So do we have an idea *why* this has shifted so much? Did I miss a link in the article?
Living in a heavily hispanic area, my naive guess would be this is simply what assimilation looks like. The majority of Americans are honest and hard-working people, and in my experience this is especially true of immigrants and their children. I would say the general perception in my neighborhood is that Hispanics are the hardest working people here and that they form the backbone of our economy. There can be cultural tension sometimes, but perceptions are strongly positive and overall tension is low.
Is this just me and my local experience, or does this sound like the general trend across most of the country?
The evidence points to something else impacting violent crime rates other than incarceration rates. My favorite theory is lead in gasoline made us violent:
But those mechanisms should suggest a decline in crime and incarceration overall, without suggesting any difference in this change between racial or ethnic groups - unless there's reason to believe that one racial or ethnic group was more affected by one of these things than others.
Without searching and going by distant memory, I believe that building highways that cut through certain minority neighborhoods and, through housing discrimination and economic disparities, having some minorities live near freeways and other busy roads subjected them to higher levels of lead from the exhaust of vehicles using leaded gasoline. I think that the Cross Bronx Expressway was cited as an example with possible repercussions for children growing up inhaling those leaded fumes.
I've heard this most strongly for Black neighborhoods rather than Hispanic ones, but in any case, this effect seems to be occurring at least a decade or two later from the main effect that is claimed to be driven by the end of leaded gasoline.
Highways were built through white neighborhoods as well as black. During much of the leaded gasoline era, inner cities were largely white in population (including the neighborhoods around the Cross Bronx Expressway). You'd expect to see some effect, earlier. Do we?
I've never bought the 'POC' formulation. The Black experience is unique, closer to the Native American experience than to Hispanics, who are more analogous to the Italians or even the Chinese. The political battles going forward will be for the loyalty of Hispanic voters. They are a growing demographic while whites are in slow decline and Blacks are staying roughly steady.
For antiblack racism, too, that traces to slavery, it's likely that to the extent there's a resolution it won't be any kind of grand moment, like a reparations bill or mass repentance or anything else like that, but that it will just fade into the past as the population mixes and changes, new immigrants arrive, including from Africa, and the old categories just become archaic.
There's a rear-guard action on both the right and the "antiracist" left to demarcate and preserve existing categories, but time marches on and so long as that's not backed up by law, as it once was, it's unlikely to succeed.
+1 I've noted for at least the last 20 years that "anti-Hispanic" sentiment is virtually always anti-immigrant sentiment when you drill into it, not genuine racism, and I've been fully expecting disparities between Anglos and Hispanics to diminish over time as Hispanic immigrants assimilated and the native-born Hispanic population matured.
Yup, the ethnic history of the United States can be broken down to 3 groups at the 10,000 feat level.
1. Native Americans: hated and despied by White Majority for land they held. Whites aggressively stole that land and pushed them into the unwanted parts of the country. Now that that mission is completed present anti-Native American racism is at the margins but impact from history still huge. Probably easiest to fix with pure reparations.
2. Whites: Majority and dominant ethnic group. Definition continually expands. Once a new group to the country reaches a certain level of acceptance with whites, intermarriage becomes extremely high. Label may change in 21st century. But based on present trends current whites, Asians and Hispanics will fall into this group.
3. African Americans: brought into the country as slaves. Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them. Explicit discrimination quite common. Implicit discrimination as well. Discrimination, racial hatred against African Americans, by far, biggest societal problem
Bingo! It is a "conservative" theme to frame issues -- trade, immigration, tax reform, LGBTQ rights, voter suppression, policing reform, vaccine mandates -- as zero sum identity politics. Liberals need to be sure our reforms are positive sum and then organize and campaign on that basis.
Yep, we need both conservative and liberal impulses. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it's bad. And even if the change is good, too rapid of change can still cause a host of problems.
I agree with that, but do not think "too much" or "too far" is usually the problem. My favorite example: The problem is not too much or too little action on climate change but the wrong kind, investments and regulation, rather than taxation of net CO2 emissions.
Be careful Matt, your friends at Vox will start attacking you for inferring Hispanics are a model minority. They are now frantically sifting through statistics to push back against this take. Expressing positive feelings about the success of a minority group is such a racists thing to do. No wonder you have to slum it at Substack!
