The US has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world [1].

US: 655/100k

UK: 135/100K

China: 121/100K

Germany: 77/100K

Iceland: 37/100K

It feels like we are consuming just a little too much of the "security" product. Maybe we should try consuming the "justice" product. I hear it's pretty good.

[1] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...

Our crime rate is probably 4x higher than developed European countries, so we could still use more of the security product. It’s not clear that they’re mutually exclusive anyway—you can push efforts to improve justice while improving policing.

I agree, but the question is how to get from here to there. Releasing all the nonviolent drug addicts - which we certainly should do! - still doesn't get us close to those other countries.

By the numbers, our best bet is probably revamping the prison system to focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, and then drastically reducing the length of sentences.

Our goal should be to get someone as close as possible to 0 chance of recidivism in as short a time as possible.

Education is usually another good place to start. Educated people tend to make more informed choices, and informed choices tend to shape better futures.

Stop basing the sentencing on baseball would also be a good move.

The problem with the drug war is imprisoning dealers, not addicts - and if we released them it would get us much closer to those other countries.

Americans are a little different from many other peoples. Every one of us has a chip on their shoulder. I'd expect it to be different, in a country with a docile population.

Here's a picture and discussion that highlights this: https://smart-online-marketing.nl/en/conversion/cultural-dif...

It be kinda nice to see an article that cites the "research" it mentions rather than just providing a nice color coded graph of the world where

"you can see how every country on the world scores on individualism, from light-green to dark-green. Light-green means a low score on individualism, in other words, strongly collectivist. Dark-green countries are strongly individualist."

Feel free to link

What's the right ratio?

Why? And what sorts of petty crime?

If the solution is more damaging than the problem, (and where I grew up, with jumpout vans driving around to stop and pat down random groups of teenagers, it certainly was) then the solution seems unnecessary.

I feel like many commentators here are divorced from what policing on the ground in these places really looks like, there is no finesse or discretion to it.

I agree that the existence of the problem doesn't justify any possible policy, and patting down random groups of teenagers does seem bad. But, I mean, crimes are bad too. Ideally nobody should have to live in a neighborhood where they're afraid of being mugged or having their car broken into, and today a lot of people do.

> being mugged

Mugging is a violent crime and should be policed - but studies also show that people vastly overestimate their risk of being mugged. It definitely happens, but I am very skeptical that "broken window" policing addresses these sorts of violent crimes.

A better move would be to de-densify poverty with mixed income housing, provide support resources, and build trust with police so people will report violent crimes.

> having their car broken into

Cars being broken in to? That's a different matter - I really don't think we have the capacity to police this in any meaningful way, it's a problem endemic to urban neighborhoods and is incredibly hard to police in a way that isn't super disproportionate.

Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.

The utilitarian in me feels like being exposed daily to random patdowns and harassments and having people jump out on you is much worse than that. Nobody should live in a neighborhood where the law enforcement doesn't treat them with dignity, just because of the color of their skin or their class background.

You can't cleanly separate what crimes you choose to care about from the policies in place. When voters tell elected officials "decrease car breakins, that's what impacts my vote" that'll translate to these disproportionate policies because the communities being policed do not have the power to sway the policy and it is easy to hide the impact of the policing from the voters.

I used to lock my car door. Then they cut open my soft top and slipped inside to steal my $4 in coins and a USB charger. My good driving record has my deductable to $0 - thank gosh - it was a $4k+ repair.

Now I just leave nothing of value inside the vehicle - even removed my glovebox (another thief ruined the locking mechanism trying to get it out).

I guess this is just a mystifying perspective to me. Car theft is impossible to entirely eradicate, I try to avoid showing valuables too, but I'd never live in an area where I expected my car to be broken into unless I had no other options. Maybe it's fine if other people are honestly okay with it?

> I'd never live in an area where I expected my car to be broken into unless I had no other options

I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so, very late at night and they would move very quickly. Many people have decided that it is worth their while to live there despite this minor inconvenience. If you don't want to live there, that's fine - but please don't vote for people who are going to institute stop & frisk and heavy policing of poor neighborhoods. Those policies don't even work to stop it - the cause is large wealth disparity in a small geographic region.

You may have the choice to live in a certain area, many do not have the choice to live in areas where they are subject to demeaning patdowns and stops.

Sure, that makes sense to me. I will certainly avoid moving to cities where people are okay with crimes, so I won't have an opportunity to vote in their elections.

