This is not my understanding at all.
Crime seems to have fallen during the Great Depression. Murders, which are almost always reported, fell.
Things get complicated once mass surveys replace crime reports.
Rape almost certainly increased when marital rape was outlawed. Embezzlement almost certainly decreased when cash registers were implemented.
One common way to “get rid of crime” is to gentrify, which inevitably lowers crime in a specific geographic area.
Another way to “get rid of crime” is to send criminals to prisons, where it’s extremely difficult to report crimes, and surveys of victimhood are never conducted.
I’m open to being convinced on this, but I don’t think the “mainly” cause of crime is poverty.
[0] Here's one example: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-ra...
"Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is:
https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_200...
Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)".
It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence. The evidence does not support this view.
I don't know if I said anywhere that poverty is the only contributing factor, or is fully required for crime to occur (clearly white collar crime is a counterexample), but I do strongly believe that it is a leading factor for many varieties of crime, particularly the "guns and drugs on the table" types of crimes that the police love to prosecute. Thanks for your condescending evaluation of my motivations and your correction of my language summarizing a study. I disagree that "very strong" isn't a useful descriptor of quantitative findings, but I suppose everyone is free to have their own preferences. Sorry for your frustration, but I do think that it's misguided.
> The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)".
Unsure how strong your understanding of multivariate regression is, but I would imagine that including two big covariates of poverty in an analysis would reduce the effect size of the actual poverty variable. "Family disruption" seems like another big correlate of poverty. The link you provided doesn't work for me so can't investigate any of these deeper, but I imagine that drawing out a little causal diagram of all these possible causes might help you reconcile the study you found with the one I provided. Have a good one!
This is simply and empirically wrong, but you're free to believe it if you find simple falsehoods more comfortable than nuanced truths.
> I’m tired of people’s political views unleashing this group of people in my neighborhood.
People need to stop using "political" when they mean "contrary to my prejudices about the world".
> I would appreciate another approach.
Likewise.
In your own words, the truth might be more nuanced than the current falsehood-du-jour.
Exhibit A: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37738543#37756115a
> Indicators of "concentrated disadvantage" (e.g., racial heterogeneity, poverty, and family disruption) are among the strongest and most stable predictors.
Absolutely nothing in the article being discussed in this comment aligns with the comment I was replying to:
> It’s no mystery that “guns and drugs on the table” crime is perpetrated by low-IQ psychopaths
Moreover, I both saw and discussed this article, so it's absolutely not the case that I'm ignoring inconvenient truths. The truths under discussion are both extremely convenient to my point, and directly addressed by me.
> https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_200...
Err, not for me, it isn't.
So I looked up the Pratt/Cullen 2005 paper (https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/655357), and right off the bat, the abstract doesn't seem to agree with you:
> Indicators of "concentrated disadvantage" (e.g., racial heterogeneity, poverty, and family disruption) are among the strongest and most stable predictors.
Also, what makes you think your counterexamples are unrelated to poverty? I would expect "unemployment length" and "poverty" to be HIGHLY correlated, and unemployment is #2 on the list.
Also there are many shared traits that both increase you risk of poverty and criminality, such as poor impulse control.
I'm not surprised by this, one would expect things like the ease of getting a weapon, cultural norms, and social welfare services to have big interactions with the poverty - crime relationships.
> And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.
This is not as clear to me, though I imagine it also strongly depends on the type of theft under consideration. Certainly I concede that most theft in the US is probably not pure Jean Valjean-style "I just needed a loaf of bread", but in my experience the people committing like smash+grabs out of a parked car are not typically very affluent. Maybe they're doing this because they can't afford the iPhone they want since all their savings went to rent and food, but I don't think you can fully say that it's purely "desire" causing them to act criminally.
Re the poor impulse control side of things, I think it would be very hard to isolate the causal direction between it and poverty. I can imagine someone working multiple part time jobs to get by is going to have a harder time controlling their impulses purely out of fatigue and stress. Not sure if this is what you're thinking
In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality. Also in my personal life I know people who are poor and rich and too a man everyone I know who's committed the types of crimes we care about had some combination of poor impulse control or psychopathy.
