Comment by monero-xmr
4 days ago
The vast majority of crimes are committed by a small percentage of people. The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders. But having video evidence is a powerful tool for a motivated prosecutor to actually take criminals off the streets
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
I was at work the other day and we were talking about my mouse problem in my basement. My coworker asked how many mouse traps I had.
I said 74.
74?! That's way to many mouse traps. No one would ever need that many mouse traps.
But sir, I haven't told you how many mice I have.
The number of incarcerated individuals is not a relevant statistic if you're also not including the number of criminals there are.
Are they working?
If your 74 traps solve your problem and in a month you have no more mice, then congratulations.
But it sounds like rather than buying more and more mouse traps, you should find and fix the underlying cause.
But why is criminality higher in the US?
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Iceland is one of the most peaceful countries in the world (murder rate 0.54), 36 incarcerations per 100k, police don't carry guns, and it's not known for its widespread mass surveillance system.
Portugal is one of the most peaceful in the world (murder rate 0.7), 118 incarcerations per 100k, and doesn't have license plate readers or mass surveillance.
USA murder rate is 6.3, 541 incarcerations per 100k, extremely high recidivism, and an amazing array of surveillance systems.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. Guess they should have bought Flock cameras instead?
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> Can you name such a place with low crime, low incarceration rate, low surveillance, and importantly, low black population?
Andorra and Finland both meet your four criteria.
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It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US
You have to understand that the people who want mass incarceration/neo slavery are never going to want to stop locking people up.
Of course he thinks the incarceration rate is too low; people who express this opinion are at some level a justification for incarceration rates continuing to rise.
If there is no real penalty for being a career criminal, people will continue to be career criminals.
If someone knows they can rob people and get away with it, why would they do honest work for a living?
What is your solution to prevent crime without incarceration as a possible outcome for people breaking the law… especially those who do it repeatedly? It’s easy to talk down to solutions being used today, but without offering up a realistic alternative, this provides no value.
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Why would you want someone who commits a violent crime to avoid prison?
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It can be true (and likely is) that both:
a) much more time and effort should be focused on catching and stopping the most persistent repeat offenders (sometimes by locking them up); and
b) orders of magnitude too many Americans are currently in prison.
From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.
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If the only crime--at all--in America was rape and murder, America would still have a higher incarceration rate than Germany.
America has a lot of criminals and therefore America needs a lot of incarceration.
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.
The real problem is people who don't want to be victims of crime, not the people doing the crime?
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> Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
Say it then cowardly racist. Stop hiding behind rhetorical devices to justify an institution that has its historical origins in slave patrols
Or maybe repeat offenders can be put in jail, and other people could be let out. Just a random thought that occurred to me.
You can get video evidence without sending it to a massive, opaque national database of non-suspects.
>"The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders"
Sure. US prosecutors are so lenient that the US is the capital of incarceration
This is literally true and you think you are being snarky but just look ignorant.
I can't tell which element(s) of the previous post you are criticizing.
Ignorant of what may I ask? Also I do not "think".
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Depends a lot on the city/state. Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
> The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders.
Sometimes judges contribute as well.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
Any evidence of what you're saying about prosecutors and video surveillance?
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
> is something missing from this equation?
Decades of historical evidence to the contrary.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
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I agree. There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets. I bet the 80%+ of normal black people in crime ridden cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans would be in full support. Let’s be honest, young black gangsters are the main criminal element in these places. Trump can’t do this because he is a piece of shit with no integrity.
El Salvador doesn't have the type of Constitutional rights that America has. That type of sweep would not be legal.
And that doesn't even get into jurisdictional issues. The federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over local crimes that do not cross interstate boundaries.
> There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets.
Sounds like a certain, controversial federal law enforcement agency in the US
Except ICE has hired poorly trained far right good for nothings.