> avoid moving to cities where people are okay with crimes

Pretty much every city is moving to less aggressive policing of petty crime largely because of its pretty blatant failure and the substantial negative impacts it has. Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

> I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so

> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

It rather sounds like you have a strange perspective on urban living. I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city. It isn't even normal for bad areas of cities. If it happens once in a person's life it would be bad luck.

> I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city.

I don't know how you have knowledge of the normal number of car break ins in every neighborhood of every city in Europe, but yes car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.

It's a function of the amount of inequity - Europe is generally has somewhat less wealth inequity in the United States and less generational poverty.

> car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.

> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

So the poster you replied to was correct to say that they can just move to cities where it isn't accepted that cars are frequently broken into. They don't have to stay safe in suburbia after all.

It is still quite frequent, if not as frequent as I experienced it (still, incidence is quite high in the Bay for instance). I don't really feel like mustering the mental energy to argue with what are ultimately pretty nit-picky objections.

In sum, car breaks in happen, policing it generally doesn't work very well, stop & frisk is bad, don't vote for people who do it, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

> cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so

As a Brazilian, wow, that's a high crime area. People here voted a crazy wannabe dictator into the presidency because he promised to fix places that were less bad than this.

Anyway, yes, random stop & frisk probably makes things worse, not better.

> that's a high crime area

Brazil's homicide rate is like 7x the United States, I find it hard to believe that the occasional opening of a door and looking through your car would be high crime by Brazilian standards where people will literally get stopped by armed gangs and kidnapped out of their car.

There were no murders where I lived, no muggings, no particularly violent crime of any kind - just some people would drive up to the rich neighborhoods at like 2:30 am and go through some cars.

I grew up in an okay neighborhood abutting a bad neighborhood (in the 80s and 90s the sounds of automatic gunfire were noteworthy but all too common). We didn't lock our doors (car or house) and 30 years bygone, somebody's car finally got broken into a couple of years ago.

The going logic is that the gang violence was isolated to their turf, and the property crime happened in the rich neighborhood on the other side of the housing projects. So there's sweet spots out there.

> We didn't lock our doors (car or house) and 30 years bygone, somebody's car finally got broken into a couple of years ago.

How would you know if your car got broken into if your doors were unlocked? What city was this (one of Baltimore, DC, Oakland, Chicago, NYC?)?

YMMV but it's not like car break-ins are rare.

This was in the south end of Seattle. People don't break into cars willy nilly, they steal shit. My brother's car recently got broken into (he's a broke musician but lives in a more affluent neighborhood) and they took everything not nailed down, including a ratty pair of shoes and the pad he used to track his gas mileage.

Fans are terrible this days, but tomorrow this shoes could worth millions so, just in case... better safe than sorry.

> don't lock your doors

Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?

> Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?

Do car thefts of this form even really happen anymore? How would they even prove the doors were unlocked?

When my car was stolen, my insurer asked whether I had locked the doors and enabled the security system. I assume this is standard procedure.

I am not sure whether a negative answer would have affected my claim.

I suspect it would have. I believe insurance plans can have exclusions for things like this. Not all that unreasonable - to consider the extreme case, would you want to insure someone who never uses their locks?

> Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.

Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.

Based on a quick google, you have about a ~0.01% chance of your airbag being stolen in a given year. How many black people should we stop and frisk to solve that problem, I'm a little rusty on the math?

Just because the original policing tactic that spawned this thread is abhorrent doesn't mean we can't discuss other possibilities here.

More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.

Here's what happens: Voters vote for someone who says they will do this thing "more on-foot friendly patrols", "catch actual criminals". Police obviously continue what they've always been doing and stop & frisk, harass minorities, etc, because that's generally what happens when you stuff poor neighborhoods full of cops from a completely different background to the community they are policing. Everyone pretends this is not what is happening until some particularly blatant instance brings it to light.

Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.

Okay, so voting like that won't lead to friendly patrols. That doesn't mean friendly patrols are a bad idea.

> friendly patrols are a bad idea.

Absolutely and I think there are models of policing that reduce petty crime and obviously people would rather have less petty crime than more. We are all in agreement here.

I just want people to be aware that the policing of their imagination is not always the policing of reality and oftentimes what your gut instinct tells you might work will have pretty large and distorted negative impacts.

