United States incarceration rate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

by ap22213 • 13 years ago

150 95 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

oleganza6• 13 years ago

Nixon dropped gold standard in 1971 and state power started expanding like crazy with printed money. Incarceration rate is just one of the effects of growing violent power.

MRSallee2• 13 years ago

Interesting connection. I'd say these charts alone aren't enough to solidify that causation, but it sounds plausible and I'd love more info to back it up.

EliRivers• 13 years ago

It's the other way around. Nixon saw the increase in crime and this prompted him to drop the gold standard :p

oleganza6• 13 years ago

Those who downvote are invited to provide a rational counter-argument. My facts are:

1. State promised to provide gold in exchange for U.S. dollars before November 1971.

2. After November 1971 it basically defaulted on that promise. But due to different factors (including military domination in many countries) people overseas kept trading in dollars, so dollar did not collapse.

3. When money is created it gets in someone's hands who now have some purchasing power they didn't have before (I'm not debating if it's "good" or "bad", it's just the fact).

4. Mainly, money is created via bonds issued by the government. So it's mainly government who get new purchasing power (the whole point of those bonds is to make some cash for government spending).

5. Government is different from any corporation in a sense that it has monopoly on violence. Only government agencies can put people in jail, use guns on massive scale at home and in the world. Again, I'm not saying if it's evil or "good for society", it's just the way it is.

6. Extra purchasing power for government means more economic power to do things that only government can do. E.g. pay policemen to chase drug dealers, computer hackers, bitcoin traders etc.

7. No wonder that incarceration rate grows.

Where am I wrong?

nawitus3• 13 years ago

You're wrong because there's plenty of other Western nations without the gold standard and higher state expenditures, yet they have low incarceration rates. The point is that there's no clear connection between your economic theory and jail sentencing. (Of course economic policies affect sentencing a lot).

VLM2• 13 years ago

Doesn't the incarceration rate actually begin climbing when prison privatization was implemented, rather than a decade or so earlier WRT gold standard?

Always following the money is good advice, and we're both doing that. I'm just doing a little more Occam's razor.

rsheridan62• 13 years ago

There was also a massive increase in crime rates around that time, which eventually led to a massive increase in incarceration rates as people voted for politicians who promised to get tough on crime (which, in practice, means putting lots of people in prison).

Other developed countries don't have the kind of crime rates the US does/did, so they don't put as many people in prison.

No doubt government spending is higher for the reasons you state, but if we had the crime rate of Sweden we'd find something else to spend it on. Most prisoners are incarcerated by state or local governments, anyway, which do not get to print their own money.

brazzy• 13 years ago

You're wrong where you're obsessed about the gold standard and inventing connections from it to anything and everything bad.

lolcraft• 13 years ago

Where you are wrong: bonds do not create purchasing power out of the air. They are effectively debt, no different than going to the bank and asking for a loan; that debt, by the way, has been more than repaid by every president since the end of WWII until Ronald Reagan. So, that's not true.

Where you are also wrong: it is also not true that this purchasing power is created "by creating money". That's an all too common fallacy from Economics 101. Sure, you have more money; but wages and prices increase too, so in the medium term, and disregarding major crises such as hyperinflation, et c., it all balances out. It's a common argument from proponents of the gold standard, and it's also false.

Where you are wrong again: most governments of the developed world also have many, many things in which to spend money constructively. Social Security. Education. If the public budget being spent on Wars on Whatever is an specific issue of the US, not of countries that abandoned the gold standard, then it's safe to say it has nothing to do with the gold standard.

Before you ask: most governments haven't had an explosion of the state budget; they've mostly spent that money in a responsible fashion. The current crisis is mostly because of private debt, not public debt (except in Greece), mainly in the housing industry.

DenisM• 13 years ago

Did you see "the beautiful mind" movie? Your reasoning is much like of that character - he was trying so hard to find connections between things that he was succeeding regardless of what he looked at.

MRSallee2• 13 years ago

We've been worse than modern Canada and China since at least the 1930s. Wild.

oleganza6• 13 years ago

Don't confuse yourself and your fellow neighbors with particular people with particular political power. You and a policeman carrying a gun are two different persons with different agendas. It is in interest of those in power to make you think that it's some abstract "country" that is responsible for actions you don't like, not some particular persons.

dizzystar• 13 years ago

For those who are saying America is worse than China or Russia, mind that the data of China and Russia's historical imprisonment data is not well-documented and they were more prone to using executions.