So someone working more hours at a legit job is less likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one, more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of some personal traits which correlate negatively with criminality.
> In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality.
I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results. I absolutely don't dispute that impulse control causally effects crime. I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education. Someone in tons of debt who can't afford to pay for rent or food is probably not going to feel like they have much to lose, and therefore may not care too much about the consequences of their actions.
Agreed
> I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results.
I definitely did forget to link the study. I'd try to find it again if it was a point of contention but it doesn't sound like it is.
> I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education.
I think peer group and culture have a large impact. I'm not aware of any studies showing you can train self-control in any meaningful sense (if we could we wouldn't need to put so many people on adderall). And I'd be surprised if we can't train self-control when we try to train it, but are very successful at training it at school where we aren't specifically trying to train it.
Also just from personal experience I've seen a few poor->rich and rich->poor transitions and it didn't seem to meaningfully affect their personality. But if you have studies or anecdotes that tell a different story, I'd love to hear them.
That doesn't mean causation. The same behaviors and character flaws of a person will both make them poor and make them commit crime. A man that is unreliable, selfish and violent will be unemployable. He will also be inclined to crime because of those personal traits. What's interesting is the underlying reasons why people turn out to be that way, but people rarely want to have that discussion. They judge the world as they judge themselves, and they know that they would have little qualms about committing violent crime if they were broke.
You might be interested to learn about the field of causal statistical analysis. There are many, many ways that a researched might infer a causal relationship from observational data. No doubt each individual case is complicated, but I trust professional researchers over your armchair epicyclic theory of the causes of crime.
edit: here's a more recent meta-analysis helpfully linked elsewhere in the thread which confirms the findings https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/655357
Punchline is:
"""
Across all studies, social disorganization and resource/economic deprivation theories receive strong empirical support; anomie/strain, social support/social altruism, and routine activity theories receive moderate support; and deterrence/rational choice and subcultural theories receive weak support.
"""
Not sure what kind of meta review was occurring in your link, but there's lots of evidence that adding more police would reduced crime in US cities: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/100/1/167/58429...
Basically every type of crime rate goes down for every cop you add, with murder going down the most. You might be arguing that for a fixed level of policing, most criminal behavior is explained by desperation, but adjusting the level of policing is the most effective way to change the level of crime.
This also intuitively checks out: you could have ~0 crime in a dystopian police state with high levels of desperation, but you would definitely have crime in a police-free state with no desperation (lots of well-off, rich people commit crimes!).
* Motivated perpetrator
* Vulnerable victim
* Lack of guardianship
Presence of police reduces factor 3, increase in socioeconomic deprivation increases factor 1. It’s unclear to me how you can confidently make the statement that “more police is the most effective” as that doesn’t seem to be attested to anywhere in that study (though I can only read the abstract), however thinking about the balance of these three factors brings our two arguments somewhat into line.
I'm breaking one right now.
"why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that?
Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate.
> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics.
I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
"Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default. They are people engaging in different patterns of behavior. They act this way for understandable, and often rational reasons. You're welcome to whatever mental model of the world you want, but in my view you're being unhelpfully reductionist.
> I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. The type of drug used clearly matters in some contexts (eg. public health), but in the context of arresting "criminals" I don't really care whether its fent or their grandma's oxy. The point is that abusing both are crimes, and that type of crime is everywhere.
> Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
I agree! Have a nice day :)
Is that some new curse word? Reducing a problem to its root causes is another term for "science."
> No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion.
"Obtuse"? you're the one who said "drugs are everywhere." You're the one making obtuse statements you can't support. No one's upset about rich people doing drugs, because they're not the ones smashing car windows.
this sounds like something you like to believe, rather than anything that comes out of studying actual criminals.
Psychologists who study real criminals in prisons report a very high level of psychopathy. AFAIK there is no treatment for that.
