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Google Engineer bails out student in jail

neil.fraser.name

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Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#71

Post by barrkel »

philwelch wrote: post #60
Confusion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, somehow, over the last 20 years the crime rate in the US has dropped tremendously. Crime rates in all Western countries have dropped over the last 20 years. More interestingly, the crime rate in the US does not significantly differ from that in other countries[1]. Even taking the statistics from [1] at face value (they are probably skewed by various different definitions for 'crime'), The Netherlands has the…

This is where the lack of controlled experimentation makes the data harder to read. To match the Dutch imprisonment rate, the US would have to release some 84% of its prison population, or in other words, to not have imprisoned those people to begin with. But if we did that, the crime rate would be different because, presumably, at least some of those people would have gone on to commit crimes! I'll readily concede t…

That makes your argument circular: you suggest that the US has higher criminality and this justifies the larger prison population; but faced with statistics that show it's not particularly higher, you now suggest the criminality would be higher if the prison population were lower.

In other words, the prison population is large because there are more criminal actors; and there are more criminal actors, because there is a large prison population.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#72

Post by philwelch »

Confusion wrote: post #56
qq66 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 25% number seems pretty hard to believe, given that compared to all countries (not developed countries) America is very low-crime and America is 5% of the world's population. I suspect that either a) poorer countries are too cash-strapped to lock up dangerous criminals or b) that many poorer countries don't have reliable data on prisoner numbers.

The '25%' number is a red herring and not worth debating. The US has over 6 times the number of inmates (per capita) as the average Western European country[1][2]. How could that be, other than because of a seriously fubared justice system? [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris... [2] http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r234.pdf

It could be because of higher crime than the average Western European country. Imprisonment is a lagging indicator, of course, so the US crime rate would have to have been higher than the average Western European crime rate 10, 20, 30 years ago, rather than today necessarily.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#73

Post by philwelch »

barrkel wrote: post #71
philwelch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the lack of controlled experimentation makes the data harder to read. To match the Dutch imprisonment rate, the US would have to release some 84% of its prison population, or in other words, to not have imprisoned those people to begin with. But if we did that, the crime rate would be different because, presumably, at least some of those people would have gone on to commit crimes! I'll readily concede t…

That makes your argument circular: you suggest that the US has higher criminality and this justifies the larger prison population; but faced with statistics that show it's not particularly higher, you now suggest the criminality would be higher if the prison population were lower. In other words, the prison population is large because there are more criminal actors; and there are more criminal actors, because there i…

It's easy to make it look like that when you ignore leading and lagging indicators. Someone might be in prison today because of a crime they committed in 1990. Obviously, their being in prison has nothing to do with the 2010 crime rate and a little bit to do with the 1990 crime rate. In 1990, the US did have higher criminality!

My point, though, was that it's not a controlled experiment to compare the US and the Netherlands. It would be a controlled experiment to compare the US to an alternate universe US where, for whatever reason, we didn't incarcerate 84% of the current US prison population.

The US imprisons maybe six times as many people, per capita, as a Western European country. The question is why. Obviously, actual criminality has to play into this, unless the US wrongfully convicts many times more innocent people than Western European countries do. Longer sentences also play into this, though--it will obviously increase the prison population (or, more precisely, stop it from decreasing) but it will also decrease the crime rate by preventing prisoners from committing crimes in open society.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#74

Post by mixmax »

snippyhollow wrote: post #65
mixmax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The United States' incarceration rate is, according to official reports, the highest in the world, at 737 persons imprisoned per 100,000 (as of 2005).[7] A report released in 2008 indicates that in the United States more than 1 in 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison.[8] The United States has 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[9] " Source: http://en.wikip…

Just to be exact, wikipedia is not the "source". Click on the [7] and you'll get the source: Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, Ph.D. (November 2006). "Prisoners in 2005" (PDF). U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. pp. 13.

You're, of course, as correct as I'm lazy...

