Countries with prison systems that try to rehabilitate, like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons and they have an amazing track record with recidivism. People like to claim "blah blah homogeneous society blah blah" but the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them - often because they view it as doing "God's work."

We do not have justice systems, we have vengeance factories.

But does this really explain a massively disproportionate homicide rate among certain groups in the US? Sure for lesser or non-crimes like drugs there can be massively unfair, racist enforcement and penalties. For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

As far as Norway and "blah blah homogenous society" do they not also show a heavy bias in crimes committed by the "non homogenous" population there?

There's a scale from accident, via involuntary manslaugher to murder. There may well be bias in judging what to prosecute.

Also, laws such "three strikes you are out" may lead to more murders. If, say, you're a burglar with two strikes, and a house owner wakes up and recognizes you, hitting him hard out of fear for that third strike becomes more likely. Similarly, racial bias by the police may make people so wary of "he said, she said" situations that they will 'snap' and kill someone instead (IMO, many people convicted for murder aren't cold-blooded killers, but mentally not the most stable persons who have been dealt a socially unfavorable card in life)

I guess I was just objecting to the idea that "racism" is the cause for these statistical imbalances, especially since you see the same kind of thing happening in Europe which would seem, at least on the surface, to have less racism issues, no? But perhaps I'm wrong since a lot of good people think the opposite, but it's hard to tell since it's so politicized and sensitive, just like anything about race.

A reasonable reader might suspect that you reached, for whatever reason, the conclusion that capital punishment couldn't be racist (perhaps because, as you've stated in other comments on HN, you feel the term "racism" is used too often), and are now intent on working your way backwards from that conclusion.

I think you should take a beat and reconsider how you're approaching the topic. It's an odd experience discussing this with you and watching you do little dances after each response to reorient yourself towards your preferred conclusion.

Edited extensively from the one-liner I originally wrote, sorry.

Do you have any suggestions on straight, fact-based reading on the subject, sources that aren't trying to appear sensitive? It's hard - even admitting races and may have differences upsets people.

On Norway, I'm just saying they don't have the same levels of racism baggage as the US regarding "Africans" (quotes cause it seems weird that many of them have families in the US longer than mine, but I would get no qualifiers as an American) yet still Norway sees overrepresentation.

You wrote:

For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

The answer is, "yes, of course."

Slightly edited.

Edit: So I searched a bit, and, in NYC, it's said this is due to reduced budgets for homicide in certain areas that are predominately minority. For this to impact the stats (the raw numbers being that blacks, as a group in the US, commit 4-5x homicide by population, and similarly bad numbers looking at interracial crime) it'd have to be a massively disproportionate amount of non-blacks going into these neighbourhoods and killing them. From the "flavour" text in the articles I read, the victims families are lamenting that cops don't care because "it's just blacks men killing other black men".

But wow am I astounded how low the solved rate is, that's crazy. Though I would suspect most homicides are at least reported, whereas many lesser crimes (like drug possession) might not be. It's totally plausible that the real drug possession rate among whites is actually orders of magnitude higher than reported, less so for homicide.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond and correct me.

Your analysis here is based on another fallacy, which is that there's a direct connection between the crime of homicide and capital punishment. In fact, no: only a subset of murders, aggravated by circumstances mostly not present in gang shootings, attract death sentences. Further, some presumably large fraction of the black/black murders you're considering occur in jurisdictions that are statistically (or, as in the case of Chicago, legally) unlikely to apply capital punishment.

To reach a conclusion that there aren't racial disparities in capital punishment, you have to de-confound the homicide statistics to eliminate murders that are effectively or statistically ineligible for the death penalty, and then make comparisons.

Whoah, don't tarnish everyone else with the fucked-up brush of the US system.

> Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...

No justice system is perfect, but let's avoid the black/white scandanavia/ROW thing. The scandanavians do well, yes, but they're not the only ones that use rehabilitation.

> the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them

Where do you see slavery or capital punishment in modern commonwealth countries? We're not in the 19th century anymore. I assume you actually meant Dominion countries and not commonwealth countries, but even so, which modern commonwealth countries have capital punishment? More importantly, how do you see it as a characteristic of a commonwealth country in general.

The Nordics are the exception when it comes to focus on rehabilitation. Not to say they are right, or wrong, just that at this point in history they are the exception.

They are models, but they are also facing completely different dynamics than pretty much every other country. Wealthy and secure and:

* Denmark - 5.7 million people, 80% of whom are Danish

* Norway - 5.1 million people, in 1992 95% were native

* Sweden - 10 million, the largest non-Swedish ethnic group being the Finns at 150k

You can drive an hour's radius through many big US metros and cover more people than those countries and within that radius find swaths of hundreds of thousands of people of various ethnic groups. These population numbers really pale compared to anything in East Asia though even if they are homogeneous (don't discount how much that helps social dynamics).

