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

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

#71

Post by dsacco »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #66
splitrocket wrote: post #12

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 inten…

> 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.

My understanding of the comment you’re responding to is that the nature of human experience precludes that ideal understanding, not that people would purposely ignore it. The point appears to be that humans encounter intrinsic difficulty in understanding the myriad idiosyncratic motivations of others in the species, not that they deliberately don’t want to understand it.

In other words: I don’t think you and the parent commenter are disagreeing.

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

#72

Post by lostlogin »

weberc2 wrote: post #53
saas_co_de wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal and only criminalize the activity of people not like them.

> More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal This is true by definition. Anyway, what sort of violent crime do you propose to legalize?

Here is one that is fraught where I live - disciplining children with a smack. Many people think hitting children in a disciplinary context should be legal.

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

#73

Post by weberc2 »

gowld wrote: post #22
exabrial wrote: 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.

> Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug-related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3). So you are confusing mental/behavior explanations with unscientific correlation-hunting racial explanations that are too popular in discourse…

Typically it's the accusers of racism who make these conflagrations. These are usually well-intentioned progressives who, in their zeal to protect minorities, pounce on anything that could possibly be warped into an attack on minorities. For example, that time James Damore was crucified for suggesting that population level gender differences might better explain Google's hiring pipeline than discrimination.

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

#74

Post by BigBuzzKill »

splitrocket wrote: post #37
Wohlf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies like these that take place in the USA are labeled racist because they disproportionately include minorities.

Studies that don’t take into account socio-economics are, in fact, racist. When you control for income and wealth, particularly intergeneraltional, racial differences disappear.

Accept that isn’t true. Racial differences rarely disappear even when you take those factors into account.

There is evidence that economic inequality has little to no effect whatsoever (1, 2).

There is also evidence that inequality is predictive for blacks but no whites (3).

There is also data that does support your latter conclusion, but my point is that this issue isn’t as clear cut as you’re framing it as.

(1) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/70/4/1035/22326...

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630

(3) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999....

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

#75

Post by zarkov99 »

splitrocket wrote: post #60
coleifer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prison is a deterrent, certainly, but it also exists to keep violent folks away from the rest of society so they can't do more harm.

This study indicates that incarceration, at least as it is currently implemented, is emphatically not a deterrent for repeat violent offenders. As for the public safety element, yes, but these people mostly weren’t locked up for life. What this shows, at least, in my opinion, is that much more intensive psychological and therapeutic interventions are needed, because if anything, incarceration as it currently exists w…

Or, more simply, you could incarcerate repeat offenders for longer periods of time.

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

#76

Post by coldtea »

evgen wrote: post #62
splitrocket wrote: post #28

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.

Lots of people (in the US at least, not, say, Sweden) care more about revenge and suffering inflicted on the criminals than rehabilitating them (or even preventing them from doing more harm -- they are e.g. totally ok if they do more harm, but inside, to other inmates).

What I hope is that those people get to experience prison for inside, and even better, for some BS reason, like the reasons tons of people are in jail for (possession of marijuana, breathing while black, and so on).

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

#77

Post by icegreentea2 »

frabbit wrote: post #64
dsacco wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think what you're asking for is unreasonable. Labelled racist by who? How do you count 50%? Does it matter if only one fringe group labels it racist? Or does it have to be called racist by a group with political capital > X.

It also leaves any potential of discussing "chilling effect" like things. You're measurement does nothing to gauge the overall zeitgeist of the time, which would clearly influence the outlook of any researcher who didn't have balls of steel and bulletproof funding.

I agree the author needs more clarity. And the clear thing to say is that "one could easily imagine this type of study in the United States causing problems for the author due to possible accusations of racism".

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

#78

Post by pjc50 »

People interested in solutions should look to studies of different types of interventions. My usual example is the extremely effective Violence Reduction Unit:

http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow-murd...

"The results were remarkable. Among the 200 gang members who became directly involved with CIRV, violent offending fell by almost half, according to a 2011 study. Weapon possession was down 85%. Even among gang members who had not attended a call-in, violence had fallen by almost a quarter."

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

#79

Post by pron »

exabrial wrote: 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.

What you are saying is troubling because it shows that many people really don't understand what it is that we call racist -- and it's not studies like these. I am a radical leftist (and a radical feminist) and I do not consider a statistical assertion such as "black people in the US are significantly overrepresented among those who commit violent crimes" at all as racist. What is racist (not just "labeled" racist; we usually "label" as racist things that are actually racist[1]) are various conclusions -- often hinted and sometimes explicitly stated -- that simply do not follow from the data according to any reasonable scientific standard and make claims about certain causes of such an effect.

[1]: Though not necessarily xenophobic; the difference between the two confuses many people, as does the difference between sexist and misogynistic. Xenophobia and misogyny imply a certain intent, a certain feeling of resentment towards other races, cultures and genders, while racism and sexism are merely actions or inactions -- usually unintentional and sometimes even well-meaning -- that serve to increase or maintain the current disparity in power among different groups. While I don't like applying the terms sexist and racist to people, as they're best applied to actions, laws, rules, institutions etc., we can apply them to those who do racist/sexist things. I know I'm racist and sexist, and I can assume you are, too. If you spend some time learning about those concepts, you know it is very much expected for people in racist/sexist societies to be racist and sexist, and it takes active effort to fight them. People should not be offended that they're racist and sexist, just as they should not be offended to learn that they may be carrying and spreading germs that cause infectious diseases, although I'm sure many were insulted to be "labeled" as disease-spreading when microbes were first discovered. Once you understand those "labels" aren't insults but well-researched observations, you know you shouldn't be offended by them, but you should learn to identify racist/sexist behaviors and prevent them, just as you learned to wash your hands.

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

#80

Post by coldtea »

weberc2 wrote: post #53
saas_co_de wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal and only criminalize the activity of people not like them.

> More like the people who designed and operate the system consider everything they do legal This is true by definition. Anyway, what sort of violent crime do you propose to legalize?

Bar brawls between consenting adults.
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