officer, David Grieco—commonly known as Bullethead—has been sued at least 32 times, costing the city $343,252, for civil rights violations, including excessive force and fabrication of evidence. Yet Grieco was promoted and prosecutors continued to call him to the stand long after a slew of his victims blew the whistle on his violent and lawless behavior. Judges continued to rely on his word to lock up defendants. And Grieco’s name did not appear on Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s long-secret list of officers with known credibility problems.
Personal attacks are not allowed here, so please don't do that.
Also, please don't use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It looks like you've been doing that a lot, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Which does not disprove the implication I made, since you assumed the hypothesis to be false. Given that they are guilty, would you still support them? There sure seems to be a lot of “we should be nicer to thieves” in this thread, so I think we already know the answer.
High incarceration rate makes sense when the US has a high crime rate. I don't understand why anyone thinks incarceration rate should not be correlated or would not be correlate to crime rate.
Incarcerating criminals isn't the issue, having so many criminals is the issue.
High incarceration rate might cause high crime. Especially since ex-convicts are almost banned from any work. The only thing they can do to sustain themselves is more crime.
US views criminals a people who failed the society, while at these numbers it would be way more reasonable to see them as people failed by the society.
The US prison system is violent and brutal, which begets a high recidivism rate. In my opinion this is because American culture tends to confuse retribution for justice but opinions vary I'm sure.
In most countries the prison system is unpleasant, including the UK, Italy, Spain, Japan, Ukraine, Mexico, etc. In addition the justice/legal systems slightly favor the prosecution.
Salvador was overrun with gang violence, a new government came in, rounded up the gangsters and crime has gone down. On balance the population of Salvador is better off.
"'The Department of Justice conducted a thorough investigation of Alabama’s prisons for men and determined that Alabama violated and is continuing to violate the Constitution because its prisons are riddled with prisoner-on-prisoner and guard-on-prisoner violence. The violations have led to homicides, rapes, and serious injuries.'"
This is not a system that is going to successfully reintegrate people. We owe a basic level of humane treatment even to prisoners, if not for the sake of liberal values than for the pragmatic reason that violent people who are put in an environment which encourages further violence will remain violent people when they are released back into our society.
The same department of justice that continues to prosecute a case against Assange? I'm nonplussed. Boris Becker (UK), Amanda Knox (IT), speak to prison brutality (and those are well known international personages.)
I linked the DOJ and not the Equal Justice Initiative because I thought they would be less likely to be seen as partisan or politically motivated. But here’s EJI on the same issue: https://eji.org/issues/prison-conditions/ and Harvard Political Review making a similar argument to my top post (that US prisons don’t adequately rehabilitate): https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/
Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil are nowhere near as highly developed as the US.
Spain is definitely closer, but Spain doesn’t execute people like the US does. Of course problems with prisons exist elsewhere.
What’s specifically appalling about the US is the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and relative freedom with widespread, institutionalized abuse and neglect of prisoners, not just to their detriment, but to the detriment of the US as a whole.
Rehabilitation doesn’t work. The modern sociological study of crime and criminals began at the latest in the 70s. They’ve been looking for a reliably working method of rehabilitation for 50 years and have nothing. Prisons works fine as incapacitation, keeping criminals warehoused until they age out of their prime criminal years but rehabilitation doesn’t work.
> Prisoner rehabilitation does not work, says former prisons boss
> Sir Martin Narey says focus should be on treating inmates with decency and dignity
> California’s prisons are supposed to be rehabilitating inmates, not merely warehousing them, but a new report from the state auditor says it’s not effectively reducing recidivism among those released from the system.
I agree that our justice and prison systems need a recalibration to one, focus on violent crime, aggravated sexual crime, property crime, and de-emphasis on personal vice correction while also trying to guide prisoners to a better path.
At the same time, I wish to point out most other prison systems in the world are similar or worse and suspects before they become prisoners have fewer legal rights afforded them.
That said, the catch-and-release as well as the watch-and-do-nothing approach we're seeing in some places are aggravating crime and they are not doing anyone any favors, the criminals or the victims.