Estimates vary wildly on how many people were executed, starved to death, murdered, or imprisoned during all of the Chinese Revolutions under Mao.

I'm certainly not defending the America prison system.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

"""For those who are saying America is worse than China or Russia, mind that the data of China and Russia's historical imprisonment data is not well-documented and they were more prone to using executions."""

Yes, but he also didn't add the massacres and concentration camps for Native Americans (of which, Hitler writes in his Main Kampf that it was an "inspiring" solution to the problem), or the enslavement (any different than prison?) of black slaves, and their executions, lynching.

andrewcooke• 13 years ago

it struck me this morning, thinking about the (justified, imho) anger at the way swartz and the nuclear protesters were treated, that those are both cases of the white, middle class receiving the kind of treatment previously reserved for poor black males.

i'm not american, and not a sociologist, so this is only my impression (of course). i wondered if it rang true for others?

Anechoic2• 13 years ago

i wondered if it rang true for others?

(Black male American citizen here). Yes, that was pretty much the the reaction I had (you can look at some of my posts in the Swartz submissions). I've spend most of my adolescent, teenage and adult life being subject to extra scrutiny by police and private security, presumably due to the combination of my gender and skin color ("presumably" since I didn't do anything wrong) and whenever I point this out on various geek/tech sites like Reddit or Slashdot, posters respond that this scrutiny is justified. Welcome to my world.

The other interesting thing I notices is that in response to all the various privacy intrusions that may be possible with Google Glass (and Google's possibly futile attempts to limit these uses but banning facial recognition apps and requiring the camera light to be on when recording) the techie response is basically "resistance is futile, technology will find a way, get used to it." The PRISM program is an example of the same thing - technology will find a way. The obvious difference is that in one example it's corporations or private individuals creating the violations while in the other it's the government, but in terms of the disruptive effects it can have on my life (and my recourse in light of those effects) to me it's a distinction without a difference.

This is the brave new world for some of you. Get used to it.

(btw, has Stallman spoken publically about Glass?)

logn• 13 years ago

I point this out on various geek/tech sites like Reddit or Slashdot, posters respond that this scrutiny is justified

I think on HN we might all agree that type of scrutiny is racist and pointless.

If the Aaron Swartz story were not about a white person using the MIT network but instead about a black person using any other network, no one would have cared. Additionally, if he were black, there's a decent chance he would have died the day he ran from authorities.

pkinsky• 13 years ago

Re Google Glass:

Do you think that security forces would be less able to violate your rights if all interactions with them recorded? Alternatively, do you think video logs of interactions with oppressive security forces might spark public outrage in a way that mere eyewitness testimony would not?

olalonde• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_gen...

This is quite surprising if accurate. I would have thought the rate of violent crime for men would be much higher than women but they are about the same.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

Men do commit nearly all of the violent crimes against strangers, but women commit violence against acquaintances at roughly similar rates to men. My impression is that violence against strangers has decreased quite a bit over the last couple of decades but that domestic violence has remained steady, so I'd expect that graph based on composition effects.

I suspect that the gap in murder rates is higher since due to size differences random male on female violence is more likely to be fatal than vice versa. For instance a male acquaintance of mine's ex-girlfriend snuck into his room at night and stabbed him, but thankfully she wasn't able to get the knife through his ribcage and he lived. If the genders had been reversed it might very well have gone differently.

scotty792• 13 years ago

Your acquintance really lucked out. I think his case was an outlier. Rates of murder in countries with and without guns are pretty much the same because the barrier is not the tools. It's fairly easy to kill with any tools. The only thing that saves us from being mudered are mental blocks against murdering tht almost all people have in their brains.

VLM2• 13 years ago

There are some startup lessons here where rates quintupled in 30 or so years but there's a theoretical limit where we imprison around 1 percent so quintupling can only continue about two more generations... so the explosive growth phase "must" end within the next 60 years or so. This collapse in growth rate will cause some interesting predictable issues in America's for profit prison system.

As a practical matter its probably too late to begin a startup focused on the prison industry. A prison-centric social network? A dating site for guards and/or inmates? A prison photo blogging site?

