Except we are [0]. Here's the breakdown of why people are in jail (numbers rounded)

- Drug offenses: 46%

- Weapons, Explosives, Arson: 20%

- Sex Offenses: 11%

- Extortion, Fraud, Bribery: 6%

- Immigration: 5%

- Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses: 5%

- Robbery: 3%

- Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses: 3%

So drugs vs (WEA + BLPO + R + HAAKO) is 46% vs 39%. Last I checked 46 > 39, so yeah we are talking about things like pot.

[0] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

__EDIT__: It appears that the parent has removed their comment, so let me add context. Here I'm responding to the parent's claim that you can outright dismiss drug related crimes because it is all about violent offenses. I'm just trying to show that drugs play a big role and thus dismissing them is naive.

These are federal offenses only. Most crime is prosecuted at the state level and the majority of that isn't drug offenses.

And the people in federal prison for drugs don't get there by smoking pot on their front porch. They're mostly there for trafficking.

That's a good point. I did address the other levels here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655174 but it was harder to find more of a breakdown in the data.

I don't have a link handy but it's around 15% of the total prison population who are in for drug offences.

I do have a link handy: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Thanks! So between 10 & 20% are in for drugs -- the lower figure if I try to exclude trafficking (although roughly, as they don't always break it down). And this means "in for nothing harder than drugs" since they are counting by the worst conviction.

It is mind-blowing how misleading this is. You should really consider editing your post. The majority of people in state prisons are there for VIOLENT CRIMES, and the plurality of people in local jails are there for violent crimes.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

But you're also missing the point. I was responding to a comment that said we should dismiss drug related crimes. Maybe that is missing now that the person removed that comment but essentially they said

> we're not talking about drug, we're talking about violent crime.

So my response was more in the lines of "we can't dismiss drugs when they are a big factor."

Note: this is also why HN tries to prevent editing, because now the context of what I was responding to is completely lost.

>Here's the breakdown of why people are in jail:

Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.

My point is that outright dismissing drug related charges is ludicrous. But it appears that the parent edited their comment to the point of removal so this context was lost. I have edited my response to clarify.

Don't even know why I'm going to bother, but most of those drug offenses are trafficking crack/cocaine and meth, a large percentage of them also involve weapons. It's not people who were smoking weed on the porch.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf

You're being very selective. Federal prison only accounts for 22.3% of drug offending inmates[0]. Specifically in jails -- where 74% of occupants are not currently charged -- possession accounts for 56% of drug related offenses. Drugs accounts for 21% of occupants, (23% of convictions, 25.5% of non-convicted). In state prisons possession accounts for 25.5% of drug related offenses and 3.5% of the total state prison.

Jails, County, State, and Federal prisons are all different. It would definitely make sense that the more serious convictions, especially with harder drugs, goes to federal. That's kinda the point of federal...

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Back to the preventive vs reactive. If you legalize all drugs, sell the harsh drugs in a controlled setting, the existing black markets would be destroyed. This argument will continue to be a circle, if we are saying "x people arrested" but "y shouldnt be a crime in the first place" "well y has to be illegal, look how much x we have."

All of the money put into cops, lawyers, prosecution, sentencing, prison, parole, etc could be put into tackling the consequences of legal use.

All of the money currently flowing into the black market, into gangs, into crime and violence causers, would try up.

4 in 10 arrests are marijuana related of those "As has long been the case, around nine-in-ten U.S. marijuana arrests are for possessing the drug, rather than selling or manufacturing it."

How many of those that graduated to crack/meth etc. started out with simple marijuana arrests?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/22/four-in-ten...

The difference is looking at federal prisons vs arrests and other prisons. Federal is for more egregious crimes, so it would make sense that less of them are for pot and more for harsher drugs.

It is difficult, but we have to try to be aware of the biases in the data we have. I should have mentioned in my first post that those were just federal stats. But I try to break down more in another comment state and jails, specifically about possession statistics.

I don't know, I was just pointing out the fact that people in federal prison are not there for smoking weed on the porch. I don't have the numbers handy, but I would guess that a vast majority of the marijuana arrests in your article result in a fine or probation at the very most.

Which I happen to agree is a waste of resources and probably does more harm than good by getting people started "in the system".

> so yeah we are talking about things like pot.

Only if you want to talk about the non-violent half to paint a picture that it’s pointless.