I'm less concerned about prompting that reaction from that crowd than I am about the prospect of seeing some extremely counterproductive articles with titles like "we need to talk about Hispanic privilege." But both are bad.
One tangential but interesting question here is the anomalous class position of cops, in that a cop can make a middle-class income without a college degree, and that's increasingly rare. Cops can make middle-class money without being middle-class people. I haven't seen any studies of the role of cop jobs in intergenerational class mobility, but it would be interesting to know.
Nursing is similar, though it requires a degree the desire can be earned at a community college. It is a typical path for an adult student going back to college, and employment is not too contingent on who you know.
It’s also hard physical labor in a way white-collar middle class jobs aren’t.
Are you including benefits as well as salary? Here in New York, the union contract with the city gives every cop a 35% contribution to their pension every year and I have no idea how much in healthcare benefits. All adds up, and all paid by taxpayers, most of whom making a lot less.
We don't include benefits for any other jobs when comparing. I mean teachers get two months of the year off, plus long spring break and winter break. That generally isn't included in evaluating teacher pay.
Private sector companies don't much emphasize benefits when they talk 'salary' because they're piddling. The average 401(k) match in the private sector is 5%, vs 35% if you're a cop, and I suspect something pretty close to that for teachers.
In today’s world it’s inconceivable that Italians wouldn’t be considered white. But what was the consensus c. 1890? As far as I know there was a lot of concern about the hordes of Irish and they were very white and already spoke English.
The politically correct position is to contend that Italians of that era weren't considered white, but that's objectively a lie - no state ever had laws banning ethnic Italians from voting, owning property, marrying other white people, etc. in the manner blacks, Native Americans, East Asians were discriminated against.
Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. That's not to say there was on talk about diluting the pure stock of NW European genes and culture, but that talk didn't get as far as making it onto any census forms. It did however lead to immigration form that effectively shut down further immigrations from Southern and Easter Europe for several generations.
A real, real thing that we have probably forgotten in recent generations. This was the intense meaning in Kennedy's presidency for Catholics of a certain generation.
Speaking of Hispanic Americans and police, I heard a story of a Hispanic cop from California who decided to retire to the Wyoming/Montana border and start doing airport shuttle rides because he liked driving and talking to people (this is how my family met him).
Anyway, he also had a nice sports car and kept getting pulled over for being a brown man in a nice car—until he went to the local sheriff and introduced himself and his ex-cop background. Then word got around not to hassle the retired cop with a nice car.
This was over a decade ago that B I heard this story, so longer since it happened, but I thought it was an illustration of summer of the trends in this piece.
Not sure what 'shrinking the correctional system to a rational size' means, other than we lock up too many people for too long. But we lock them up for committing what our society at large thinks people deserve being locked up for. Like murder, burglary, theft. In my lifetime we've stopped locking people up for smoking pot and having gay sex. If Matt has some useful suggestions for other things we should stop locking people up he should say so. This piece doesn't and is entirely unhelpful for framing the issue.
Sentences are mostly too long across the board. A year in prison is a devastating punishment. I dont think you should ever get more than that for e.g. a robbery where no one got hurt.
What should happen is that we reduce the magnitude of punishments but use the saved resources to increase the probability of getting caught. Its quite easy to get away with crime in certain parts of the US, including really bad stuff like murder. This has led to a general decay in rule of law, since while those who do get caught face harsh punishment, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it.
A much better framing of the issue, though people will have different views on what length of time being locked up is deserved for what crimes. It's why we have elections to let these different views play out among our elected representatives.
For white collar crimes, certainly. But the point is that better enforcement and shorter sentences would be a better equilibrium that balances the costs of crimes with the cost of preventing and punishingly them.
I don't know man. I got robbed at gunpoint, went to a bar afterwards and got a free shot from the bartender and went on with my life. I am Vet though, might influence that way that I think about these things.
How effective your argument here is depends on if the people you're talking to want the point of prison to be punitive or if they want it to be reformative. (or really, how much the individual leans one way or the other).
A person arguing for a one year sentence for robbery likely:
a) Thinks the current system is too punitive.
a) Is more concerned about reformation than punishment.
b) Thinks that the arbitrary sentence of 1 year is better than the arbitrary sentence of whatever-it-is-now when it comes to what the goals of prison should be.
