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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

  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 same crime rate as the US, yet the prison population is six times smaller (per capita)[2]. Considering the various other Western countries doesn't make that better. Your assertion that the US suffers from --criminality in some American cultures-- seems unfounded.

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-t...

[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-pris...

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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 that at least half, maybe 60% of the US prison population is only locked up for drug offenses, and that legalizing drugs by the end of this week won't affect the rates of other crimes[1]. 84% seems high.

[1] I couldn't easily find any good breakdown of what all these people are imprisoned for, and would appreciate it. That said, as much I'm in favor of drug legalization, drug possession and sale is still a crime, and it's also a crime in nearly every other country you're comparing crime rates to.

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.

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.

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.

Well, let's consider (a) and (c). We're comparing statistics to other Western countries, and other Western countries have largely the same criminal laws the US does. Some of them legalize prostitution more than the US does, but everything else (violent crimes, property crimes, drug crimes) that's illegal in the US is illegal in the countries we're comparing the US with. So that rules out (a) for the purpose of this discussion.

(c) doesn't create criminals so much as it creates prisoners. (c) is bounded by (b) in one respect, but in another respect, you can unjustly change aspects of (c) through longer sentences. There is evidence of this, if you look at some of the differences in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine.

The social issues you cite are probably a big part of (b), though. It's easier for these disadvantaged subgroups to arise when you have cultural heterogeneity (since the society has to have some way of distinguishing a subgroup in order to disadvantage it) but there's definitely room to say the US has answered those challenges poorly throughout history.

While criminal laws are similar, punishment might be more severe in the USA. The same crime which leads to several years in prison in the US might result in a fine in the Netherlands. I have no statistics to back this up so I can’t tell you whether that‘s actually the case but I think it’s important to note that the mere existence of the same crimes in the criminal law of different countries is not sufficient to decide the question.

> Some of them legalize prostitution more than the US does, but everything else (violent crimes, property crimes, drug crimes) that's illegal in the US is illegal in the countries we're comparing the US with. So that rules out (a) for the purpose of this discussion.

I'm not so sure about that. You'll not go to jail for possession of small quantities of drugs in Denmark, but you might in the US?

Absolutely! I'm not going to throw around a figure I'm not sure of, but there are a stunning amount of people in American prisons for non-violent possession charges.

What a horrendous farce!

There are people in prison with a life sentence in the US because they were carrying some marijuana and it's their third strike. What european countries also do this?

There are people in prison in the US because they were 18 and they had sex with their 17 year old girlfriend. What european countries also do this?

It's certainly the case that (b) is a major role. Forget about convictions - lets just look at crimes. The US murder rate is 5/100,000 people, Britain, Denmark and similar countries have about 1/100,000 people.

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

The reason why we are different from much of Europe isn't a secret, it's just taboo to discuss. Most of our crime is confined to a small subset of our population and this subset is mostly absent from Europe.

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_informati...

(I'm focusing on murder because while things like drugs might be counted differently between the US and Britain, dead bodies with knife holes probably aren't.)

> The US murder rate is 5/100,000 people, Britain, Denmark and similar countries have about 1/100,000 people.

Depends which crimes you look at. Britain, for example, has a higher overall rate of violent crime than the US.

UK murder rate is 1.4/100000

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murde...

Violent crime is a broader category than murder. Although the UK has a lower murder rate than the US, it has a higher overall rate of violent crime.

What subset are you talking?

The link you provided to fbi.gov doesn't indicate it.

It's murder rate by race. Black people account for 15%-20% of the US population, while white people account for about 60%, yet their tallies are nearly the same.

It's not really taboo if rationally discussed in a small group (like a college classroom) since there's a long and complicated history surrounding the contributing factors which have been fairly unique to the Americas, but in an open forum on the internet it's practically impossible without moderators.

"Most of our crime is confined to a small subset of our population and this subset is mostly absent from Europe."

According to those figures, the most effective way to lower the homicide rate is to get rid of men.

> [Murder conviction is proportionately much higher in Black people]

What happens when you control for income?

In Europe, race appears to play a major role in criminality, unless you take wealth into account. Models controlling for social factors don't reveal any significant race effect.

Poverty is the real culprit. I wouldn't be surprised if this transfered to the US.

If the subset you're talking about is blacks and maybe other racial minorities, I have to disagree with you. This subset is far from being "mostly absent" from Spain, UK, Portugal, Italy, France, Netherlands, and Germany for example.

I'd suggest that our living arrangement (get isolated from community, earn and spend money to purchase a simulacrum of what community used to provide) has a lot to do with the bleakness of American life, and bleakness is probably a bigger predictor of criminality than anything else. If you want to fix the US, go back 60 years and fight highway and auto subsidies.

Given that crime rates are vastly higher in walkable urban settings than sprawling suburbs, I'd suggest that highway subsidies are a poor indicator of crime rates.

Possible explanation: the highway subsidies led to the middle and upper-middle classes leaving the cities, leaving only those too poor to afford a move (because they can't afford the added transportation costs, etc.).

Violent crime rates in the US are really high in rural areas right now due to drugs and gang activity.

Of course, possession and use of drugs is not a crime in the Netherlands (selling them is illegal for hard drugs and soft drugs above a certain quantity). That explains away part of the difference. If you consider fewer things to be crimes then you have less criminals. Dutch laws are also more tolerant on things like prostitution (if not forced), euthanasia (if properly executed), underage drinking (not in a bar), and a few others.

A clear side effect of being in prison is that you are more likely to get the wrong friends and less chance of a job which leads to more crime. Rinse & repeat. That explains away a lot of the rest.

However, I picked The Netherlands from the list because it was closest to the US and has a higher crime rate than Germany, France, Canada, etc. You can substitute any of those in my argument and it still holds.

You can reduce the prison population by giving out smaller prison terms.

Taking a look at the definition of Crimes per capita it states: "Note: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence. Per capita figures expressed per 1,000 population.".

According to the crime statistics for The Netherlands the rape victims rate is 0.8% versus 0.4% for the united states [1] (its definition being: "People victimized by sexual assault (as a % of the total population)". However looking at the rapes per capita[2] The Netherlands has 0.1 per 1000 vs 0.3 for the US.

Additionally the murder rate in the US is about 5 times higher than in The Netherlands[3]. The Dutch rate is without attempts, but still I doubt if it would get even close to that in the US.

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_vic-crime-rape-vic...

[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

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