> At the same time, I wish to point out most other prison systems in the world are similar or worse
This might be true but I do not think it’s true of most peer countries (Western Europe, Canada, etc). I do believe that US prisons are among the least humane of this group as well as the least effective at rehabilitation. Again, this is not to say that those other systems do not have problems, just that the severity of the worst abuses and the extent of abuse in general is worse here.
They serve a function other than deterrence: they remove criminals from the street.
There is a certain political faction that has developed the habit of observing the effects of jail on criminals while ignoring the effect of criminals on the innocent. I think the parent is reacting to the disingenuousness of this position.
A lot of commenters are on the parent post are of the opinion our American prison rates are high because of more criminal activity, which may be true, but I think it's also important to recall having a small prison population doesn't necessarily equal a just society.
There were very few long term prisoners in medieval society, not because of a progressive outlook but because most crimes were punished with some form of torture, execution, or both. Also, many things were crimes that now are thought of as basic human rights. You can have small prison population if your are willing to truly brutalize your population.
China performs about half of the execution in the world every year, is known to torture dissidents, and I doubt it reports those being re-educated as prisoners. I would hardly consider that more just than America.
A society can also have a small inmate population and be unjust because enforcement is rare, or selective either due to corrupt or ineffective law enforcement. Additionally if acts of vigilantism are common in a society you can have also have less prisoners since "justice" is found in the streets.
I think there are reasonable critiques of the American prisons, criminal justice system, and especially for profit prisons, but there are also much worse alternatives. The system we have really is an imperfect attempt in need of adjustment and not a deliberate attempt at cruelty. The cruelty is a bug not the feature.
No, there was almost no prison in medieval times because the bulk of crimes were punished with fines (good for the government) or expulsion from the area. Capital punishments were not as common as you imagine, and some forms, such as being pulled apart with horses, have become legendary yet were almost never used.
> the government and NGOs are on the side of the criminals
I lived in Vancouver in Canada, that is true there too, Seattle is the same (the CHAZ bs a couple years ago? 3rd avenue in Downtown?).
Hell, in Argentina is also the same and that's south america.
I think this is more a problem of places with left leaning politics which consider criminals victims of society which means that they can't be held responsible by their actions. Meanwhile, everyone else suffers.
If China executes prisoners who would be imprisoned in the US, is it a fair to compare the number of incarcerated in the US and China [1]? In the US they get a lengthy prison sentence, increasing the moving sum of incarcerated for the US, in China they are shot, decreasing the moving sum of the incarcerated for China.
> I should point out to those not from the US that this is how Americans view the US. There is a lot of crime, the government and NGOs are on the side of the criminals etc. It is up voted to the top as well, with agreement in the replies, this is how Americans view the US.
What? No. This is not remotely a universal American viewpoint -- especially the government being "on the side of the criminals etc." What would that even mean?
> Police arrested one of two gun-wielding people caught on camera during a double shooting at a crowded holiday celebration this past weekend in south St. Louis, but the 33-year-old woman was released Wednesday afternoon after the prosecutor’s office refused charges against her.
> The suspect’s release drew public ire, but Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office declined to further explain.
So, to start with, I absolutely agree that the news can distort out notions of what is representative or not and it's something I've done my best to notice and account for by looking at broader statistics and trends in the data. In this case, though, it's part of a new phenomenon and there's no lack of examples.
Here's Alvin Bragg, talking about no longer charging certain crimes at all:
If you prefer specific cases, here are some lawyers who were facing domestic terrorism charges for firebombing a police car. They had already plead guilty. They were given a new, lesser plea deal:
I can find a lot more individual cases. For example, the Zimminskis who may only have been prosecuted because Binger was called to account for that during trial. They managed to get arrested for multiple other crimes, including a kidnapping, while on bail.
Locking up violent people and thieves is very popular among those outside the US!
You're right about the comparatively huge US prison population, but the difference is NOT because other countries let violent people and thieves roam free!