Thus, arguing that the current system does what it does *because* it is punitive and that's what "we" want does not seem like a good argument. You're just asserting that the thing they want to change exists. They know that, that's the whole reason they hold their viewpoint.
>>if prison is purely about reforming the offender, then logically all sentences should be indeterminate. “We’ll let you go once you’re rehabilitated.<<
The US the highest prison population in the word, both per capita† and in absolute numbers. There must be something we're doing differently.
While the US has a pretty high crime rate by developed world standards, it's not proportional to our massive prison size. And it's not high by world standards.
Yes, most of it is that we lock up too many people for too long.
____
† With the exception of one tiny country – the Seychelles.
This is just a weird argument to me. Different countries have vastly different circumstances and variation in thing like poverty, inequality, access to guns, demand for illegal drugs, cultural backgrounds, urbanization.
With such a complex set of inputs it's very difficult to determine what the optimal level of incarceration **should** be. Quite a lot of those inputs are vastly different between the US and the developed world. And if we're comparing across a broader stretch of societies, how do we know it is the US that is too high, and not that El Salvador, Mexico and Brazil are too low? The latter are countries where criminals operate with impunity quite often, and the murder clearance rate is only like 10%.
It seems like the safest comparisons should be done more locally in space and time. I'd like to see data comparing neighboring states to each other, or more arguments built around trends in crime and incarceration over time in the US, so that more other variables are held constant.
Would you also guess that their murder clearance rates are much lower than here? More in line with Mexico and central America? To me that argues that they should have more violent criminals in prison, not less.
I think you missed the point. They just shoot murderers, no need for a trial, a 'murder clearance rate' or incarceration. Sounds like the efficient justice system Matt and Keith are calling for.
Except no one is calling for that. literally no one is calling for the police to be judge jury and executioner here. And we have no idea (from this statistic) that the police are shooting only would-be criminals. The police may be killing people that are in the ways of their own criminal rackets in Brazil (the highest-grossing Brazilian movie of all time, Tropa de elite Part II was basically about that topic).
If they're shooting criminals in traffic stops but only clearing 10% of murder cases, this is evidence of a very dysfunctional, probably defunded, police force and justice system.
I honestly don't know, maybe there are two exceptions.
But the point stands. Both the US incarceration rate and total prisoners exceeds every other country — including China, Russia, and El Salvador — by quite a bit. And it's off the charts by developed world standards.
I have to agree with the poster above who questions the reliability of the numbers from places like China or Russia. Those governments lie about a lot of things -- I put very little trust in their claims.
In the United States incarceration rates rose drastically from 1980 to 2000 and murder and other serious crime rates fell by almost half over that same period. Seems like a pretty important data point of correlation
And incarceration rates fell from 2009 while violent crime fell as well. So not that great a correlation overall. There at the least must be something else influencing violent crime.
i'm sure there are plenty of other factors. But if we'er looking at the incarceration vs crime trend the longer term trend is a major rise in crime from the 60s to the 80s while incarceration was flat, followed by a major rise in incarceration and decrease in crime, followed by extremely mild changes in both rates - both have basically been flat since about 2010 or so, except post-covid incarceration dipped sharply down while murder rate dipped sharply up.
I totally agree there are other factors and I'd love to understand them better as much as anyone would. But incarceration rates seem to suggest that they impact crime rates to an important degree.
I also think that we, as a society, have decided to use some of our wealth to lock up criminals for longer—we can rearrange our priorities, but we made that decision in the first place because of reasons.
All good points, but a more interesting question is WHY did this happen? As a Hispanic who grew up in Compton, Ca in the 80's and 90's and still has family living there, I posit a few reasons:
1. Technology. Everyone has a cell phone now and anything done is fundamentally done in the eyes of everyone. This would contribute to an overall reduction in crime, not specifically Hispanic. But its such a callosal point its worth mentioning right at the beginning.
2. If you ask the friends I have living in Compton, they will say it was deportations. Do anything serious - even in California - and you get deported. This is a confounding variable though. It doesn't just reduce one less criminal, it also changes the culture dramatically. Less new people to feed the criminal networks.