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

There is a lot of business available dealing with prisons. The prisons are open to do anything they can do to gouge the prisoners and families for money. Your ideas sound more like "slap prison on an idea", when the real process is "What do such families do, how can we impose 'taxes' on stuff they already do or need to do?"

obstacle1• 13 years ago

I wonder where we should draw the line between providing a legitimate service for prisoners and becoming complicit in an imprisonment/slave labor system larger than the soviet gulag.

king_jester2• 13 years ago

As a practical matter its probably too late to begin a startup focused on the prison industry.

Starting any kind of business that derives revenue or profit from prisons is massively unethical, as the existence of your business becomes dependent on the continuation and increase of imprisonment. Such businesses do nothing to make society better and in fact only make society worse.

dionidium• 13 years ago

I read an article a while back about the then imminent closing of a prison in New York that was no longer needed due to falling crime rates. There were quotes from workers voicing their displeasure. I'll repeat that. They were upset that crime rates were falling and fewer prisons were needed. As always, incentives matter.

snomad• 13 years ago

In general, I would agree. However, I happened to hear a presentation by a former IT manager from California Dept of Corrections. Using data, they were able to figure out that a sudden increase in the purchases of Ramen was a precursor to a riot. The theory being, inmates knew it would go crazy and they would be locked down.

That kind of big data analysis is helpful to the guards, inmates, and taxpayers.

gdonelli2• 13 years ago

Sounds like incarceration is a profitable business to me...

jkuria• 13 years ago

Very profitable indeed. And the companies that profit from it have been big campaign donors.

gdonelli2• 13 years ago

that's really sad :(

ommunist• 13 years ago

Gulag was very small thing comparing to this contemporary enslaving machine.

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

This seems like something that people will look back on 100 years from now and state how bazaar and awful it was. How do we start the process of turning this around?

Is anyone on HN involved in any organization trying to stop this?

ericabiz• 13 years ago

Yes: http://norml.org/

Please join, support, rally with NORML for better drug laws.

The facts: 55% of federal prisoners are held for drug law violations

21% of state prisoners are held for drug law violations

via http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Marijuana#sthash.LTU05KnJ.dp...

Legalization doesn't just help people who smoke pot--it helps ALL of us, by reducing prison time and incarcerations, especially sentences due to simple marijuana possession.

EDIT: More facts via http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777,00....

"Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession."

300bps• 13 years ago

Seems balancing the budget is a simple matter of legalizing drugs. Attacks the spend side through fewer prosecutions and incarcerations. Use the money from drug taxes to pay for treatment programs and attacking the revenue side of the budget deficit.

Are there really that many people in the country that are upright about drugs? I've never done a drug in my life but I certainly don't care if others do in a manner similar to alcohol.

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

Consider a thought experiment. Suppose 2% of country A has committed a crime, and 1% of country B has. Suppose both countries have identical criminal justice systems - say they catch 80% of criminals, and have a false positive rate of 0.25%.

In that case, country A has 1.845% of their population in jail, while country B has only 1.05%.

I'm not saying this is the only cause of the US's high incarceration rate, I'm just pointing out that some stats are missing from this discussion.

(Interestingly, 30% of the people in jail in B are falsely accused, while only 15% of the people in jail in A are.)

zanny2• 13 years ago

This also implies you have a culture that is actively hostile and promotes criminality, be it fiscally or socially. Which I don't think is inaccurate, rugged individualism in the US can promote hostile interactions that lead to violence or depression, and both can get you in jail.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

This also implies you have a culture that is actively hostile and promotes criminality, be it fiscally or socially.

Have you been to the hood lately? This is exactly what urban culture is like. Now, there is still a disproportional focus, motivated in no small part by racism, on cracking down on urban crime in particular by American law enforcement.

ezy• 13 years ago

You have to be very self-critical when proposing thought experiments. Typically, they end up having no connection with reality (attempts to make variables independent which really aren't), I'm not sure it's productive to think like this unless you're really super-guarded about your assumptions.

You're assuming a 1% absolute difference could easily exist given equal laws, enforcement, and penalties. If you say you're just asserting that for purposes of the experiment, you still can't say anything because the assertion may well be nonsense.

You're assuming you can tease it apart (e.g. existing laws and enforcement's influence on criminal culture) such that stats are "missing", it's not clear that you can. In fact, evidence (prohibition) more likely says you can't.

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

I'm assuming a 1% difference could exist holding everything else constant simply to make the example simple. I explicitly disclaimed the idea that my thought experiment was a good picture of the world.

