Live data from Hacker News

26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

61–70 of 244 posts

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#61
Maybe we should stop seeing people who are violent as people that we need to punish and start seeing them as people who need help.

I'm not a specialist, but I'd think that giving someone a job, a place to live, and a weekly therapy session would do a lot more to prevent future crime than locking him up with a bunch of other violent offenders that have nothing to do all day long.

Sometimes restricting someones freedom is necessary to protect others. But right now we are doing it backward: we lock people up after they committed a crime, but there's very little that we can do to protect potential victims before it is too late.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#62

Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations, the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that everyone else is exactly like us. Therefore, when we build systems and institutions that attempt to alter behavior, we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus. I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we develop products. Our ins…

Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.

In the minds of many people the purpose of the system is not entirely to deter crime; some criminals will not be deterred and the secondary purpose of the system is to segregate such people from society by placing them into little boxes until the system decides they are no longer a danger to the rest of us.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#64
post #59
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist'," Please provide some factual, quantified basis for this statement.

Be more charitable in your reading of that comment. If you’d prefer, interpret it this way: “These studies can be socially controversial, and so authors must be especially careful in the way they conduct their research and present their conclusions.” At a certain point, demanding empirical evidence for a clearly observable societal zeitgeist becomes disingenuous or obtuse, regardless of how well-intentioned the reque…

I am not being uncharitable. I am asking whether the poster has analyzed the number of studies in the USA, structured as carefully as this one, and found that they are in fact labelled racist more than 50% of the time. And if so, by whom.

I don't think the poster needs charity. Clarity is more like it.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.

Tautology - People who are effectively deterred from committing crimes do not commit crimes. The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would still apply. Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does not effectively deter.

Yes, true.

So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand those who are currently not effectively deterred.

More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#66

Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations, the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that everyone else is exactly like us. Therefore, when we build systems and institutions that attempt to alter behavior, we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus. I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we develop products. Our ins…

>we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus

I don’t see how that’s true. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, the system was encoded based on what the designers knew about motivation and desires at the time?

The fact that what they knew was based on their own motivations seems incidental. I doubt if they had the perfect formula evidenced and understandable to them at the time, that they would have intentionally ignored it to still encode it in their own image.

So we can really boil it down to, people didn’t understand human nature as well when these systems were created. Then, even as better understanding evolved and continues to improve, the problem of inertia and entrenched thinking works against change.

From that we can conclude one of the biggest problems with the criminal justice system is, simply that it’s impeded in the exact same way so many other systems are.

edit after comment: Point is the description of the problem seems to imply pretentious motivations, when the simplest explanation is they just didn’t know how things worked at the time.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.

In the minds of many people the purpose of the system is not entirely to deter crime; some criminals will not be deterred and the secondary purpose of the system is to segregate such people from society by placing them into little boxes until the system decides they are no longer a danger to the rest of us.

So are you saying that the solution is to lock up these people for life?

Because I hope that’s not what you are saying.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#68
post #52
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden is as diverse as the US, or more so.

Not even close. The vast majority of Sweden is ethnic Swedes. The big minority group is ethnic Finns. 87% of the country is Lutheran (as of 2012). In the US, probably no ethnic group (e.g. Irish or English) has more than 20%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_...

Check out the list based on Alesina’s analysis.

Or go to Sweden. In the younger population groups, muslims are now are huge minority.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#69
post #41
post #5

Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist', or it turns into an ad hominem attack on the authors, or struck down in the media for singling out some minority group. I love the wording as it has a focus on the positive; summed up it basically says: we can't help those who we can't identity.

"Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist'," Please provide some factual, quantified basis for this statement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/social-media-dumb...

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#70
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testosterone

It's always interesting to see that there's a segment of the public discourse that consistently hammers on "melanin" as a predictor of crime, but ignores "testosterone"....

> It's always interesting to see that there's a segment of the public discourse that consistently hammers on "melanin" as a predictor of crime, but ignores "testosterone"....

It's interesting to see the strawmen from people who were never interested in getting acquainted with the arguments to begin with.

>Mean testosterone levels in blacks were 19% higher than in whites, and free testosterone levels were 21% higher. Both these differences were statistically significant. Adjustment by analysis of covariance for time of sampling, age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs somewhat reduced the differences. After these adjustments were made, blacks had a 15% higher testosterone level and a 13% higher free testosterone level. A 15% difference in circulating testosterone levels could readily explain a twofold difference in prostate cancer risk."

Testosterone level differences between human groups has been a known fact for quite some time.

As is the case for the different ages for puberty onset:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/20/us-study-boys-...

> The investigation also showed that American boys are divided by race when it comes to puberty. It found that, on average, black American boys started showing signs of puberty at a little older than the age of nine, while their white and Hispanic counterparts did likewise just after turning 10.

And even gestational age :

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15075154

> The median gestational age at delivery was 39 weeks in Blacks and Asians and 40 weeks in white Europeans.

We are going to pay for all this wilful ignorance and happy sentiments your kind has imposed on the rest of us in the west.

Post reply on HN