> "Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default.
actually, all the evidence through history says that they are a "universal entity," given that every civilized society has them. Maybe you're imagining some sort of ideal society that doesn't have them, but in our real world, we do.
And the word "criminals" does not need quotation marks.
> I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate.
What exactly is the problem in there? If you're for "human rights" you can't be objective? Everything else just seems to be a summary of her research results.
Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate for policies that improve survival outcomes so they maintain the profile of an objective scientist?
It's not that someone who is "for" something can't be objective, it's just that there is a strong likelihood that they ~aren't~ being objective. It doesn't mean an advocate doesn't have valuable perspectives, it just means that you should perhaps take them with a grain of salt.
> Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate for policies that improve survival outcomes so they maintain the profile of an objective scientist?
So again I'll ask: specifically what is the "something" listed on that page[1] that would lead you to believe this person is better considered an advocate and not an "objective scientist"?
The fact remains that a lot of people you might not think are drug users actually are. You're just not seeing them because they're functional people who lead ordinary lives. There's a whole host of different subcultures where drug use might be accepted beyond the desperate poor. And those subcultures generally have different norms around what is acceptable and what gets you shunned.
The police will arrest you just the same whether they catch you with a couple of MDMA pills or a baggy of crack.
Your question is flawed: "Upscale people" can afford different drug-habits and different drugs... Or even the same drug in a different form-factor that gets a different name.
That confusion is really important to recognize and eradicate, because we've already seen it used for evil and human suffering.
It has lead (and may yet lead) to incredibly biased laws where two people getting caught with the same amount of the same chemical received insanely different punishments, all based on whether they were carrying the the "low class" cheaper form or the "upscale" fancy form.
Your own question echoes this: You demanded proof of "crack" (cocaine) specifically, but not "powdered". In the past, 5g of crack cocaine would cause a mandatory minimum 5-year prison term, while "upscale people" with 499g of powdered cocaine didn't have to worry about that.
It was believed to be so much “worse” than powdered because crack was used as a means to vilify black communities while powdered circulated in white communities with must more lenient punishments.
I have smoked cocaine before (on a blunt with cannabis) and it felt like I felt something but who knows.
They don't smoke crack, they snort powdered cocaine, or do pills. They don't start (But they sometimes end) with fent, or heroin, or meth, they start with oxy and adderral.
A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.
I think the sad part is: that's the point.
Departments were coming under fire for bad policing and needed to offload the blame. So they pay millions to some vendor to launder their bad policing through an algorithm and give them a scapegoat when they need it.
These days, in places like SF and Seattle, people just freely use their drugs on the street while cops just look on. But it is just one segment of the population that is doing it out in the open (unhoused), and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing).
> mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class
As far as crime goes, shoplifting rings, at least in our area, is mostly about drugs. You shoplift a lego set from Target, and get some fent in return from your ring leader. But ya, social norms are completely out the window at that point, and we are just seeing the end of that path.
Most of the shoplifters are too lol!
Of course some people might disagree with this intervention as "simplistic". And they'd be at least a little right. For those people who may not have read "Leverage points: Where to intervene in a system" by Dana Meadows, I highly recommend it to see why.
Turns out that messing with parameters like money, and feedback loops that constitute a "criminal justice system" are the least effective of all actions. The fundamental values of the system must be addressed. One of those is itself the error that "cybernetic governance" based on software can do anything more than enrich a few software companies.
You don’t need predictive policing to identify areas of high crime (in fact, identification of areas of high crime is an input to predictive policing.)
> then that’s a sign of poverty,
Poverty information is also an input to predictive policing, not something it provides you information about that you didn't already have, even in the fantasy world where it works well.
> the root cause of crime
Poverty is not the root cause of crime. It may be a root cause of some crime.
edit: Sarcasm aside... My serious point is; just what exactly is this software trying to achieve? Isn't this whole caper a solution looking for a problem dreamed up by people who have tech and nothing to do with it, and no grounding in basic human values?
