> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?
The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad.
Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?
> the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys.
Reminded me of this quote:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
OT but does anyone have this quote in what I presume is the original Russian?
edit: Found it: Если б это было так просто! — что где-то есть чёрные люди, злокозненно творящие чёрные дела, и надо только отличить их от остальных и уничтожить. Но линия, разделяющая добро и зло, пересекает сердце каждого человека. И кто уничтожит кусок своего сердца?
> Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence.
This is certainly not generally true. There are many countries with much greater poverty, inequality, and ignorance (at least measured by education) than the US that have much less violent crime. I'd imagine having more drug users per capita has a significant effect on violent crime everywhere however.
The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.
Any country with those two factors will have a problem with violence; the fact that the US is the most civilized country among that list (and likely sits atop that list) is what is so damning.
The largest single chunk of the violence is just the settling of drug industry business disputes. If the people doing the shooting had badges and got their pay stubs on state letterhead most people here wouldn't blink twice.
Whereas you may lean on an expensive and complicated court system to send an employee of the state to apply violence (or threats thereof) to someone who had wronged you until they right their wrong people in the drug industry has no such luxury since their disputes will not he heard by a court. Likewise they must DIY it. That means home invasions, shootings, etc, etc.
Back before people in these lines of work shot at each other (have you ever tried doing a drive by on horseback with a 6 shooter, doesn't work very well) over these sorts of disputes people would round up friends and beat each other up or people would torch houses.
Bringing our massive illegal economy out of the shadows would clean up a huge fraction of the violence by replacing a lot of it with threat of state violence. See prohibition for an example of the reverse case.
I was thinking of Indonesia, only because I lived there for a while, but those are factors in nearly every country.
> The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.
I don't think either of these are what cause the violence (maybe they throw fuel on the fire as you're saying though). People can be just as violent without weapons, and just as greedy when they are on the top. They just become more dangerous with money, guns, and lawyers.
Ok. What exactly are you trying to imply? It's hard to draw conclusions from your gaps, it's pretty clear that you are saying that young African-American men commit more violent crimes per capita.
What should I draw from this though? That the USA has a violent history with slavery and segregation and those scars haven't been healed, that the government hasn't figured out a way to fix this historical issue?
Or should I draw some other conclusion that I prefer to not type out because it'd be too disgusting to even entertain it?
Probably the only safe thing to say with these facts in mind is that we haven't found a solution to this problem that both reduces the crime output of those likely to commit it, and also treads carefully across our collective sensitivities surrounding the topic.
Maybe that's an impossible task given those requirements. If it were easy, we'd probably have found the solution by now. We're pretty sensitive about numbers like that after all, to the point that I'm generally reluctant to quote them.
> Probably the only safe thing to say with these facts in mind is that we haven't found a solution to this problem that both reduces the crime output of those likely to commit it, and also treads carefully across our collective sensitivities surrounding the topic.
It's certainly the thing to say if you don't feel like actually changing anything.
The main reason behind the disparity in crime demographics become fairly apparent when you compare them to the statistics on poverty demographics. Research shows a correlation between poverty/income inequality and rate of violent crime. It follows that reducing the crime rate, regardless of demographic, is a matter of raising people out of poverty and reducing the level of societal inequality.
> If it were easy, we'd probably have found the solution by now.
Quite frankly, most countries haven't even tried looking for one. Most prison systems only put people through a process that only makes them more likely to reoffend. The insane thing about this is we know that some places are better but we make excuses and refuse to change.
The problem is not with stating the facts. Because facts and numbers have no meaning in themselves.
The problem comes from the things that you're supposedly implying. This isn't entirely your fault, because this line of thinking is brought up again and again. People know what someone is trying to say if someone just pulls up this kind of statistic. Your fault (if it's an honest mistake) is not being aware enough of the discussion around this topic and the lack of articulateness in your comment.
"The FBI is racist": ever heard of COINTELPRO? I think trying to undermine the civil rights movement (among others) could be classified as racist, do you not agree?
Also "FBI crime stats" is probably one of the loudest dog whistles, more like a fog horn at this point.
If we're erecting dumb strawmen, let me erect one in the shape of the parent comment - African-Americans are over-represented in crime, because they're just like that. Quod erat dumbonstrandum.
All of which were mentioned by a grandparent comment, then quoted and commented on as being insufficient to understand "who" is committing crime, by the person I was replying to.
If you can't see what their gist was, well, that's a you thing.
Nope. Grandparent comment asked why the US is a violent society. Absolute top comment on the chain is just outright incarceration numbers. No one asked anything about race until you came along.
Crime statistics split by demographic are commonly used as a dog whistle by racists. The people posting them typically aren't interested in discussing the reasons behind a particular demographic committing more crime beyond asserting that it's due to inherent traits.
That those statistics were posted as a dog whistle is backed up by the user's other posts.
On Portugal's African colonies:
> The only thing to apologize is to ourselves. We should haver never went there and left you in the stone age.
> All the infrastructure we left you weren't able to maintain, as it happened with 99% of the African countries.
> Total mystery why.
Casual quotation marks around youngsters:
> And now robbing stores is becoming rampant as we can all testify by the loads of videos of "youngsters" entering stores and taking what they want without anyone doing anything.
Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos?
These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence".
We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
It’s interesting that you bring up theses specific questions. Ask yourself: why is the U.S. riddled with violent gangs? Why is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states? Why do large chunks live in inner city crime-infested ghettos (and why are there ghettos in the inner cities in the first place)? Many would argue that all these are home-made problems. Imprisoning the victims of this system can’t conceivably be the solution, and might in fact only make it worse (mass imprisonment has many bad societal effects).
Your government policy has turned your cities into crime infested ghettos. Even diverse and poor countries like India are managing to avoid this problem.
US doesn't have some magical and unique set of challenges, apart from political disfunction, that can't be found anywhere else in the world.
> We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF
I must have missed something - SF solved the housing crisis, everyone could get a an education and a decent job but crime remained?
> Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos?
Why does the US have these problems? They didn't come from nowhere.
> We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA.
The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad.
Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?