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America’s incarceration rate is in decline

theatlantic.com

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Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#371

Post by reverendsteveii »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #82
reverendsteveii wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a followup to that (excellent) book, here's Barry Glassner - A Culture of Fear. The Better Angels of Our Nature talks about how violence has always been declining. A Culture of Fear talks about how the rate of that decline has been increasing since the 90s but people actually perceive things as becoming more dangerous rather than less, and attempts to come up with an answer as to why that may be the case.

The most obvious answer is large-scale media. I can learn about a shooting on the other side of the country within hours of it happening, and think "that could happen where I am". Likewise with any other news, which by definition is about out-of-the-ordinary events. There's more news about violence because there's more news, not because there's more violence, but it feels like there's more violence.

Piling onto this, humans have both recency and frequency biases that, combined with the attention-as-currency news industry, tend to lead to an increase in the perceived danger of violent crime that's entirely disconnected from the actual statistical danger of violent crime. You hear about more crimes, you hear about each crime more often, and your estimate of how much crime there actually is increases.

Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#372

Post by vharuck »

kieranmaine wrote: post #149

One more thing to throw into the mix. The treatment of ADHD might be helping: "ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time" https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

I once asked myself, "What did people with ADHD as severe as mine do before there was medication?"

The obvious answer was: drugs. People like me used to do a lot of drugs.

Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#373

Post by froohmb »

Spooky23 wrote: post #326
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bubble implies that it's going to burst. I don't see it. Women aren't going to stop wanting careers, and HCOL is coming for everybody. I expect the whole country to join SF in this "bubble".

The desire to work and have children is going nowhere. Like Hollywood, the careers are going to go away. The money that lubricates the Bay Area is all from the Middle East now, and the return on in-region labor dollars is declining.

I’m sure the return on in region labor dollars decline that you note is real but is it regional? Where in the US is the return on labor dollars not declining? Housing costs, including taxes, seems to be the big problem in the Bay Area. Workers are still productive, but they require higher pay to offset the demand for housing caused by all the foreign “lubrication” and tech-49ers.

Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#375

Post by inglor_cz »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #374

[flagged]

I don't believe that, at least not in the whole nation (certain cities may be an exception). US cities used to be a lot more violent three decades ago. Fudging manslaughters statistics is not easy.

I suspect the reason is the same as with everything else - kids glued to screens don't have time or even stamina for gang activity, all their attention being consumed by a highly addictive product at hand.

Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#376

Post by inglor_cz »

casenmgreen wrote: post #25

Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available. If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot. If it is, crime rates are down. When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up. Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults. This is apparently the only pos…

For me, this is a bit of a suspicious explanation, because Europe is a patchwork of abortion laws, with some countries being traditionally strictly religious and other less so, but the crime stats don't copy that.

Communist Romania once banned even contraceptives, and yet it never became a violent crime haven, not even after Communism fell. (Which was some 25 years after the ban, so the unwanted kids should still have been in their prime criminal age.)

Maybe the correlation isn't causational, maybe it only works in specific demographic groups...

Re: America’s incarceration rate is in decline

#380

Post by achillesheels »

solatic wrote: post #258
dcow wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generat…

Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration. The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will…

I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.

American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads

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