A typical healthy 25 year-old does not go to the doctor, like, ever.
On the other hand the population of 25 year-old drug users will have a higher rate of interaction with the medical system.
Anyone can lie with statistics, but this isn’t really how ML works. Such a model would not appear to perform well, in addition to not performing well.
If you had a model that predicted the probability of getting a drug arrest it should work just fine even if you give it an abundance of examples of going to the same area if it as still the same rate as other places. That is to say it should not learn these areas are different
But it would be very easy to do something like to predict the probability that a cop makes an arrest given they went to each area. And if there’s no difference in the areas, it should not matter how many times they went there. The rates should be the same.
It seems likely that the models were right and that it’s way easier to make drug arrests in these areas, which was kind of baked into the original premise. So it’s not clear why blaming the modeling is an issue here.
The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some mode overfitting. Like would you blink if I told you the probability of being able to make a drug arrest in a poor area was 20% higher? Probably not. Does that need to mean that you only go to the poor area? No.
Sure I don't disagree with this. I guess the point is not so much that ML models are bad here in the typical sense (although greedy consultants may, and IMO likely are, happy to pawn off shitty models to jurisdictions which don't know any better), but more that the underlying system isn't one where predictive modeling is truly going to be "effective" (although, as another commenter pointed out, there are cases where predictive modeling works fairly well such as pretrial detention risk assessment). The problem as I see it is that model "efficacy" means one thing to the cops and voters ("effective" in the sense of reducing or preventing crime) and another thing to a data science ("effective" in the sense of able to achieve a high F1 score or w/e). These definitions may be correlated, but are not guaranteed to be, and the strength of the correlation is highly dependent on how the model is ultimately used.
One would except drug usage to go down in neighborhoods where it is slightly enforced meaning that they should move on to another location. If there is a problem population which never gets better then permanently having increased coverage would make sense.
I don’t think that follows at all. People like to be intoxicated in/near their homes.
Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a situation where most people are commiting crimes because... they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.
I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the discussion but it may also miss an important consideration. Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability. It's a balancing act.
The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).
To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.
So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.
Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.
That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.
> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st...
The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...
So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-...
Not everyone who is white today was white 100 years ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prohibition+anti+immigrant
Take your pick.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
And thus is the pyramid scheme maintained.
Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
State data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
Federal data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
Combined:
Violent crime (2020): 662,347
Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
With that said, there is massive disparity in federal crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple possession'
https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-population...
yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
as far as Sweden https://www.statista.com/statistics/534214/sweden-persons-se...
3237 people in Swedish Prison for drug offenses
Sweden has a population of over 10 million so less than 0.03%
going by this https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarce... I figure the American rate must be 0.2%
It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not have a large number of people incarcerated for drug possession.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
With the caveat to your caveat that "sales" in the US tends to include anything above 1 or 2 doses. I'm no bartender, but I'll still buy beer by the twelve pack.
Assuming you even get to a jury trial. For most pseudo-distribution cases like this, the defendant is going to plead out, because they know they're dead to rights on the possession charge, and if the judge throws the book at them for that then they may well have been better off taking the distribution plea deal.
If you're caught in possession of a couple grams of coke, then the prosecutor is going to want to get you on distribution. They can say something like "You will be found guilty of possession, we both know that. If you plead guilty on both counts, we can recommend concurrent sentencing and you'll be out of prison in less than two years. If you don't take the deal, we're going to push for everything we can get: even if you get off on the distribution charge, you'll still be in prison for 3 years for possession."
Now, you or I, affluent tech-bros that this forum attracts, know that this is a terrible deal. We'd hire a lawyer, fight it tooth and nail, and walk away with a possession conviction and a slap on the wrist sentence. But if you're some broke kid, with a public defender who's really just there to counsel you on what plea deal you should take, it might not seem like such a bad idea.
Like I said, getting aggregate statistics on how pleading down impacts the composition of the prison population is very hard, but the fact of the matter is most people who end up in prison don’t do so because of anything which looks like only recreational drug use.
https://www.justcriminallaw.com/drug-charges/2023/04/24/drug...
