I've seen a lot of people wondering why America has such a high incarceration rate. If you weren't even aware that it does, consider this graph from Prison Policy: To understand why America is like this, consider that, when Stalin died, his secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria
Bonus post: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/... You can plausibly trade off policing and incarceration. If you choose to police more, you can incarcerate less with the same crime rate and vice-versa.
America's at a place where it should be doing more of both policing and incarcerating. The homicide rate, rates of physical violence and theft against fellow Americans—it's all too common and America should get on a trajectory like Germany or Japan. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/...
Quick math on this. Assuming: 1. America can do policing as well as the peer nations on this chart (https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/... big 'if' that is unlikely given differences in scale, urbanization, etc.) 2. The tradeoff is linearly causal at a 6:1 cop to prisoner scale America
More to note: 1. People are generally not locked up for property crimes for very long (https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/... 2. And property crimes explain little of the prison population in general (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r...
@cremieuxrecueil The defund the police camp seems to believe Alaskans wear bigger, puffier, more insulating coats than Floridians while suffering more hypothermia deaths. Therefore, insulating coats cause hypothermia deaths so we must ban coats!
@DonpaulStephens True!
@cremieuxrecueil "This clears up why America has such a high incarceration rate: it's because Americans are relatively violent people!" Any explanations about this?
@azi_d20 Selection, access to guns, individualistic culture, etc. Many American Whites are selected from some of the more violent regions of Europe, and America also has a lot of pretty unselected Hispanics and Africans, so being more violent isn't all that surprising.
@cremieuxrecueil Learned a lot here thank you.
@cremieuxrecueil ISTM that incarceration rate is a bogus statistic. What is useful is the crime rate, which indicates the quality of life for the innocent. If prisons get crowded, build more.
@cremieuxrecueil For consideration…
@cremieuxrecueil We have ~50 million black people in a country that otherwise highly values law and order, unlike most African nations that have lower incarceration rates. As for gun access being a factor in violence, it's not the guns per se, but WHO owns them. US is ranked 60 something in
@cremieuxrecueil According to psychologists ~4% of the population are sociopaths. In America that would be 13,904,984 people. Psychopaths are ~1%, that's 3,476,246. Yet we only have 1.9 million people incarcerated in the US. We need more prisons. ASAP.
@cremieuxrecueil Did some internships at a local sheriffs department back in the day. More population = more crime. But other factors were at play. The county was split into 4 zones, northeast, southeast, northwest and southwest. 10 officers, split among 4 zones, about 2 per zone counting 1
@cremieuxrecueil If penalties were much more severe, fewer people would risk incurring them & so they would need to be imposed on fewer people.
@cremieuxrecueil Fantastic thread. Thank you.
@cremieuxrecueil I think the deeper question is, between crime rates and incarceration rates, why are there so many criminals in this country? If your just shuffling people between prisons and committing crime on the streets, you are managing crime but not necessarily solving it.
@cremieuxrecueil Should we have separate prisons for 1st timers and repeat offenders? Seems logical to make a big effort to sort and divert the 1st timers, and just warehouse the repeats…
@cremieuxrecueil TL;DR 1. The US has a lot of criminals. 2. The US is good at catching criminals. 3. Some countries have a lot of criminals but are poor at catching them. Some countries have few but are good at it. The US has both; and the effect is multiplicative.
@cremieuxrecueil Right, but why are Americans so violent is the more interesting question? Why is the country doing so poorly apart from GDP maximization (which isn't a small feat either, I do appreciate Boston and Silicon Valley inventions!)
@cremieuxrecueil Please rerun this data by race (or in the case of Latin Americans -county of grandparents origin) I won’t hold my breath. Now run crime rates of white Americans vs recent Swedish immigrants.
@cremieuxrecueil Not nearly enough. More people need to be in jail. A lot more
@cremieuxrecueil Are you saying the US has a psycho problem? No shit. Just yesterday: - Kirk assassination at Utah campus - School shooter at Colorado High School - Man decapitated for not talking directly to a service worker in Dallas And this was after the country was still digesting the
@cremieuxrecueil @Hawkabooboo Longest post ever.
@cremieuxrecueil 'A very violent people'...? Nah, probably just hungry with no prospects to look forward to.
@cremieuxrecueil I am leery of the data quality in crime reporting. I am also uncomfortable with analysis that treats our nephews and sons as data points, and the beat result comes from removing them from society and our lives for what is often an early life of dumbasssery.
@cremieuxrecueil The USSR used to make a lot of hay about the high crime & incarceration rates in the US in the ‘80s, and it was true, however, the USSR had much higher numbers in mental institutions. Something like 3x the US rate. Asylums should be included in this analysis. Clientele overlap.
@cremieuxrecueil What happens when you compare the US with the EU? The issue is one of size. The US is so much larger than any one European nation that comparison is meaningless. I have never seen the utility of comparing the US to say Germany for anything; incarceration, GDP, etc. The EU is
@cremieuxrecueil @grok summarise this post in less than 100 words