I really do think we're all on the same side here. Nobody likes crime and nobody likes police excess. The problem is just that sometimes where we grew up and what experiences we've had can lead us to underestimate one impact and overestimate another.

I submit that any random searches by police breach our Constitutional Rights, are a form of mugging (or at least assault), and should be punished as such.

In tourist areas I'd quite like the police to be proactively stopping pickpockets and scam artists.

Again - you're discounting the negative secondary effects of the policy when the police start harassing people who "look" like pickpockets.

Reminder - more total money is stolen from workers in the form of wage theft than is robbed by a factor of ~3 [0], why don't we focus on policing that?

[0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

You target pickpockets by having the police pretend to be a tourist, then arresting anyone who tries to pickpocket them. There's no confusion or profiling going on.

And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.

It's not whataboutery in the context of limited policing resources and public attention. Accusations of tu quoque get thrown around way too quickly on the internet.

There’s limited resources. How is it whataboutism?

Arresting pickpockets may be an overall gain if tourists feel safe to go out and therefore spend. And rampant wage fraud also ought to be tackled, again possibly a net overall gain if that increases tax revenue. If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.

Is there evidence that pickpocketing is such a problem in the United States that it is making a dent in tourism spending? Is there evidence that policing it in this way makes a dent in the incidence of pickpocketing?

> If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.

Underfunded local institutions are the reality in most of the world, not the exception. I'd rather have bodies investigating people who are witholding wages and illegally paying below the minimum wage then spending their day pretending to be a tourist in the hope that someone pickpockets them.

It's odd - it seems among this class of HN commentator-cum-policymaker, evidence driven policy is an unknown concept.

Pickpockets are much more disruptive to your day than the known quantity of the wages you get not being theoretically as high as they should be. Personally if I was in such an area I'd fill my pockets with rusty nails.

> known quantity of the wages you get not being theoretically as high as they should be

When you're living in poverty, withheld wages is a much larger problem than your apparently daily encounters with aggressive pickpockets, are you kidding me?

What an incredibly tone deaf comment.

Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen: poor person might lose the majority of their net worth, not be able to get to their job and get fired, probably not be able to replace certain things, etc. potentially spiraling into much worse. Not to mention the effects on your feeling of security.

Wage theft: didn't get paid for doing something before clocking in or got their hours messed with or whatever, which is also very bad of course, but more spread out and not as directly disastrous as the other scenario even if the total numbers might be higher.

So no, it's not tone deaf if you look past your knee-jerk reaction, it's just a well-reasoned justification why someone might be more mad about thieves than wage theft. It's not unreasonable to have the view that one murder is worse than a trillion people stubbing their toes once a week for a year even if the second scenario might add up to a higher score if you added it up by some quantifiable ethical metric.

> Wage theft

Or like you're paid $6/hr to do migrant farm work when the minimum wage is $12. That adds up much more quickly and leads people to turn to things like theft.

That's already half your net worth right there.

> Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen

The average person, even the average person in poverty, is not going to lose the majority of their net worth from pickpocketing, that's just absurd.

Now you're adding in two other crimes, which you didn't mention in your original comment, (you just said pickpocketing is worse than wage theft). Most people in poverty don't own cars in the first place.

My reaction wasn't knee-jerk - the suggestion that pickpocketing is some sort of epidemic across America affecting the nation's poor is just absurd on face.

Robbery has a specific legal connotation and is not equivalent to theft.

Theft is the unlawful taking of property. Robbery is a subset of theft where violence or the threat of violence is used to accomplish the taking.

Pickpockets are thieves, not robbers.

You're absolutely right, I've edited my comment slightly.

I was making the assumption that total $ robbed was an upper bound on total $ pickpocket, which seems reasonable given what I've observed in the United States - but I am having trouble finding reasonable statistics about incidence in the United States.

There are lots of petty crimes on Wall Street too. Check out downtown Manhattan on a Friday night and you'll find plenty of people with illegal drugs...yet...the broken windows theory seems to focus only on select [poor] neighborhoods.

And that's a bad thing, but I'm sure you'd agree the right solution isn't for the police to permit lots of crime in poor neighborhoods.

It comes down to judgment. It's the difference between a cop writing a ticket to someone who's going 5 mph over the speed limit but driving safely and someone who's going 30 mph over while weaving in and out of traffic.

While both are technically illegal, one is low risk and socially accepted behavior, while the other presents a real threat to many people's safety.