> You can be charged with drug trafficking even if you have not actually sold any drugs. Prosecutors will try to show that you were in possession of a controlled substance and planned to sell or distribute it, even if you were going to distribute it for free or use it with friends.
Texas is finally calming down on weed but back when I was in college I knew plenty of friends that were slapped with "trafficking" because they had some normal amount of grams on them and the cops just went for it. That lets prosecutors scare them into shitty deals because with trafficking you're looking at years of prison.
Considering the scale of the American prison industrial complex, I'm sure plenty of people didn't have good enough lawyers to get the bogus trafficking charges thrown out.
As per OkayPhysicist's point about what counts as possession and trafficking, many drugs require larger dosages with habitual use and the courts do not take this into account.
on edit: I see Komali did a better job pointing out that lots of traffiking and sales are actually possession.
These also vary state to state, and while a white kid with a 1/4 might not get possession, a black kid with the same amount might get the book thrown at him depending on who’s prosecuting the crime.
The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That said, those figures represent the upper bound of of people in prison for possession, because offenses could be pleaded down.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which state prison offense data are available), 58% of all persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
I expected this to be in the 10-20% range prior to looking into this more deeply, something that isn't helped by the piss-poor dashboards by BOP https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
EDIT: started researching this prior to seeing that others had posted :)
I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false premises.
Don't know if you picked Sweden in particular intentionally but they are very much an outlier of their own when it comes to drug-related crime. Simple possession of small quantities for personal use can still have you end up in jail or even prison for up to 6 months.
They're still all-in on the War on Drugs.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
Portugal did exactly this (or decriminalized them for personal use anyway).
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's any consolation the chinese claim the same.
E.g., I'm not sure the current trend of increasing access to gambling will lead to a more stable society, although it increases freedom. There's a balancing act there too.
What I'm not saying: the current policies are the best ways to mitigate those risk in order to increase stability.
From a practical standpoint, this depends on the notion that prohibitions actually increase stability. No place that drugs have been legalized or decriminalized have seen significant increases in addiction rates, for instance. No place that legalizes drugs will need criminal gangs to supply them anymore. Restricting consensual acts reduces a society's stability considerably.
From a moral standpoint, giving anyone the authority to prohibit victimless acts is a pandora's box human rights violations. Who chooses what is worth oppressing in the name of stability? So soon after gay marriage (or just being gay at all) was legalized and we are already forgetting this lesson.
Edit: I would also say that providing sex services is probably an act of desperation in many cases, even if paying for them isn’t.
I would only add that it is my understanding that most sex workers would very much like sex work to simply be considered work, and that the only way to improve conditions for all sex workers is to end criminalization of consensual sex between adults, paid or otherwise. At least that's the overwhelming consensus of the swers I know and the stuff I read/follow on the topic.
Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate?
Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and, in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so consider me wrong
No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that speech because there are potential consequences? If you go rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves risk? I don't see the logic at all.
It's just the wrong word, then, by a huge margin.
There's multiple definitions
I don't give speeches to large crowds either, that sounds hella stressful. That won't stop me, but I'd have to be desperate for the respect or attention.
There's 4 things we call "crime" and the only thing they have in common is that the state sends in an agent to physically restrain you from doing it.
1) Rational crime. Someone looked at the payoff to getting away, the cost to getting caught, and the probability of each and concluded the expected payoff was positive.
2) Victimless crime.
3) Political crime. Crime where the point is to openly defy the law itself. From Rosa Parks sitting in front of the bus to the unknown man standing in front of the tank, we all know what this looks like.
4) Deranged crime. Actual anus-type personality disorder.
victimless crime on it's own
> illegally camp in a city park
rational crime, you want payoff of not sleeping in the rain and probability of being swept out of the area is unlikely depending on where you set up
Seems reasonable for something like weed, but for "hard" drugs like meth there's clearly a negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
So perhaps their point is that the crime should be the harmful behaviors, not the drug use.