For the sake of discussion, assume pot is legal and those drug arrests didn’t happen. Low income areas still have higher rates of violent crime.

Is your argument that drug criminalization is causing other violent crimes?

Drug criminalization causes some but certainly not all violent crime.

Creating an unregulated black market for which there is high demand always increases violent crime.

My point is dismissing drugs from the equation is dumb when it makes up almost half the convictions.

Is that global statistics or statistics for "over policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is about?

> Is that global statistics or statistics for "over policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is about?

Neither, it is US statistics.

Getting specifically the "over policed neighborhoods" statistics is a little trickier but when you do some location of arrest lookups you do see a higher percentage of arrests coming from those neighborhoods, so it would make for a reasonable assumption that those neighborhoods are a representative demographic of this dataset (if you're drawing from two jars and you draw 80% from one jar and 20% from the second jar, the marbles you have is a better representation of the contents of the first jar than they are of the second jar).

> We’re talking rape, burglary, murder, vandalism, and assault... Conversely, low-income neighborhoods have tons of hardcore crime like I’ve described.

Tons?

Rape seems an unnecessarily emotional grab here, since most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows and aren't restricted by income.

Vandalism happens everywhere as well.

> It’s always the people in the white upper-class neighborhoods who think the police are the problem.

My mom grew up poor and told me to not trust the police and certainly not let them in the house without a warrant.

> ...because they celebrate...

Who is "they", in this context?

"Tons." "Always." "They." Your language suggests an agenda that you're presenting in absolutes.

I was more upset that the parent was implying that his neighborhood would have equal arrest numbers if the police had been more present on account of his pot smoking. I hope everyone can see what a stupid argument that is and that’s the hill I’m willing to die on here.

> There are tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there had been more cops around I would have gone to jail.

That's what the person you replied to said. Not that more police would have been more arrests based on (just) their pot smoking, but on other behavior as well. I saw a lot of vandalism that led to kids being dragged by their ears back to their parents in middle-class neighborhoods, that would've resulted in arrests (even for misdemeanors) for kids in poor neighborhoods (where I've also lived and seen this difference).

In white neighborhoods small crimes would lead to police dragging the kid home, in minority neighborhoods they'd end up with a misdemeanor record (at least). All of this creates a bias in the algorithms which generally assume that someone with a criminal record of some sort is going to be a higher risk individual (which is probably a safe assumption for many crimes), but it is biased because people aren't charged with crimes at equal rates due to the biases in the existing system that these algorithms are more likely to exacerbate than alleviate. Now that the minority community has a thicker criminal record, the policing in that neighborhood continues to go up which continues to create increased conflict between the police and residents as the police end up arresting people for increasingly minor offenses, along with the major ones.

A lack of policing or difference in attitude of the police in poor and/or minority communities versus middle-class/wealthy and/or white communities is very much present in the US (and probably the world). This leads algorithms like those under discussion to end up inheriting the same or similar biases, whether the developers and marketers intended it or not.

I think maybe you're missing the point? I don't think the parent was implying that there'd be equal arrest numbers.

The difference is that if you send all the cops to the "bad neighborhoods", then the "good neighborhoods" get away with a lot of crime, even if that crime is low-level.

Let's say all neighborhoods have 100 instances of low-level crime per day. A so-called "bad" neighborhood -- where most of the cops get sent to -- also has instances of much worse crime.

The end result of this officer allocation scheme is that people get arrested in the "bad" neighborhood for a mix of low-level crime and worse crime. But pretty much no one at all gets arrested in the "good" neighborhood, because there's basically no police presence there. So maybe you see in the "good" neighborhood a handful of arrests for those 100 instances of low-level crime, but in the "bad" neighborhood you see 60 arrests for that similar crime. (You also see arrests for more severe crime, but that's not the point.)

I'm of course making up numbers here, but regardless of the magnitude of the numbers, even if they differ between neighborhoods, the percentage of crime handled ends up being much lower in the "good" neighborhoods because of the simple fact that police aren't there to handle it. Sure, they'll come out if called, but response time is longer, and they have very little ability to see things happening in real-time.

Meanwhile, if you feed this data into your algorithm, it will start to believe that there's basically no low-level crime in the "good" neighborhoods -- even though it's the same! -- so it prioritizes those neighborhoods even less.

If you feed an algorithm bad data, it will only give you more bad data. And it becomes worse when you act on that data and feed it more results based on that bad data.

