U.S. Incarceration and Crime Rates Continue to Fall in Tandem

U.S. Incarceration and Crime Rates Continue to Fall in Tandem
reason.com

And this(https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/...):

> The FY 2015 Budget requests a total of $8.5 billion for federal prisons and detention

And from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

> During fiscal year 2015, the Federal government received approximately $3.25 trillion in tax and fee revenue and had outlays (spending) of $3.7 trillion;

The population of the US is 318.9 million, and (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...):

> In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population.

So our federal government would be 0.1% smaller in terms of expenses if it weren't responsible for drug offenses, but a full 1.4% of the population is under their control as a result. 2% of the population has lost its right to vote, so perhaps 1% due to drug offenses.

That's about half the number of Jews in the US, which both political parties pander to quite heavily(making Israel a huge point of contention in any election). I guess that makes sense: drug reform is less visible than Israel in the news but still significant, though I haven't measured it to say that it's half.

You're actually allowed to discriminate against people and take away their right to vote, but the states are punished by reducing their representational basis so they get fewer legislators and electors in elections. Since we have a winner-takes-all system, this encourages states to allow all minority groups to vote if they wouldn't tip the election. I was originally thinking it'd be strange for states to reduce their basis by as much as 1%, but it looks like there's an exemption for crimes:

> Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

I suppose, strictly speaking, you could have your right to vote stripped away if you get a parking ticket? I wonder if it's a gerrymandering scheme to throw Democrats in prison and take away their right to vote. (Democrats tend to be big on drugs)

Since drug use counts towards the arrests but probably doesn't count towards the crime rate(it's a victimless crime, and the offender doesn't report it), that portion of it shouldn't affect the link described in the article.

I'm not sure it's smart to directly compare percentages like the article does. If the crime rate is already low because all the criminals are locked up, then you'll have no change in crime rate and a low change in imprisonment. And you usually want to compare derivatives of the log-percentage, not the percentage directly.

I had a passenger who got fined $1000 for letting his medical marijuana card expire. In the future, this fellow has it on his record that he is a political criminal who didn't hurt anyone, and a zealous brain-dead prosecutor might use this prior conviction to advocate for prison.

Another passenger had recently been released from a 2-year prison sentence. Her crime was sharing a single opiate pill with a friend. The cop was chuckling as he wrote her up. This one had gotten fat on prison food, which is not very nutritious. Several of her fellow inmates died from the neglect. (I guess police officers have to be rather disconnected from the consequences of their job. "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them" is a cop-out.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, etc) recently had this to say:

  Being nice counts the most when 
  you are nice to people ignored 
  by others, deprived of attention, 
  or devoid of friends. The rest is 
  largely theater.

This one had tried (really hard) to stay sober after almost 2-years in prison for her 3rd DUI. But life happened, and she hadn't learned how to cope in minimum-security prison.

I worked with her regularly over the course of about two years. She'd sober up, get a job, have a bad day at work, relapse... Finally I turned her over to her family (who previously had tried the "maybe mom will stop drinking if we ignore her" strategy), and she has really turned the corner now that she knows her kids are there to support her. Her son recently trusted her to watch her grandkids overnight. Prison didn't enable this transformation. (she originally fell into the alcoholic's pit when she found that vodka helped her anxiety better than the Xanax prescription. Benzodiazepines only work for about 4 weeks, before the patient's anxiety levels become worse than before.)

I'm still thinking about whether I should say more about this passenger. The Difference Between Boys and Girls [1] is about another passenger who did quite well after meeting me.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-...