3. Immigration restrictions are certainly playing a role. Mexicans crossing over now have to get significantly higher income to cross (coyote fees are like $10k now, years salary in Mexico). Then there is the Venezuela and Colombia affect (Venezuela is crumbling, which causes an exodus of the high income - and low crime - population to flee to USA).
4. All play a factor but my biggest answer is: culture. Women suddenly, around 2000, stopped valuing gang members. Ask any Hispanic who grew up in LA during the 80s and 90s and they will tell you that you almost had to be a gangster to get play in the dating market. It was high premium. Even ugly dudes scored higher if they were from a gang. This all changed in the 2000s and its bound to have downstream consequences. Why this sudden change?
Anyway it's a fascinating puzzle, but one thing I'm fairly certain of is that it wasn't because of any real policy issue. The ground level is much more dynamic than policy experts assume.
On your point 4, I wonder if it's related to the way housing prices soared? Making $ was more valued because no one wants to end up homeless. Being in and out of jail is very rough on your financial situation and most street gang members, even those dealing drugs, are not making major $. The bank teller, or entry level IT worker who lives on his own and might one day afford a house looks a lot better when you see 30 something gangbanger's coming out of prison being forced to live with mom again. Back in the 80s the recent ex-con could still afford his own place.
What's remarkable about these numbers is the lower Hispanic jail incarceration rate occurs despite: a lower median age, lower socioeconomic status, and some degree of discrimination. Which throws in to question how important those factors really are when studying crime and arrests.
Right! I came across this in some previous work I did on life expectancy modeling.
To sum up, Hispanics appear to live much longer than white people in the United States, despite lower socioeconomic status, which is very contrary to the usual trend. Theories explaining this phenomena boil down to "it's because they are healthier in some way" or "the numbers are wrong b/c population and deaths are being miscounted in some way'
I was pretty open to both sides of the debate, and likely there are multiple contributing factors. But covid has really pushed me towards believes "the numbers are wrong". It sure seems that Hispanics in the United States, and in the countries that have recently sent so many immigrants (mexico foremost among them) are experiencing very bad rates of covid deaths, relative to whites. Excess covid deaths seem linked primarily to age and health and given that we know that Hispanics are younger, on average, it seems very likely that health factors like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems are behind most of the difference.
This is even more true with Asians probably. Lot of Asians in Queens and other places very pro-cop. Also, why aren’t you using “Latinx” instead of Hispanic? :)
> From 1997 to 2016, the proportion of police officers who were African-American was stable, whereas the proportion who were Hispanic increased 61%. This helps explain why a June 2021 Gallup poll found that the proportion of Hispanics expressing “a lot” or “a great deal” of trust in police was 49%
Correlations are not causation! Maybe they trust police more for other reasons and thus are more likely to be become a police officer.
The pace of Hispanic assimilation to Anglo norms really is amazing.
Yesterday's "Yglesias" is today's "Humphreys."
So do we have an idea *why* this has shifted so much? Did I miss a link in the article?
Living in a heavily hispanic area, my naive guess would be this is simply what assimilation looks like. The majority of Americans are honest and hard-working people, and in my experience this is especially true of immigrants and their children. I would say the general perception in my neighborhood is that Hispanics are the hardest working people here and that they form the backbone of our economy. There can be cultural tension sometimes, but perceptions are strongly positive and overall tension is low.
Is this just me and my local experience, or does this sound like the general trend across most of the country?
The evidence points to something else impacting violent crime rates other than incarceration rates. My favorite theory is lead in gasoline made us violent:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
Another one with some evidence is the rise in abortion rates. Unwanted children are more likely to cause crime, according to that theory:
https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/
Is is probably more than one factor though.
But those mechanisms should suggest a decline in crime and incarceration overall, without suggesting any difference in this change between racial or ethnic groups - unless there's reason to believe that one racial or ethnic group was more affected by one of these things than others.
Without searching and going by distant memory, I believe that building highways that cut through certain minority neighborhoods and, through housing discrimination and economic disparities, having some minorities live near freeways and other busy roads subjected them to higher levels of lead from the exhaust of vehicles using leaded gasoline. I think that the Cross Bronx Expressway was cited as an example with possible repercussions for children growing up inhaling those leaded fumes.