America's dominant culture is toxic individualism. Respecting others is largely thought of a waste of time. There is no culture of shame like there is in eastern asian countries. Seriously, disrespecting people is something to be proud of for a huge number of americans. Everyone looks out for themselves and taking care of number 1 is generally seen as the correct decision. There is incredible income inequality which leaves many of the poor feeling abandoned. The cowboy may be the most famous American caricature. It celebrates toxic individualism and law breaking. This leads to tons of cultural artifacts that glorify crime. Those things all add up to a feeling that the social contract has been broken and crime is an acceptable thing to do.
This is wrong. No amount of toxic individualism is going to make someone cross the Rubicon of using extreme violence (ie: shooting someone). Maybe non-violent theft but the US has serious violence issues.
People who use extreme violence against other people are deranged. It's a mental health issue. In other countries, it's limited and so the heuristic is to just lock these people up in some place called prison. In the US it's endemic making it difficult to control no matter how many people you are incarcerating.
- schools with no ability to deal with bad behavior
This leads to young adults who think they can get away with anything?
Baltimore is one of the worst places I’ve visited for work. Everyone in the office told us visitors to stay on the main streets in downtown.
Baltimore City, MD - Single-Parent Households with Children as a Percentage of Households with Children (5-year estimate) in Baltimore city, MD was 57.45%
I’m sure there are plenty of good single parents out there, but a lot of these kids aren’t getting a good foundation for life?
I know many teachers, and I frequently hear how behavior at schools is the worst they’ve ever seen. It seems like it’s only getting worse.
One thing I noticed is that lax laws create more criminals. For instance, on the D.C. metro they used to take fare evasion very seriously, and you almost never would see people jumping the fare gate for the metro. Then a few years ago, the Council decided to decriminalize fare evasion. No you see tons of people just openly stepping over the gate every day. If they ever want to tackle the problem, they're going to have to have _much_ more enforcement, because now there's probably 100x or 1000x the fare jumpers than there used to be.
Many places in the U.S. allow a certain level of criminality, which not only encourages criminal behavior, but means the people involved only face consequences when they do something truly horrendous that brings a long sentence. Let a teenager walk free when they steal cars, and they end up killing the next person they steal a car from (happened here recently). Never charge a stalker when he assaults his stalking victim multiple times while on probation, and he eventually kills her (also happened here recently). Let someone simply walk away from the court after being convicted of an armed robbery, and they'll eventually murder an innocent (again - happened here recently).
It can take years to undo this. We started moving in the right direction - cracked down on crime, brought the crime rates down, which started bringing down the incarceration rate. But then people got impatient and wanted undo everything, with many big promises that never materialized. Now crime rates are up, and we're probably going to end up with more incarceration.
Many other countries have lower incarceration stats. But in my experience, the people in those countries are often shocked when they learn that in nice neighborhoods of the U.S., large groups of men can walk into a store in the middle of the day, openly fill up bags of stolen merchandise in front of everyone, and simply walk out with no consequences. The base level of crime that's accepted in many places in the U.S. is simply much higher than in many other countries.
Does it matter? The solution to keeping violent people away from the rest of us is orthogonal to the solution to limiting societal production of violent people.
In other words, China incarcerates 3x as many people per homicide as the USA, and the USA homicide rate is 12.8x that of China. Homicide is used instead of/as a proxy for violent crime, because it is largely immune to bias by overpolicing or racism, which are the usual excuses to dismiss statistics. Source:
What exactly are you talking about regarding the "organ harvesting thing"? It's undeniable that it happened. In 2014 China promised to stop doing it. Here's an article from Chinese state media:
> China's long-term dependence on executed prisoners as organ donors will end at the start of next year, according to a high-ranking official.
My understanding is the debates are over whether or not it still happens and to what extent political prisoners (particularly Falun Gong members) were victims.
Sending most of the citizens below retirement age of a province to concentration camps certainly seems like a normalized practice in China today.
It was wrong when we did the same here in the USA with Japanese Americans (George Takei wrote about his time there) and we should not normalize this mass imprisonment without individual right to fair trial.