When police seek out and punish the first kind of behavior, people see it as predatory. When it's the second, most people are thankful.

In many poor communities, police seem to have their priorities exactly backwards: they zealously seek out and punish petty victimless crimes, while not investigating serious crimes due to a lack of resources.

Great analogy to relate towards policing that everyone is familiar with.

"Permitting crime" and not hassling everyone who looks a certain way or is in a certain area are two VERY different things.

People are harassed and delayed for no reason just because of the way they look or where they are coming/going from, even if its their neighborhood. They're also ticketed for minor offenses due to those same "reasons" meanwhile people elsewhere are not having those same offenses punished. You will find plenty of stories from people who lives in neighborhoods where this was applied where you literally have to allow extra time to come and go from your own home because its likely you will be stopped and questioned just going about your daily lives. That would not fly in more affluent communities.

"Proactive Policing" allows implicit and other biases of the police force to be acted on directly because there needs to be no crime to stop someone, its entirely on the polices judgement on who to stop and why.

Permitting petty crime would be a better solution than many alternatives. One such worse solution would be, for example, proactive, racially and economically discriminatory policing, ruining fragile, impoverished, limited-opportunity lives and breeding distrust, while simultaneously ignoring white-collar crime in rich neighborhoods.

So inversely, it is the right solution for police to permit lots of crime in well-off areas.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

Poor people are certainly exposed to bad policing more often, but I don't think they see the entire concept of law enforcement as unequal. Most people across all income groups don't commit or approve of crimes.

>> And that's a bad thing, but I'm sure you'd agree the right solution isn't for the police to permit lots of crime in poor neighborhoods.

I'm not sure if your comment was satire or not. But if it isnt satire -- it is exactly why so many people are so angry.

The privileged attitude is best summarized as: yes, i'm doing something criminal, but so is that PoC, lets go after the PoC [while ignoring my crimes].

This is injustice because true justice is blind, not a tool for selective oppression.

Monthly reminder that more total money is stolen in the form of wage theft from poor workers than is robbed in any form. [0]

[0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Two points: 1. Broken windows is bad policing strategy. 2. The 'crimes' in downtown manhattan shouldn't be crimes, victimless crime isn't a crime.

Those areas are everywhere; they’re only selectively enforced in neighborhoods of color. White people don’t smoke weed, for instance? The huge rush of white folks into “legal” weed business suggests that’s not the case. But how many teenage boys in the suburbs are harassed and arrested and need to be bailed out? Imagine if all white people were stopped when they’re out in their neighborhood and actually had all those “petty” crimes enforced. (1) the policy would change overnight and (2) the arrest rate and mistrust of police would skyrocket.

I believe that petty crime is the cost of a free society.

Strong arm tactics used by police do not stop it. It is simply going to happen. Spending resources to make sure everyone has what they need will drop petty crime rates.

this is all my opinion.

What you're basically saying is, "sure, this and various experiences show that this kind of policing might make things worse, but hey, at least they have good intentions". Well, plenty of terrible things have been done with good intentions.

This is one of the things I really dislike about a lot of politics, I see it all too often. There's a problem, so we need to do something in the name of fixing it - doesn't matter if it helps or not, we just have to be able to say we're doing something. But maybe we should step back and look at whether there are better ways to deal with the problems.

We should step back and look! What concerns me about policing is that a lot of proposals seem to reduce to ignoring the problem; there's a particular famous city a bit north of me where it's just become accepted that the streets should be covered in poop and shattered window glass. So I'm skeptical of alternatives which can't clearly explain how they will stop people from doing crimes.

> Poop and shattered window glass

These are symptoms of wealth inequality. Do you see wealthy people going around defecating on the ground or breaking glass? No. Do you see middle class people doing these actions? No. These are actions taken by homeless people (and teenagers), who have nothing worth while to do with their time, no money for idle entertainment, and awful living conditions.

This just strikes me as an intensely disrespectful hypothesis. Poor people and teenagers are people just like you and I; the vast majority of them are good citizens who feel no impulse to do crimes or poop on the street.

Singapore has some ideas.

Disneyland with the death penalty. No thanks.

I prefer to live in a society that doesn't execute non-violent drug dealers.

Community policing is the solution to the problems that broken window policing attempts to and fails at solving. It involves building rapport with the local community so that the community and police can work together to solve the problems in the community.