I've heard this most strongly for Black neighborhoods rather than Hispanic ones, but in any case, this effect seems to be occurring at least a decade or two later from the main effect that is claimed to be driven by the end of leaded gasoline.
Highways were built through white neighborhoods as well as black. During much of the leaded gasoline era, inner cities were largely white in population (including the neighborhoods around the Cross Bronx Expressway). You'd expect to see some effect, earlier. Do we?
I've never bought the 'POC' formulation. The Black experience is unique, closer to the Native American experience than to Hispanics, who are more analogous to the Italians or even the Chinese. The political battles going forward will be for the loyalty of Hispanic voters. They are a growing demographic while whites are in slow decline and Blacks are staying roughly steady.
For antiblack racism, too, that traces to slavery, it's likely that to the extent there's a resolution it won't be any kind of grand moment, like a reparations bill or mass repentance or anything else like that, but that it will just fade into the past as the population mixes and changes, new immigrants arrive, including from Africa, and the old categories just become archaic.
There's a rear-guard action on both the right and the "antiracist" left to demarcate and preserve existing categories, but time marches on and so long as that's not backed up by law, as it once was, it's unlikely to succeed.
+1 I've noted for at least the last 20 years that "anti-Hispanic" sentiment is virtually always anti-immigrant sentiment when you drill into it, not genuine racism, and I've been fully expecting disparities between Anglos and Hispanics to diminish over time as Hispanic immigrants assimilated and the native-born Hispanic population matured.
Yup, the ethnic history of the United States can be broken down to 3 groups at the 10,000 feat level.
1. Native Americans: hated and despied by White Majority for land they held. Whites aggressively stole that land and pushed them into the unwanted parts of the country. Now that that mission is completed present anti-Native American racism is at the margins but impact from history still huge. Probably easiest to fix with pure reparations.
2. Whites: Majority and dominant ethnic group. Definition continually expands. Once a new group to the country reaches a certain level of acceptance with whites, intermarriage becomes extremely high. Label may change in 21st century. But based on present trends current whites, Asians and Hispanics will fall into this group.
3. African Americans: brought into the country as slaves. Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them. Explicit discrimination quite common. Implicit discrimination as well. Discrimination, racial hatred against African Americans, by far, biggest societal problem
"Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them."
You're going to need to present some pretty strong evidence for a statement like that.
Bingo! It is a "conservative" theme to frame issues -- trade, immigration, tax reform, LGBTQ rights, voter suppression, policing reform, vaccine mandates -- as zero sum identity politics. Liberals need to be sure our reforms are positive sum and then organize and campaign on that basis.
Right, like not caring about inequality, right? Just growth?
My ideal for politics is for progressives to put forward some "half-baked" ideas for improving things and conservatives "bake" them. :)
Yep, we need both conservative and liberal impulses. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it's bad. And even if the change is good, too rapid of change can still cause a host of problems.
I agree with that, but do not think "too much" or "too far" is usually the problem. My favorite example: The problem is not too much or too little action on climate change but the wrong kind, investments and regulation, rather than taxation of net CO2 emissions.
Be careful Matt, your friends at Vox will start attacking you for inferring Hispanics are a model minority. They are now frantically sifting through statistics to push back against this take. Expressing positive feelings about the success of a minority group is such a racists thing to do. No wonder you have to slum it at Substack!
I'm less concerned about prompting that reaction from that crowd than I am about the prospect of seeing some extremely counterproductive articles with titles like "we need to talk about Hispanic privilege." But both are bad.
One tangential but interesting question here is the anomalous class position of cops, in that a cop can make a middle-class income without a college degree, and that's increasingly rare. Cops can make middle-class money without being middle-class people. I haven't seen any studies of the role of cop jobs in intergenerational class mobility, but it would be interesting to know.
Nursing is similar, though it requires a degree the desire can be earned at a community college. It is a typical path for an adult student going back to college, and employment is not too contingent on who you know.
It’s also hard physical labor in a way white-collar middle class jobs aren’t.
"Middle class" like $200k-$300k p.a. from OT, much higher than this PhD ever earned.
Some of these guys make a killing. And earn a lot, too.