Just for awareness, the US also had people of Japanese heritage sent from Latin America to the US to put them in camps. Peru sent 3000 Peruvians with Japanese heritage.
The source I remember was that China’s waiting lists for organ transplants were extremely low. If you have a refutation of that specific point, I would be very interested to read what you have to write.
and china is the least country of voluntary donations of organs in the world.
According to the statistics, the deceased organ donation rate in China currently is only about 0.6/1,000,000 China citizens, one of the lowest in the world. The sad truth is that there are about 1 to 1.5 million people in China needing organ transplant every year and only 10,000 people can get a new organ successfully[0]
The way the Chinese government talks about things tends to not be that accurate. The Uyghurs are not terrorists. They are an ethnic minority that is being terrorized and subjected to genocide by the Chinese government.
The US has very similar camps in the form of forced labor (i.e. slavery) by prisoners. These slaves have built products in the US that many of us have used, including clothes and office furniture. They make 63 cents per hour - make no mistake, they are slaves.
> The US is a massive area of land with a variety of different regional geographic and cultural differences. You wouldn't go about describing Europe or an entire continent with equally broad strokes.
The 13th amendment is federal and applies everywhere in the US. Not every state takes full advantage of prison slave labor, sure, but it is legal everywhere, and some do.
You could have chosen from about 220 countries with a lower incarceration rate than the US, but because you said China, people are ignoring the substance of your comment.
Yeah, that's a weird comparison. But I doubt the people who are deliberately focusing on China instead of Europe would engage in an honest discussion about things even without it.
>I should point out to those not from the US that this is how Americans view the US.
No, it isn't. It's the opinion of a single person, and you're taking it for granted that their comment was made in earnest and that they truly represent 'the American view' -- whatever that is.
>So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.
No, they can't. They can learn about the opinion of a single person.
Can you point me to a country with such a unified opinion that any single person can cover the opinions of the entire populous?
If not, why would you assume that such a case may exist for the United States?
And more to the point, the premise was that it is ridiculous to hold the manufacturer of stolen goods to be wholly responsible for the theft in a jurisdiction that has law enforcement -- do you disagree with that, or do you just care to make an example out of someone?
Yes, violent people should be removed from society. Full stop. That's the point.
The tired trope that the US incarcerates so many non-violent criminals is just that, a trope. It's not based in reality. You could let out every single non-trafficking drug offense today and you wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the prison population at all. Drop that down to all non-violent offenses and it's not much better. At this point it's an outright lie when people bring this topic up, it's not simply being misinformed any longer.
The fact is US society is far more violent than many others it's compared to. There are many reasons that should be addressed, but we certainly do not have a problem of over incarceration of habitually violent criminals. Quite the opposite in fact. A very small percentage of people are responsible for the vast majority of the crime, and as a society we simply stopped caring bout their victims and let them roam free after dozens of interactions with law enforcement.
Then you have someone who is generally a decent citizen who makes a mistake and gets the entire book thrown at them - since they have something to lose and it's not politically dangerous.
This is a problem in the US. Hand-waving it away as saying American's simply want to jail everyone is silly. Live in some of these urban neighborhoods and tell me with a straight face you don't want more people in prison. You will be astounded at the people left to simply walk the streets and terrorize others. Literally everyone in the community knows who they are but nothing at all is done about it.
> Then you have someone who is generally a decent citizen who makes a mistake and gets the entire book thrown at them - since they have something to lose and it's not politically dangerous.
Speaking of tired tropes...
> Live in some of these urban neighborhoods and tell me with a straight face you don't want more people in prison.
Since you asked, I've lived in Dallas, Baltimore and the Detroit metro. I can tell you with a straight face I don't want more people in prison.
>You will be astounded at the people left to simply walk the streets and terrorize others.
It's more like you will be astounded at how dramatized this is, you will not be terrorized walking down the street.
> It's not based in reality. You could let out every single non-trafficking drug offense today and you wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the prison population at all. Drop that down to all non-violent offenses and it's not much better. At this point it's an outright lie when people bring this topic up, it's not simply being misinformed any longer.
