America's dominant culture is toxic individualism. Respecting others is largely thought of a waste of time. There is no culture of shame like there is in eastern asian countries. Seriously, disrespecting people is something to be proud of for a huge number of americans. Everyone looks out for themselves and taking care of number 1 is generally seen as the correct decision. There is incredible income inequality which leaves many of the poor feeling abandoned. The cowboy may be the most famous American caricature. It celebrates toxic individualism and law breaking. This leads to tons of cultural artifacts that glorify crime. Those things all add up to a feeling that the social contract has been broken and crime is an acceptable thing to do.

I think it starts with

- higher rates of bad/no parenting

- schools with no ability to deal with bad behavior

This leads to young adults who think they can get away with anything?

Baltimore is one of the worst places I’ve visited for work. Everyone in the office told us visitors to stay on the main streets in downtown.

Baltimore City, MD - Single-Parent Households with Children as a Percentage of Households with Children (5-year estimate) in Baltimore city, MD was 57.45%

I’m sure there are plenty of good single parents out there, but a lot of these kids aren’t getting a good foundation for life?

I know many teachers, and I frequently hear how behavior at schools is the worst they’ve ever seen. It seems like it’s only getting worse.

One thing I noticed is that lax laws create more criminals. For instance, on the D.C. metro they used to take fare evasion very seriously, and you almost never would see people jumping the fare gate for the metro. Then a few years ago, the Council decided to decriminalize fare evasion. No you see tons of people just openly stepping over the gate every day. If they ever want to tackle the problem, they're going to have to have _much_ more enforcement, because now there's probably 100x or 1000x the fare jumpers than there used to be.

Many places in the U.S. allow a certain level of criminality, which not only encourages criminal behavior, but means the people involved only face consequences when they do something truly horrendous that brings a long sentence. Let a teenager walk free when they steal cars, and they end up killing the next person they steal a car from (happened here recently). Never charge a stalker when he assaults his stalking victim multiple times while on probation, and he eventually kills her (also happened here recently). Let someone simply walk away from the court after being convicted of an armed robbery, and they'll eventually murder an innocent (again - happened here recently).

It can take years to undo this. We started moving in the right direction - cracked down on crime, brought the crime rates down, which started bringing down the incarceration rate. But then people got impatient and wanted undo everything, with many big promises that never materialized. Now crime rates are up, and we're probably going to end up with more incarceration.

Many other countries have lower incarceration stats. But in my experience, the people in those countries are often shocked when they learn that in nice neighborhoods of the U.S., large groups of men can walk into a store in the middle of the day, openly fill up bags of stolen merchandise in front of everyone, and simply walk out with no consequences. The base level of crime that's accepted in many places in the U.S. is simply much higher than in many other countries.

Does it matter? The solution to keeping violent people away from the rest of us is orthogonal to the solution to limiting societal production of violent people.

No consequences