Are you including benefits as well as salary? Here in New York, the union contract with the city gives every cop a 35% contribution to their pension every year and I have no idea how much in healthcare benefits. All adds up, and all paid by taxpayers, most of whom making a lot less.
We don't include benefits for any other jobs when comparing. I mean teachers get two months of the year off, plus long spring break and winter break. That generally isn't included in evaluating teacher pay.
Private sector companies don't much emphasize benefits when they talk 'salary' because they're piddling. The average 401(k) match in the private sector is 5%, vs 35% if you're a cop, and I suspect something pretty close to that for teachers.
It bankrupted Detroit.
Was it that or losing 65% of their population?
I've been at companies where they present total compensation analysis that covers all the benefits too.
Given that benefits can add up to 20-30k a year (or more). It make sense to include them
In today’s world it’s inconceivable that Italians wouldn’t be considered white. But what was the consensus c. 1890? As far as I know there was a lot of concern about the hordes of Irish and they were very white and already spoke English.
The politically correct position is to contend that Italians of that era weren't considered white, but that's objectively a lie - no state ever had laws banning ethnic Italians from voting, owning property, marrying other white people, etc. in the manner blacks, Native Americans, East Asians were discriminated against.
By that theory the Jews had nothing to complain about either. I think we can agree that Anti-semitism was still a thing even if not codified into law.
Anti-Semitism was and is a thing. Bigotry and racism aren't synonyms. (All racism is bigotry; not all bigotry is racism.)
Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. That's not to say there was on talk about diluting the pure stock of NW European genes and culture, but that talk didn't get as far as making it onto any census forms. It did however lead to immigration form that effectively shut down further immigrations from Southern and Easter Europe for several generations.
You’re forgetting about the ever present threat posed by popery.
A real, real thing that we have probably forgotten in recent generations. This was the intense meaning in Kennedy's presidency for Catholics of a certain generation.
"Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. "
I would argue that today's concerns about immigration are likewise not usually racist. But just concerns about too much immigration too fast.
Some of the coverage of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial spoke of Italians as being other than white. This was 1921.
Speaking of Hispanic Americans and police, I heard a story of a Hispanic cop from California who decided to retire to the Wyoming/Montana border and start doing airport shuttle rides because he liked driving and talking to people (this is how my family met him).
Anyway, he also had a nice sports car and kept getting pulled over for being a brown man in a nice car—until he went to the local sheriff and introduced himself and his ex-cop background. Then word got around not to hassle the retired cop with a nice car.
This was over a decade ago that B I heard this story, so longer since it happened, but I thought it was an illustration of summer of the trends in this piece.
how law enforcement ought to work, not
Great article!
Not sure what 'shrinking the correctional system to a rational size' means, other than we lock up too many people for too long. But we lock them up for committing what our society at large thinks people deserve being locked up for. Like murder, burglary, theft. In my lifetime we've stopped locking people up for smoking pot and having gay sex. If Matt has some useful suggestions for other things we should stop locking people up he should say so. This piece doesn't and is entirely unhelpful for framing the issue.
Sentences are mostly too long across the board. A year in prison is a devastating punishment. I dont think you should ever get more than that for e.g. a robbery where no one got hurt.
What should happen is that we reduce the magnitude of punishments but use the saved resources to increase the probability of getting caught. Its quite easy to get away with crime in certain parts of the US, including really bad stuff like murder. This has led to a general decay in rule of law, since while those who do get caught face harsh punishment, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it.
A much better framing of the issue, though people will have different views on what length of time being locked up is deserved for what crimes. It's why we have elections to let these different views play out among our elected representatives.
I also suspect if we had uniform and effective enforcement of our laws, the prison population in the US would increase, not decrease.
For white collar crimes, certainly. But the point is that better enforcement and shorter sentences would be a better equilibrium that balances the costs of crimes with the cost of preventing and punishingly them.
"Tell me you haven't been a violent crime victim without telling me you haven't been a violent crime victim."
I don't know man. I got robbed at gunpoint, went to a bar afterwards and got a free shot from the bartender and went on with my life. I am Vet though, might influence that way that I think about these things.
How effective your argument here is depends on if the people you're talking to want the point of prison to be punitive or if they want it to be reformative. (or really, how much the individual leans one way or the other).