My key point - looking at incarceration rates while ignoring criminality rates is ignoring half the picture. Do you disagree with this point?

subsystem• 13 years ago

"It's not a war on drugs, don't ever think it's a war on drugs. It's a war on the blacks, it started as a war on the blacks," says Ed Burns, the co-creator of the television show The Wire. "It's now spread [to] the Hispanics and poor whites, but initially it was a war on blacks. And it was designed, basically, to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and destroy it."

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryus2012/2012/0...

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

Not sure why your comment was downvoted, since it's essentially true.

They call it War on Drugs, because "War on Blacks" would be racist and "War on the Poor" would be admitting to class warfare.

Think about the simplest example: crack vs. powder cocaine. Prior to 2010, there was a 100:1 ratio on the Federal penalties for the two types of the same drug. Crack cocaine also carried a five year mandatory minimum. Officially, this was based on Congress's belief that crack was more dangerous than powder. Unofficially, it was because crack was much, much more common among blacks and Hispanics, whereas powder was often consumed by rich white people.

In 2010 Obama reduced the disparity to 18:1 and removed the mandatory sentencing on crack. The disparity is still crazy racist however.

nawitus3• 13 years ago

But countries which have >99% white population have similar policies as the United States on drugs, so the race theory doesn't seem to be correct.

oofabz• 13 years ago

It is true that smoked crack is more dangerous than insufflated cocaine. It has a faster, more pleasurable onset, and effects don't last as long.

These properties both make it more addictive. Many prescription drugs use an extended release formulation to make them less addictive.

TomGullen• 13 years ago

Approaching 1% of your population being incarcerated seems absurd.

vacri2• 13 years ago

If you rule out kids, it becomes 1% of adults. There was a statistic I saw a few years ago that said that 1 in 9 black men were either incarcerated or on parole - it was the clearest statistic showing lop-sided legal policy I've seen.

gre• 13 years ago

Capitalism finds a way to make everything profitable eventually. Iterate, optimize, and you have the perfect machine where some are at the controls and the rest are fuel.

sitkack2• 13 years ago

A couple clicks away and come across this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal.

hammerzeit2• 13 years ago

My fundamental question here comes back to this: If the number of reported crimes in the country doubled, what would you expect to happen to the prison population?

In the time period that the incarceration rate in the USA grew 4x, the number of violent crimes in the US grew nearly 7x [1]. This was a much more dangerous country then. The incarceration _per crime_ rate is only about 25% higher than it was in 1960 [2].

None of which to say there is not something deeply, deeply flawed in our country today and in the way we deal with imprisonment. Similarly there are real fundamental issues of race and class that make crime and enforcement problematic.

That said, we seem to look at institutions more than society when we look at social ills. But just like with healthcare and education, the two are inseparable -- we must consider the priors.

[1]: Data sourced from two sources, focusing on 1960-1994: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

[2] http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/documents/pictu...

Perceval• 13 years ago

The best work being done on the explosion in incarceration is by Marie Gottschalk, a professor at UPenn. She's done two great books on what has driven the increase in incarceration, and how the drivers of incarceration have changed over time (e.g. the War on Drugs was a major driver in the 1980s, but faded in importance relative to three-strikes and zero tolerance laws in the 90s).

whiddershins6• 13 years ago

Are you 100% certain that the definition of violent crime isn't a moving target? It sounds so cut and dry, but is it?

Also, are you 100% certain that this doesn't reflect a change in what people are charged with, rather than their actual behavior? Have you any experience with prosecutorial discretion and how that affects what people are charged with, and hence, the "crime rate."

hammerzeit2• 13 years ago

I certainly don't, and I think these are important and fascinating questions.

Do you have any evidence to suggest the definition of violent crime has changed at all? I'd be very curious if that were the case. In the absence of evidence, though, I'll continue going with what I understand to be the generally-accepted theory that crime rose dramatically throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

oellegaard• 13 years ago

This could be drastically reduced if the USA would implement proper social security. I hardly think that is is coincidental that the Scandinavian countries are generally at the bottom of the list - or e.g. Germany. It is not really high level science, that if a person does not have income he still needs food. If he can't buy it, the government doesn't give it - he has to steal it.

whiddershins6• 13 years ago

I don't think it is about food. I think it is about respect. People are violent most commonly where their dignity has been threatened. Although that is obviously true on a case by case basis, noone seems to see a correlation between the humiliation we make a person go through to get welfare vs. our crime rate. It isn't that they are poor, it is because we shame them for being poor.