That very specific qualm doesn't mean that increased police presence helps though in the higher crime neighborhood. See my previous response, but basically all things can be true.

It can (and evidence supports that) at ac basic level:

1. There are more crimes committed in one neighborhood than another

2. Increasing police presence in the higher crime neighborhood does not decrease the occurrence of such crimes

3. Increased police presence leads to unjustified disproportionate enforcement of smaller violations being broken equally by both neighborhoods

Your original reply goes much farther than simply claiming less natural crime, and then adds a lot of armchair sociology without backing. When you ask rhetorical questions and follow with "I don't know", you are implying without evidence and it's not a constructive argument that appears in good faith.

Given a long enough timeline of increased arrests, police presence and assumption of guilt, why would my neighborhood not eventually have the same number of arrests and crime. Unless your argument is that there is something physically different in the other neighborhood that drives them towards crime. If that's your argument and I am having a hard time seeing what else it could be then I think we are done here.

Of course poor neighborhoods are going to have higher crime. Unless you have been truly poor you won’t understand the sense of desperation that can lead to bad decisions.

You grow up in a food scarce household with a parent addicted to painkillers with no guidance on what a path to a successful future is and crime becomes a lot more palatable. Getting in the game starts to look like the only possible way to “make it”.

I agree. Every time there is an article like this you get the same arguments, the same discussions, and the same comments. Back and forth, back and forth, over and over again.

But if you actually bother to do some reading on the subject the conclusions are overwhelmingly clear. Over and over again social programs show very clearly that if you improve education and give people better opportunities to escape the poverty trap and better themselves you reduce crime.

The formula is simple really: if you give people opportunities to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make an honest living; if you don't give people the opportunity to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make a dishonest living.

I agree with you but my question is does increased police presence lead to a poor neighborhood. Take for example a middle class white neighborhood. If there was a sudden and very visible increased presence over years, arresting people for minor offences, watching everyone and questioning everyone, would that neighborhood become a poor neighborhood. I think it would. I think people who could would move out, property values would drop and the people who could not move out would have a higher predisposition to crime as they were worked into the system.

I agree. The use of 'they' to refer to a group of people is very problematic.

> We’re not taking about specious arguments like pot arrests and improper turn signals. We’re talking rape, burglary, murder, vandalism, and assault.

Look at arrest data, the former is exactly what we're talking about. Most of these cases of police brutality come from basically random stops that focus on such minor violations (turn signals, jaywalking, etc) or "your car/description matches a potential subject". See parent and weed usage vs who gets caught with weed.

Not to mention that you throw in rape/murder/assault into a sentence with vandalism. Police have a historically terrible track record with rapes in both processing cases as well as no record of stopping them. Police react to these incidents, not prevent them. The idea that police presence stops these is not supported either as when police reduced their presence in NYC neighborhoods, crime actually went down.[1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

I agree up until you say "few good people living in those neighbourhoods" it's the other way around .. you'd be amazed at how few people are generally responsible for crime in any given area.

I’ve been to plenty of protests in low income areas, and the push to defund the police is coming from them, not the higher income areas.

A question to ask is what are the demographics? Is the support a plurality, old people, young people, homeowners, a silent majority a vocal minority, do we know?

Seemed to me to be made up of a wide variety of demographics, but organized by respected community leaders who typically are homeowners in the areas they live.

I hear what you are saying but disagree to a point. How many of these people getting arrested for the serious crimes have pre existing arrests / convictions for minor crimes? Once you have a couple of minor arrests and you are in the system, finding a career and advancing yourself becomes increasingly difficult. I would make an uneducated assumption that if they had not gotten the minor infractions and had a future perhaps the major infractions would not have happened. With that said there are always going to be bad people that require police intervention. Further adding to this if you grow up in an environment where there is a high criminal element you may be more predisposed to it, starting with minor infractions like marijuana use and then you are arrested and the self fulfilling prophecy repeats.

Massively increased policing has created the environment in which many of these people are born and turn to crime. If you are constantly treated like a criminal, you may come to think of yourself as one.

In the UK we have what's know as youth offending services, the main aim of which is to keep youths out of the courts and criminal system by utilising more appropriate methods of disposal for minor offences like drug possession.

This seems like a great idea. We should not be essentially damning people to a much more challenging life due to youthful indiscretions. Obviously some crimes are worse than others.