A person arguing for a one year sentence for robbery likely:
a) Thinks the current system is too punitive.
a) Is more concerned about reformation than punishment.
b) Thinks that the arbitrary sentence of 1 year is better than the arbitrary sentence of whatever-it-is-now when it comes to what the goals of prison should be.
Thus, arguing that the current system does what it does *because* it is punitive and that's what "we" want does not seem like a good argument. You're just asserting that the thing they want to change exists. They know that, that's the whole reason they hold their viewpoint.
Well crap, that is a huge fail in making a lettered list!
>>if prison is purely about reforming the offender, then logically all sentences should be indeterminate. “We’ll let you go once you’re rehabilitated.<<
IIRC Norway uses such an approach.
The US the highest prison population in the word, both per capita† and in absolute numbers. There must be something we're doing differently.
While the US has a pretty high crime rate by developed world standards, it's not proportional to our massive prison size. And it's not high by world standards.
Yes, most of it is that we lock up too many people for too long.
____
† With the exception of one tiny country – the Seychelles.
This is just a weird argument to me. Different countries have vastly different circumstances and variation in thing like poverty, inequality, access to guns, demand for illegal drugs, cultural backgrounds, urbanization.
With such a complex set of inputs it's very difficult to determine what the optimal level of incarceration **should** be. Quite a lot of those inputs are vastly different between the US and the developed world. And if we're comparing across a broader stretch of societies, how do we know it is the US that is too high, and not that El Salvador, Mexico and Brazil are too low? The latter are countries where criminals operate with impunity quite often, and the murder clearance rate is only like 10%.
It seems like the safest comparisons should be done more locally in space and time. I'd like to see data comparing neighboring states to each other, or more arguments built around trends in crime and incarceration over time in the US, so that more other variables are held constant.
I think it's worth asking, like I do with healthcare: why do other countries, particularly developed ones, incarcerate fewer and cover more people?
It's a great question. and a complex enough question that we probably shouldn't jump to conclusions.
Would you also guess that their murder clearance rates are much lower than here? More in line with Mexico and central America? To me that argues that they should have more violent criminals in prison, not less.
I think you missed the point. They just shoot murderers, no need for a trial, a 'murder clearance rate' or incarceration. Sounds like the efficient justice system Matt and Keith are calling for.
Except no one is calling for that. literally no one is calling for the police to be judge jury and executioner here. And we have no idea (from this statistic) that the police are shooting only would-be criminals. The police may be killing people that are in the ways of their own criminal rackets in Brazil (the highest-grossing Brazilian movie of all time, Tropa de elite Part II was basically about that topic).
If they're shooting criminals in traffic stops but only clearing 10% of murder cases, this is evidence of a very dysfunctional, probably defunded, police force and justice system.
Didn't a Cuban dissident claim not long ago that according to classified figures, Cuba actually has a higher incarceration rate than the US?
I was going to ask this question in the Cuban-health-care comments but didn't want to distract people. Now here we are.
I honestly don't know, maybe there are two exceptions.
But the point stands. Both the US incarceration rate and total prisoners exceeds every other country — including China, Russia, and El Salvador — by quite a bit. And it's off the charts by developed world standards.
I have to agree with the poster above who questions the reliability of the numbers from places like China or Russia. Those governments lie about a lot of things -- I put very little trust in their claims.
That's fair. Though we do have better data from quite a few countries.
The better comparison is with developed countries anyway. That shows and even bigger disparity even accounting for America's higher crime rate.
It fell because we took lead out of our gasoline, made abortion legal and a few other things. Carceration rates do not correlate to crime.
In the United States incarceration rates rose drastically from 1980 to 2000 and murder and other serious crime rates fell by almost half over that same period. Seems like a pretty important data point of correlation
And incarceration rates fell from 2009 while violent crime fell as well. So not that great a correlation overall. There at the least must be something else influencing violent crime.
i'm sure there are plenty of other factors. But if we'er looking at the incarceration vs crime trend the longer term trend is a major rise in crime from the 60s to the 80s while incarceration was flat, followed by a major rise in incarceration and decrease in crime, followed by extremely mild changes in both rates - both have basically been flat since about 2010 or so, except post-covid incarceration dipped sharply down while murder rate dipped sharply up.