Addiction is made worse by social and economic stresses. So is anti-social behaviour.
If you want to fix addiction and personal violence, start by removing systemic political and economic violence and assembling a reliable social contract.
Start modelling and dramatising pro-social behaviours in the media - which can be done in a gritty and relatable way, not a saccharine and patronising way.
This won't end addiction, violence, and mental illness, but it will make these problems less prevalent and easier to target and manage.
> But in another, critical sense, addiction does discriminate among people, in a way that is unjust and deadly, and in a way that shines a spotlight on tears in the socioeconomic web that is holding our society together. It has long been observed by clinicians that social determinants of health (SDoH) can tip the scales against people, in their already daunting quest to recover from any type of addiction. According to the World Health Organization, SDoH are defined as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels."
https://stjosephinstitute.com/understanding-the-relationship...
> Poverty Increases Addiction Risk Factors
As they said, it's not a causal link, but it is correlative.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
I don't understand where this is coming from at all. I value human agency and freedom most of all.
> Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Yes, in the last 300 years we started using soap and also discovered penicillin, this has indeed caused enormous leaps forward in medical care. Did you mean medical access? That is still highly striated based on class, and our royalty class seems to be smaller but far more wealthy now (the difference in net worth between our top .1%, 1%, and 90% is astounding).
> The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving.
People say this all of the time but outside of soap and penicillin I'm not exactly sure what people are talking about. The poor and starving seem to only exist in greater numbers than ever in history. Perhaps the conditions of the absolute poorest in American society are slightly better than the absolute poorest in American society 200 years ago, but at the cost of creating new poverty classes abroad in colonized places that previously had relatively low technological development but much higher happiness and quality of life than they do now.
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.
Heroin is ludicrously more potent in that regard, in mere weeks you're either high or in withdrawal.
The fact that alcohol was once also illegal doesn't make them somehow equally harmful on physiological or societal level.
And indeed, if you are rich enough or have enough clout to avoid police problems, you can be a heroin addict for decades. You can even stay productive. Take for instance, The Rolling Stones.
I don't even feel the need to debate that the primary and secondary effects of legal alcohol addition are huge and expensive.
Most addicts cannot function well without some outside resource being used up to keep them well functioning.
And since it is illegal, it is hard to get data on how many people use hard drugs while maintaining a normal life. Those who are successful, don't draw attention. I always thought otherwise, but was surprised a couple of times, by finding out seemingly normal people use heroin on a semi regular basis. So apparently some people can do it.
That is false. Most addicts are nicotine and alcohol addicts and they function ok, in general, without special support. They have plenty of problems, to be sure, but prohibition would only multiply them.
Chemical dependance is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction.
Millions of people use opiates on a daily basis and live otherwise normal lives.
Diagnosed alcohol vs heroin use disorder: 14.8M vs 1.1M, x13 difference.
Addiction treatment stats: 50% alcohol, 5% heroin, x10 difference (percentages of all addiction treatments).
The sole fact that the two are on the same scale in terms of deaths, delinquency and even visibility should indicate that that per capita hard of heroin and alcohol are incomparable.
You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
These are problem behaviors with or without prohibition. And prohibition doesn't seem to reduce them. So you have not fixed them with prohibition, you have only imported the additional problems of cartel drug manufacturers, violent drug gangs, purity dosing and adulteration deaths, infectious disease spread through dirty needles, political corruption, an oversized militarized and swamped criminal justice system, and all the crime associated with needing to rob, steal and whore for drugs priced at 100X what they would cost if legal.
> But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
Also pornography, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. Chemical dependance is neither required nor sufficient for addiction to be a destructive force in a person's life. What can't we ban if we decide it is sufficiently harmful?
Btw, nicotine works well against ADHD for most. (Smoking is about the worst way to get nicotine. Plasters or even vaping are better alternatives.) See https://gwern.net/nicotine
It turns out that if you're having to find hundreds of dollars a day and you're not sure you're going to even be able to find that next hit, and you don't know the purity of what you're getting, or have access to clean needles, or ... things get rapidly worse for you over and above the effects of the drug itself.
