This highlights the necessity of putting yourself in a good financial situation, otherwise be put in prison or just be black I suppose. This situation is unfathomable .
You can have cute little Norwegian jails with light sentences when the population is Norwegians. But America is not Norway. We have a large underclass of people capable of destroying whole communities. Have you seen those pictures of Detroit in ruins? Crime in the 1970s got out of control. Stuff like this played a role in turning it around.
Everyone agrees that violent crime is in decline. But the cause is a hotly disputed issue. I personally don't find compelling the idea that tough on crime laws are the cause.
Well, quite a lot of politicians and pundits seem to think otherwise. It is getting a bit tiresome. Also, I was responding to someone who wanted a citation of the stats.
Freakanomics has a long section on it that contradicts Gladwell and I am inclined to believe the Freakanomics since they back it up with stats.
This isn't scientific but It just seems like the 70's had a very chaotic vibe with a lot of external stuff hitting the US. The economy wasn't strong and we were going into a massive transition (factory -> office). Nixon (scandal & economy) and Carter (personified weak) didn't help a whole lot. A lot of in decline thinking causes a lot of unrest and crime.
I would rank most tough crime laws as a cause not a cure.
I wish the up arrow was bigger and the down arrow was moved after the [link]. It would save a lot of hassle and provide a guidance that up is nicer than down.
For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find reasons to doubt it (e.g., the big drop in crime happened some ten years after the ramp up of incarceration rates, Canada experienced a similar decline in crime over that period without the corresponding increase in prison population), however, Pinker himself thinks that when all is said and done it seems likely that incarceration was one of the reasons. One other contributing factor was a large increase in the size of police forces during Clinton's presidency. On top of that, he argues the culture just for some reason shifted to being less violent.
(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)
I see the noun "underclass" here more as a factual description. Blacks and latinos are (especially in NYC!) treated like 3rd-class citizens, and they're far more likely to end up in jail for stuff a white person would just get a slap on the wrist.
I won't specifically defend life sentences for non-violent crimes, but I would defend very harsh sentences for repeat offenses. The profiled people demonstrate terribly poor self restraint and judgment. I strongly suspect they were ongoing severe burdens on their communities in many unmentioned ways.
> I strongly suspect they were ongoing severe burdens on their communities in many unmentioned ways.
You're painting a picture that's not connected at all with the information we've been provided and you're using it to support your personal stance.
Yes, the ACLU article is presenting their story in the opposite way; but just because they're painting these people in a positive light doesn't mean that they're hiding a series of continual, unrepentant actions of which these particular crimes are the ones they were caught for. In fact, in one of the cases, the article argues that the judge didn't want to give the sentence that he gave, but his hands were tied by standards.
Do human rights actually mean something in the US?