It feels bizarre to make appeals to a foreign society with a history, culture, government, and demographics which are utterly alien to the situation in the west. We don't live in China. Are you so sure that our situation SHOULD be that of China that you'd be willing to risk you or a loved one being victimized by a violent thug? It always confused me that people would side with criminals over the innocent.
The massive incarceration rates in the US don't seem to be solving anything, although you don't think they're enough. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world yet in your view it is barely incarcerating at all.
If China is too different, look at western Europe. England's incarceration rate is less than one third of the US's. Canada is on sixth of the US's. These countries have lower incarceration rates but less crime.
I agree the US incarcerates too many people, does the comparison to China make sense? How can we trust their numbers especially when they disappear people.
"Too many" doesn't mean much when you look at actual crime rates of serious things like murder and rape where most people don't want those people to be free to commit more crimes that are less susceptible to reporting bias.
Yeah I mean we also have more crime too, so I feel like we’d need to normalize this somehow with like incarcerated/crime rate or something. Given I think nonviolent offenses should be less severely punished than they are today.
This argument suffers from Simpson’s Paradox. While the US may have high rates of incarceration, a city like San Francisco with which I’m familiar has European rates of incarceration. In addition, you can drive down the incarceration rate by reducing sentence lengths instead of reducing conviction rates for crimes or diverting bonafide criminals from prisons into various makework social programs that do not work to keep society safe or rehabilitate criminals.
Although I lived in the US for just a year, my impression was that a) US promoted an all-or-nothing culture, and b) crime, especially gun-related crime, was wildly glorified.
My layman belief is that this isn’t just a law and order issue. Its a cultural dysfunction.
It's the tyranny of low standards. I sat in an airport in Florida in 2016 watching CNN rerunning the same police shooting footage over and over trying to convince anyone still listening that the pistol that had fallen out of the kid's hand was, in fact, a book. At the time I could have told you the exact type of gun it was, too.
The criminal is excused because he doesn't know any better, those that defend themselves are punished to the fullest extent because it's politically expedient to do so.
The previous poster didn't really say anything about incarceration. They didn't say anything about any solution – they just said there's a serious problem. You're reading far too much in to their comment.
This was obvious hyperbole meant to express a deep frustration at having suffered at the hands of criminals in a city I care deeply about. People I love have been terrorized
>FWIW, the parent poster doesn't want increased incarceration, they want these people executed (probably without due process).
that isn't just wrong -- it's not even what parent said.
Their hyperbole was pointing out that the perceived situation is so bad that it would take something drastic to turn it around, not that they in anyway wanted or desired it.
There is a lot of purposeful misinterpretation/mis-reading going on in this thread, it seems.
"It would take Ra's al Ghul to resolve the problems of this city" dereferences directly to "It would take [mass gassing the residents of Baltimore to death] to resolve the problems of this city", as Batman Begins is the scheme being referred to.
Both are hyperbole, but that is indeed what was said and implied. Defend it as rhetoric, don't gaslight it as a purposeful misreading.
Note: the incarceration rates were much higher in the past and that's the basis of many of these claims. What you're seeing now is the political backlash from those rates. Many crimes aren't prosecuted and the cops often don't do anything. So it's not exactly fair to say that Baltimore has a high incarceration rate these days.
He says he wants to take the solution of the Batman villain in Batman begins. He doesn't want to incarcerate more people. He wants to destroy the city of Baltimore with all the people in it.
> The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people
This is an apple & orange measure. Starting from first principles, that is how people behave in society, we can at least temper superficial reading of bare metrics.
Human beings self police under surveillance. This is the entire point of setting up surveillance states. US in contrast tends more towards police state: show of force to partition society in distinct 'social climates', directly informed by economic means.
So, yes, a police state will attempt to partition, even to the extremity of incarceration, and a surveillance state (which is a super-set of police-state) applies psychological force and thus has a much reduced subset that it will deem 'problematic'. Ideally, a state like China will like to approach the limit of having every 'citizen' well trained and well behaved, as domesticated humans.