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#75

Post by barrkel »

philwelch wrote: post #73
barrkel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes your argument circular: you suggest that the US has higher criminality and this justifies the larger prison population; but faced with statistics that show it's not particularly higher, you now suggest the criminality would be higher if the prison population were lower. In other words, the prison population is large because there are more criminal actors; and there are more criminal actors, because there i…

It's easy to make it look like that when you ignore leading and lagging indicators. Someone might be in prison today because of a crime they committed in 1990. Obviously, their being in prison has nothing to do with the 2010 crime rate and a little bit to do with the 1990 crime rate. In 1990, the US did have higher criminality! My point, though, was that it's not a controlled experiment to compare the US and the Neth…

Criminals are created by (a) laws, (b) their transgression, and (c) their enforcement. You seem to think that the whole issue is in (b) - that there's something about the US that causes more people to act unlawfully, to transgress. Have you considered other possibilities, such as unjust laws, or unequal application of laws?

Besides that, there's social issues, whereby subgroups are disadvantaged and have fewer opportunities for lawful profit in life. It could be that these social issues are the same in the US as elsewhere, but the US invests in prisons rather than welfare, for self-defeating political reasons.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#76

Post by dschobel »

You can talk about the privatization of the penal system as yielding degenerate incentives but ultimately it's up to the police on the streets to get them into the system.

If there's no dead body, damaged/missing property or even an aggrieved person (as in this case) what problem are the police trying to solve by capriciously jailing people?

What's the incentive here?

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#77

Post by Confusion »

philwelch wrote: post #72
Confusion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The '25%' number is a red herring and not worth debating. The US has over 6 times the number of inmates (per capita) as the average Western European country[1][2]. How could that be, other than because of a seriously fubared justice system? [1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris... [2] http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r234.pdf

It could be because of higher crime than the average Western European country. Imprisonment is a lagging indicator, of course, so the US crime rate would have to have been higher than the average Western European crime rate 10, 20, 30 years ago, rather than today necessarily.

Well, for instance[1] shows that the violent crime rate has been 2.5 to 3.5 times as large as in Canada between 1980 and 2000. That still leaves a factor of 2 to be explained. The other statistics in this report only makes the difference in incarceration rate harder to explain. The most common explanation I have heard is that in the US, people that are accused are both prosecuted and convicted more often. It seems extremely doubtful that the US police force and justice system could be twice as effective as that of other Western European countries.

[1]http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/85-002.../01...

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#78

Post by iwwr »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
philwelch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, somehow, over the last 20 years the crime rate in the US has dropped tremendously. Every single one of those prisoners was convicted of some crime or another by a comparatively just court system. The underlying problem--criminality in some American cultures--is difficult and rather unique to the United States. Other rich countries are more culturally homogenous and hence suffer less criminality, though that'…

Many of those crimes are drug crimes, which are only a crime because we've chosen to make them so. It's not all that hard to change a law to make a certain group of people whose habits you dislike criminals.

Not only drug crimes, but drug-related violence as well.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#79

Post by billswift »

philwelch wrote: post #44
jrockway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can be suspected of anything. Let's have a trial, a real trial, and then worry about punishment after he's guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. (And by real trial, I mean a jury of Americans, not some bullshit military tribunal. Yeah, yeah, he signed some papers that said he can't have a real trial. Fuck that. This is America, not Saudi Arabia.)

Manning is a soldier charged with violating the UCMJ, and should be court-martialed like any other soldier charged with violation of military law. (This is distinct from the "military tribunals" established for "enemy combatants" during the Bush administration.) The duties and obligations of a soldier don't change just because he's become a cause celebre on the internet in the course of allegedly violating his duties…

I remember in one of H Beam Piper's novels, I think it was Little Fuzzy, a character mentions that he had heard, "If you were innocent you are better off being tried by a military court, and if guilty by a civilian one." (not an accurate quote, but close).

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#80

Post by rb2k_ »

zeemonkee wrote: post #34
mixmax wrote: post #24

25% of the world population in jail is American. 737 out of 100.000 Americans are in jail, that's almost one out of a hundred. As a comparison Denmark has 59 out of 100.000 people in jail. And the number of Americans in jail has been rising steadily for the last 20 years. This is a pretty serious problem.

Or a pretty serious opportunity, if you get to build/run prisons for a living. Given how corrupt US politics is, I'm sure the two are connected.

The interesting thing is that for a lot of crimes, prison is ment as a time for rehabilitation. If the people that run the prison only make money if you come back again (or stay there), the situation changes slightly...
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