Just one man's opinion.

waps• 13 years ago

You might want to google "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" [1].

Basically, people will fight, kill and die immediately for physiological needs, for food, water, sex, sleep and a few other things. For safety, the average human being is still quite prepared to use lethal violence. Safety includes security, employment, resources, morality, and health. Then less violence is used up the pyramid. And so on you go to love/belonging, esteem (where the respect comes in), and lastly self-actualization.

Of course this is only one theory. Other theories are based more on imitation (people will fight/use violence in a specific situation because they see others using violence in similar situations). That one is my personal favourite since it makes a whole lot more sense than the psychological theory. How would you store something as complex as Maslow's pyramid in genes ? There is no room for anything so complex. For that matter, employment exists maybe 5000 years, human race is at the very least 165000 years old. I have visited places where it doesn't seem to hold (villages in Africa, slums, where it seems people are more than content with just most physiological needs and some form of drug. Oh and they'll do a lot for different drugs, ie. for alcohol).

Of course the first part of Maslow's theory is true, by definition, people will fight, kill and die for physiological needs. Not having them, after all, means dying yourself. The other levels, including respect and "good" food, I don't think work like that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

beloch• 13 years ago

There are certainly problems with the for-profit prison industry. For example:

1. Is it reasonable to expect a corporation that wants to expand its "clientele" to rehabilitate prisoners into law-abiding citizens rather than repeat offenders?

2. Is it really a surprise that the prison industry has managed to reform the law to drum up business in a country where Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain?

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

The incentives for (2) are reduced by privatization. Any individual prison operator can sit around freeloading while the other guys lobby for harsher laws.

In contrast, in a system with government run prisons, the prison guard union has strong incentive for rent seeking - they will capture all the rents.

Privatization has problems, but this isn't one of them.

tete• 13 years ago

And compared to central Europe, how secure is the US?

csense2• 13 years ago

a woman who has been recently released from prison comes into a society that is not prepared structurally or emotionally to welcome her back

To me, this was the most important statement in the article (although I think this issue affects all prisoners more-or-less equally, regardless of gender).

I was reading a story recently about a Wells Fargo employee who was fired after seven years on the job, when his employer discovered that he once put a fake dime in a washing machine nearly fifty years ago.

If we as a society decide, through our laws and legal system, that someone is not sufficiently dangerous that they need to stay in jail (or be executed), we should make every effort to be sure that person becomes a productive, functioning member of society again. That outcome is in the best interests of everyone (well, maybe not private prison operators, but that issue's another discussion entirely).

But if people are refused jobs, education, passports, government assistance, etc. due to a criminal record, how are they supposed to recover their lives? How are they supposed to feed themselves or their families?

We need to be more forgiving of people's past. I think this will be inevitable as people become more searchable due to the Internet and social media -- not everyone has a criminal record, but everyone makes mistakes, and as a greater fraction of the population has a greater fraction of their past in public view, more and more of those mistakes will become visible, until it won't be possible to find anyone who's "perfect."

chongli• 13 years ago

But if people are refused jobs, education, passports, government assistance, etc. due to a criminal record, how are they supposed to recover their lives? How are they supposed to feed themselves or their families?

I think the answer is basic income. We're at a point right now where the demand for labour is so low that people's lives are subject to the whims of fickle employers. This problem will continue to grow as automation makes more and more people redundant. It will take the economic pressure off the less fortunate and open the doors to their future.

With basic income we can turn productivity gains into a force for benefitting all people. We can free the creative masses from the mundane and unnecessary. We can build a labour market that is less regulated and more competitive. Capitalism functions best when its participants are able to make free choices.

csense2• 13 years ago

By "basic income," I assume you mean the government pays everyone enough to live. Welfare by another name.

What keeps people from just taking the money and doing nothing?

Some fraction of people will probably always want to work because a job makes them happier, or they desire the luxuries that the increased income makes possible. But in the time between now and the techno-utopia where robots and computers do all the work, how do we know that this fraction will always be big enough? Why won't our society won't collapse due to too many people opting to live on the public dime, and there not being enough workers left to produce the food, clothing, shelter, etc. needed by the non-workers?

Isn't this basically how communism collapsed?

United States incarceration rate

Related Stories