Our problem over here is (given a generous disposition) that we struggle with reconciling freedom and order without resorting to brainwashing the population, or (less generously) that structural characteristic of our system where "freedom" is bound with at times grotesque wealth disparities naturally creates social hostility, and the economic incentives of a criminal life.
China doesn’t count non-judicial punishment as incarceration, so there are lot more people forced into work camps for their behavior (or speech) than those numbers tell. Also, if you get caught stealing a wallet in say Shanghai, the victims friends are more likely to beat you up before the police arrive, with no penalty to them (I didn’t make up this example, I saw it for myself).
The problem with the USA’s prison system is that it doesn’t focus on rehabilitation at all and instead focuses on punishment. We get the exact results expected of such a system, which is a lot of repeat business.
I’m also from the US and I’ll second that this is basically correct and should be taken as an implicit assumption about most Americans if you’re looking in from the outside.
Most Americans are only presented with increasing incarceration rates as the only realistically viable way of solving most social ills. As such, there are many flavors and colors of “increase the incarceration rate” across the political spectrum, and lots of people will pick a boogeyman (drug addicts, thieves, etc.) to justify it. For those that don’t pick a boogeyman their support of increasing the incarceration rate is tied to something entirely unrelated (e.g. “My guy that supports mass incarceration is so much better than your guy that supports mass incarceration! Look at his track record on {social issue}!”)
The fact that this is the view shared by the majority is reflected in the barely-fluctuating incarceration rate and military-sized “crime fighting” budgets. It is also a fact that is reflected in who Americans continue to elect and which policies we vote to enact.
1. Two things can be true. The US imprisons a lot and the US doesn't imprison the right folks.
2. Comparison with China is not accurate. a) Can't trust numbers from China and b) China has a much more rigid social structure and rules and the population has been beaten in submission (e.g. make pie Tiananmen square). Imagine a visa system that prevents folks from California from migrating to Texas (we are even for allowing mass migration from outside).
3) If this is really not a problem with Baltimore (as you imply), other locations with Kias and Hyundias should also be suing them. As far as I know, they are also sold in China but don't have these issues.
Think of the poor thieves. Stealing is a basic human right! Hopefully we can spread the word to looters across the country that the EU will welcome them with open arms.
I’m unaware of many places in the EU where it’s socially acceptable to walk into a store take a bunch of stuff and leave without paying and without the staff or the police doing anything about it…
I mean that many europeans do not believe in the right for a victim to defend their property, ie. if they get away they get away, whereas a robber’s choices in America when the victim is armed are to comply or be forced to. And if they are caught, EU police will stick them in a cosy waterfront prison to play with iPads and eat Michelin star food, probably costing the victim more in taxes then whatever was being stolen from them.
Well the alternative is vast, and I do mean VAST, spending on social welfare.
The US is ofcourse rich enough to do it but that would require scrapping every single tax cut since Reagan. Which would inconvenience those in the upper strata of society.
Has it occurred to you that different countries, and different groups of people within those countries, might have different rates of criminal behavior?
We could also compare the demographics of China and America. What percentage of Chinese are from other countries/cultures with other rules and laws?
How many young people are in China vs the US?
Sorry, these views are not "how Americans view the U.S."
The GP comment is pushing a certain narrative that (in my view) has been ginned up by reactionary groups for their own ends.
In addition, it's wrong on the facts (insofar as it makes any fact-based claims versus just pushing buttons).
I'll go farther. I scoff most profoundly at the viewpoint of the GP post. I view people pushing it as low-information and politically naive (if they actually believe it) or evil and opportunistic (if they are just "intensifying the contradictions" for their own reactionary ends).
The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people, but the view obviously is the incarceration rate needs to increase even more, as crimes are barely being prosecuted according to him. The US is off the charts in incarceration rates, but he thinks they are far too low and want them increased more, as he sees increasing incarceration even more as the solution to the problem which western Europe does not seem to have to this extent.
So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.