If memory serves, the rise in incarceration rates can be traced back to the failed war on drugs, which incarcerated many non-violent (often black) offenders. There is also a tough-on-crime stance, in part due to the fact that US sheriffs and judges compete in local elections, leading to aberrations such as mandatory minimum sentencing.
As for health spending, a lot of the spending can be traced to inefficiencies, and predatory pricing by hospitals, drug companies, and medical device manufacturer. The lack of centralized information for insurance and payments (note that I don't blame insurers) also creates huge administrative costs.
Those are both complex topics, so I don't claim to have captured all aspects, and I may have some of the details wrong, but I would say it's a good first approximation.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
Can you expand on this?
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?
In the shadow of the salesforce tower and probably trillions of dollars of market cap, this is what we see? Wtf
Glad you asked. First of all who is committing the crimes, USA and Switzerland?
I don't know if there is publicly available data for Switzerland but for the USA there is:
https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
check the "All Violent Crime Offender vs. Victim Demographics" tables. The numbers are absolute values, so you'd need to calculate the per capita values.
>Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighborhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence.
Trying to reduce those issues has been ongoing policy in the last years. Yes they are important, but they are not the only factor.
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 and fabricates stats
This, but unironically
If you can't see what their gist was, well, that's a you thing.
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.
I hope you're only playing dumb.
Also "FBI crime stats" is probably one of the loudest dog whistles, more like a fog horn at this point.
You're the bad guy here. No two ways about it.
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?
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.
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.
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?
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. The legality of the death sentence is a clear violation of human rights, for example.
I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.
Yup, this is a cultural thing. In the US, people (in general) want criminals to be punished, they don't put too much value in rehabilitation. It's very different from many European countries which is visible in sentencing.
> I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.
On the contrary, there's much more crime in the US than most western countries. Whether this has anything to do with punishment vs rehabilitation is impossible to say though. I personally think that lack of many social services is more to blame. Things like social security, public housing mixed with private, health care, workers rights, et cetera mean less people end up in criminality in the first place.
Recidivism rates unfortunately are extremely hard to compare due to the methods and sentencing being extremely different.
If the US has a higher incarceration rate it's extremely likely that it has "more crime" because incarceration is supposed to be a punishment for doing crimes. The question is how the definition of those crimes compares to other countries. E.g. do you consider possession of cannabis a crime because it is illegal on a federal level? Former US President Bill Clinton used cannabis before it was legalized in any US state, so was that a crime?
For a real world case of this nebulous concept of "crime" as an opaque quantity consider immigration: even if they commit fewer violent crimes, it's still entirely possible for an immigrant to be more prone to crime simply because they are subject to additional legal requirements citizens aren't and failing to comply with any of them may qualify as a criminal offense. Just by their legal status they are able to commit an entire category of crimes others can't. Whether you think that is justified or not, they can literally be criminals for behaving exactly the same way as a non-criminal citizen would.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...
Well, as it turns out, some of the key ideas taught focused on the rational economic theory, and extrapolated from there to crime and punishment - e.g.: a criminal makes a cold economic calculation before commit each crime, taking into account the expected gain from this crime, the likelihood of getting caught, the expected punishment if caught, etc. - and therefor, if we make the "cost" higher, by opting for harsher prison sentences - crime will become less attractive and therefore happen less.
When the data is analyzed, justices that went through this program appear to hand out harsher sentences to offenders, and often rule in favor of corporations and against government agencies when compared to the control group. The effect is most evident for judges that used to learn more to the liberal side, which is surprising to me, but it definitely is interesting.
Either they are overly violent or overly incarcerating people, both are "something bad"
Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in...
This is a general charge in Rwanda, which is a dictatorship still run by the commander of the ethnic army that sparked the genocide by killing the president and massing at the border to invade. They recently imprisoned the guy Hotel Rwanda was about as a terrorist. And like you say, they're still less of a police state than the US.
Perhaps it is a violent society because of a deeply-ingrained fear of violence. Frightened people are more likely to assume a situation is threatening, and respond with violence. And imprisonment is a form of violence; nobody voluntarily takes themselves off to prison on judge's orders. The more likely you are to be imprisoned, the more likely you will risk a shoot-out with cops.
There seem to be a lot of people in the USA that take a strongly retributive attitude to justice: e.g. "Close the prisons, criminals should just be shot like mad dogs".
The purpose of a criminal justice system is to protect the public by enforcing the law, not to embody some moral posturing about the fruits of wickedness.
Most crime pays terribly, being a street drug dealer barely pays minimum wage and involves immense risk. Opportunities for some in the US are so bad that they choose terrible jobs (high risk, bad pay) at far higher rates than people do in other countries. Jobs that, in addition, come at a moral/reputational cost (your family is angry at you, other careers are closed off to you once you have a record.)
> perhaps the US is a violent society
What does this even mean? Of course it is a violent society. This is just a vague innuendo that this violence is impossible to fix and intrinsic to the US; it's just question-begging.
See https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ and https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... for some numbers - prison populations massively spiked over the course of a couple decades, but while crime rates have come down massively prison populations have not declined nearly as much.
Based on the number of people in US jails and prisons who are awaiting trial - not even convicted of a crime - or there for minor offenses due to policies like "three strikes", it's hard to argue that massive incarceration is actually what's making us safer.
I understand that prisons don't necessarily fix the crime problem, but the thing we probably all agree on is that fixing crime is not something trivial at all, and until we know the exact causes of crime, and start to tackle them one by one, we need to do something immediate about crime because life here is frankly unbearable. Random shootings, shoplifting, assault, hate crimes, and muggings are all too common here.
I'm unable to even think about starting a family in this environment.
A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more.
Glad to hear any thoughts about this.