I totally agree there are other factors and I'd love to understand them better as much as anyone would. But incarceration rates seem to suggest that they impact crime rates to an important degree.
I also think that we, as a society, have decided to use some of our wealth to lock up criminals for longer—we can rearrange our priorities, but we made that decision in the first place because of reasons.
All good points, but a more interesting question is WHY did this happen? As a Hispanic who grew up in Compton, Ca in the 80's and 90's and still has family living there, I posit a few reasons:
1. Technology. Everyone has a cell phone now and anything done is fundamentally done in the eyes of everyone. This would contribute to an overall reduction in crime, not specifically Hispanic. But its such a callosal point its worth mentioning right at the beginning.
2. If you ask the friends I have living in Compton, they will say it was deportations. Do anything serious - even in California - and you get deported. This is a confounding variable though. It doesn't just reduce one less criminal, it also changes the culture dramatically. Less new people to feed the criminal networks.
3. Immigration restrictions are certainly playing a role. Mexicans crossing over now have to get significantly higher income to cross (coyote fees are like $10k now, years salary in Mexico). Then there is the Venezuela and Colombia affect (Venezuela is crumbling, which causes an exodus of the high income - and low crime - population to flee to USA).
4. All play a factor but my biggest answer is: culture. Women suddenly, around 2000, stopped valuing gang members. Ask any Hispanic who grew up in LA during the 80s and 90s and they will tell you that you almost had to be a gangster to get play in the dating market. It was high premium. Even ugly dudes scored higher if they were from a gang. This all changed in the 2000s and its bound to have downstream consequences. Why this sudden change?
Anyway it's a fascinating puzzle, but one thing I'm fairly certain of is that it wasn't because of any real policy issue. The ground level is much more dynamic than policy experts assume.
That's all really interesting
On your point 4, I wonder if it's related to the way housing prices soared? Making $ was more valued because no one wants to end up homeless. Being in and out of jail is very rough on your financial situation and most street gang members, even those dealing drugs, are not making major $. The bank teller, or entry level IT worker who lives on his own and might one day afford a house looks a lot better when you see 30 something gangbanger's coming out of prison being forced to live with mom again. Back in the 80s the recent ex-con could still afford his own place.
What's remarkable about these numbers is the lower Hispanic jail incarceration rate occurs despite: a lower median age, lower socioeconomic status, and some degree of discrimination. Which throws in to question how important those factors really are when studying crime and arrests.
Even more so remarkable is the Hispanic Health Paradox:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
Right! I came across this in some previous work I did on life expectancy modeling.
To sum up, Hispanics appear to live much longer than white people in the United States, despite lower socioeconomic status, which is very contrary to the usual trend. Theories explaining this phenomena boil down to "it's because they are healthier in some way" or "the numbers are wrong b/c population and deaths are being miscounted in some way'
I was pretty open to both sides of the debate, and likely there are multiple contributing factors. But covid has really pushed me towards believes "the numbers are wrong". It sure seems that Hispanics in the United States, and in the countries that have recently sent so many immigrants (mexico foremost among them) are experiencing very bad rates of covid deaths, relative to whites. Excess covid deaths seem linked primarily to age and health and given that we know that Hispanics are younger, on average, it seems very likely that health factors like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems are behind most of the difference.
The "numbers are wrong" theory also jibes with a better-understood phenomona, the race-crossover in life expectancy: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-69892-2_795-1
This is even more true with Asians probably. Lot of Asians in Queens and other places very pro-cop. Also, why aren’t you using “Latinx” instead of Hispanic? :)
Shh, don't let the English departments know about this. Where they are going to get their funding if everyone is turning white??
> From 1997 to 2016, the proportion of police officers who were African-American was stable, whereas the proportion who were Hispanic increased 61%. This helps explain why a June 2021 Gallup poll found that the proportion of Hispanics expressing “a lot” or “a great deal” of trust in police was 49%
Correlations are not causation! Maybe they trust police more for other reasons and thus are more likely to be become a police officer.
(not that this takes away from your overarching point)
Hey. Who's this new guy? :)
Welcome, Keith. Good article to kick off with — Easy to understand, well argued, fact based and makes an interesting point with many implications.
Are you going to be writing here again?
Thanks, just happy to be here today!