The demographics are shifting in Nordic countries but they a really are extreme outliers worthy of praise and recognition that they are outliers.

edit to include reply:

You are talking about demographics. How can it be irrelevant?

The US is in the situation it is in because an entire demographic was transplanted here against their will due to slavery. Nordic countries do not have this situation (good!) so the potential remedies are different.

The only way to solve problems is to effectively diagnose them. You might not like that the US isn't a country of 5 million people with 80% native population which makes policy a lot easier, but that's reality. We can't make things better unless we recognize that and figure out the proper solution within this setting and not some other.

It's not racist to recognize that and it's wrong to call someone a racist because they are searching for solutions.

It is a massive self-reinforcing feedback loop. If we had even an ounce of the empathy and rational approach to public safety that the Nordic countries had, we wouldn't be having this discussion and that feedback loop would have been broken a century ago.

That said, this is not endemic to western cultures. The same attitude is prevalent in LatAm, Africa, South Asia, etc.

It would be helpful if people didn't perpetuate the myth that it springs from race (though race can exacerbate the issue). It was a problem in Britain before they became empire.

It's an issue in China, India, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Japan, Korea, etc. many places far-removed from western culture.

If that was true (in the US) then there would be more rehabilitation in prisons, preparing people to reintegrate into society. Instead of we don't and have a 75%+ recidivism rate for state prisons.

Also, the war on drugs.

That might be true in Norway, but it's clearly not true in the U.S. U.S. prisons and prison policies are tacitly designed to make them as miserable as they can be without making it obvious that they are in fact torture chambers. The widespread use of solitary confinement alone, which is now clearly understood to be torture, falsifies your assertion. The death penalty too does nothing to advance public safety. It is vengeance, pure and simple (and very expensive vengeance at that).

We absolutely punish people "because it makes us feel good". That is one explicit goal of legal theories of punishment - retribution is about replacing revenge, so that the state serves as a proxy for our monkey-needs for revenge.

In the U.S., things are very much tilted towards making people convicted of wrongdoing suffer. Granted, not as much as some places, but that's hardly anything to be proud of.

Sounds nice, but isn't it a very common motive that the aggrieved want "some sense of fairness" in punishment? You hear it a lot after publicised trials, the relatives will offer their opinion on whether the punishment was appropriate for their loss. Doesn't it seem a little weird that only society's interest is what matters?

There's a rather large can of worms in the ideas you speak of.

Safety, for instance, is not an obvious thing. Suppose a study comes out identifying that 50% of members of a given group (say geographical, skin color, education, etc) will commit a heinous crime (and 50% is way more than normal in the population). There is no further specific information; as far as members of this group, it's a coin toss.

What are we to do? The ones who haven't committed a crime yet are a risk. Can we lock them all up? I doubt it.

Here's another interesting one. A study appears in which it is studied what happens to jealousy-murders, eg where a guy finds his wife with another guy and murders them. Lets say the study concludes that once the murders have happened, the murderer is no more likely than anyone else to commit a crime. It's totally safe to let him out now, because it's safety we care about? Seems wrong. But many countries do recognise this kind of enraged murder as a special circumstance in sentencing.

Anyway, not saying I have the answers. Ethical questions have been vexing for a long time.

This is no different from thinking about what would happen if you could teleport. The correct answer isn't "but you can't do that".

I sat in a court room during sentencing of a young man for a federal drug offense. He had prior drug offenses. No violent crimes. Right before he got clean, a friend asked him to mail him some drugs. The amount was just enough to qualify as intent to distribute. Mailingnacross state lines made it federal. The friend had been arrested and was given leniency in exchange for turning in someone else.

I knew the young man being sentenced. It took two years for him to be picked up. In the two years he had gotten clean, and started a small business that was growing. He had NA spnosors saying he never missed a meeting, drug tests over previous two years showing he was clean, a stack of letters vouching for his current character, and a dozen people in the courtroom who were there for support. He was also given the option of turning someone in, but since he had been clean for 2 years, he didn't know anyone.

The judge said that while rehabilitation was part of sentencing, the primary reason for sentencing was for punishment; To set an example and deter future crimes by both the convicted and people in the community.

He got 7 years in a federal prison.

I always thought this was exactly the reasoning behind the death penalty.

After all, TANJ (There Ain't No Justice) in the natural world. Punishing people for breaking laws is one way that society "upgrades" over the natural world.

People are busybodies and like to exert control over each other. It's a power trip.