The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
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Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#2I'm willing to bet decriminalization of weed is a huge factor of keeping kids out of prison.
Just hope we continue to learn how to build a system that restores dignity, treats the causes of criminal activity and focuses on keeping people out of the system. Hard to do when many prisons are moving to for-profit private facilities.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#3Steven Pinker talks about the root causes for this in Better Angels of Our Nature. He argues that crime has been trending steadily downward for centuries. There was a blip of increasing crime, at odds with the trends, that lasted from about the early 1960s to the late 1980s, and he offers some explanations for that blip. But in general, crime should continue to fall.
The US homocide rate has been dropping steadily since 1991, from 9.8 to about 4.5 today. (The post-WWII peak was 10.2 in 1980.) It stands to reason that a drop in juvenile crime would track the drop in adult violent crime.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#4"Tough on Crime" is no longer en vogue in most parts of the US.
That likely has a huge impact.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#5I'm willing to bet decriminalization of weed is a huge factor of keeping kids out of prison. Just hope we continue to learn how to build a system that restores dignity, treats the causes of criminal activity and focuses on keeping people out of the system. Hard to do when many prisons are moving to for-profit private facilities.
The numbers were dropping long before the current wave of marijuana decriminalization.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#6"Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes. It's good to see that the winds have shifted towards a more just system although there is a long way to go.
I think there are many factors that contribute to this trend and would love to see a paper which goes into the details. I would bet that prosecutors have a lot to do with this. Prosecutors have so much power in our criminal justice system due to what charges they choose to bring forward.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#7Anyone have any evidence that suggests this is because there are fewer juveniles that should be in prison, or if we're imprisoning more accurately, or there are more juvneiles that aren't in prison but should be?
There's a lot of nuance here and I haven't found any good data on what caused the change -- just political bloviation
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#8Steven Pinker talks about the root causes for this in Better Angels of Our Nature . He argues that crime has been trending steadily downward for centuries. There was a blip of increasing crime, at odds with the trends, that lasted from about the early 1960s to the late 1980s, and he offers some explanations for that blip. But in general, crime should continue to fall. The US homocide rate has been dropping steadily s…
I though lead paint and lead in gasoline was a good candidate for the blip?
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#9"Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes. It's good to see that the winds have shifted towards a more just system although there is a long way to go. I think there are many factors that contribute to this trend and would love to see a paper which goes into the details. I would bet that prosecutors have a lot to…
Tough on crime has gone out of style. We had our primaries recently and only a few conservative dinosaurs even mentioned ToC in their voter biography. Most of the candidates running for AD, circuit judge, and other legal offices were drumming up their crime intervention bonafides.
Re: The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted
#10>No one painted this portrait so well as John Dilulio, the criminologist who popularized the term. A self-styled tough researcher, he surveyed juvenile prisons, where he saw “vacant stares and smiles” and “remorseless eyes” staring back at him. These kids “pack guns instead of lunches,” he wrote. They roam the streets in “‘wolf packs,’” and “‘maim and kill on impulse.’”
Sure sounds like sound science /s. I wish more politicians/the general public weren't so vulnerable to Appeal to Emotion fallacy. A guy wandering through a juvenile prison and being spooked shouldn't count for jack shit in policymaking.