Addicts who do have access to cheap or free doses, and who do know that they can access these reliably, and who do have access to clean equipment, known doses of known substances etc, can stabilise their lives, hold down jobs and often can slowly come off the substance, or be persuaded onto programs that can get them clean over time.
I know that western societies in general aren't ready for this, because there would be outraged howls of "OMG we can't just be giving drugs to junkies! And we're paying for their drugs! This is highly immoral!". However from what I've read in the past it's better all round for us to use this sort of compassionate approach to heroin addiction - addicts get help to get their lives together and it's cheaper for the rest of us to support them like this than it is to put up with the high levels of petty crime they otherwise commit, pay the costs to incarcerate them and fight the gangs of drug traffickers. Further, these sorts of things can cut down on new users, and I believe this was found out in Switzerland - there's very little that's alluring about a line of tired, grey, old-looking faces lining up outside the heroin clinic every morning, that's not what edgy, rock-n-roll kids want to get into ...
I'm not advocating that heroin should be sold openly in shops like alcohol, but there is a wide territory between that and where we are now, and I feel a real solution (or at least a better path) lies somewhere in that territory.
But I guess regardless of the specifics (and I’m sure I’m not the expert here anyway), the point is that we ought to be trying what works, for the addicts and for the rest of us to reduce their associated crime, rather than sticking to dogma and judgement.
That's part of Switzerland's drug policy since the late 90s of the last century. It was confirmed multiple times in referundums by the public and I think it's overall very successful.
The greatest success, in my opinion, is that it completely reversed the image of heroin consumption. By turning it from a "hero" drug to a total loser drug.
Cool kids don't do heroin nowadays.
Despite being legalised, alcohol still causes problems. But I doubt banning alcohol would decrease problems on net (especially compared to heavy taxation).
This has been thoroughly tested. It was a bloodbath.
The American experiment with prohibition did not work out well, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_alcohol... lists a few more countries that current limit or ban alcohol. I don't think they all have bloodbaths?
Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture. And still has! The Puritan heritage that's against any fun is strong with them.
Another side note: restrictions on smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other areas largely preceded shifts in culture in many jurisdictions. So legislation can predate changes in culture. However, I don't know whether that's just a coincidence, or if there's a causal effect? Also, legislation that makes desirable things inconvenient, but doesn't outright ban them, probably has a much, much lower chance of turning into gang wars. (That's a big part of why not-too-high taxation works fairly well for drugs.)
Yet another tangent: we often see drug production and distribution as part of organised crime. But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organised crime: as you can see by the legalisation of alcohol and more recently cannabis, people in the industry would much rather just do their business and satisfy customers; but organised, violent crime can become a parasite on any activity that's shut off from recourse to the police and legal system to defend themselves.
To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.
> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime
Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
No, it wasn't, that's not how Constitutional Amendments work.
Btw, in general decisions on drug prohibition / legalisation should probably be taken at the state level or even lower (county or city).
There's no need why there should be a federal law to put the same alcohol regulations on the folks in Utah as on New Hampshire.
That kind of reasoning applies to many other areas as well. Eg minimum wage or letting in foreigners.
Opiod users are vastly over-represented in all sort of statistics - addiction treatments, overdose deaths etc as compared with alcohol.
6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think. Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's called desoxyn, and can be prescribed for ADHD or weight loss.
Also chirality-flipped meth is available over the counter as a nasal decongestant
all the shows I've ever seen on it suggests it is pretty life destroying though.
but what harm per dose? May be the harm is high, but there's so few users that nothing shows up in aggregate.
None of them, except maybe some prescription pills like benzos, take control away from me the way alcohol does.
None of them have had me wake up in some random place with no idea how I got there. None of them have made me do things I don't remember, none of them have made me do and say things I regret.
Alcohol has caused all of that and more. The only reason I still drink alcohol is because it's the only socially acceptable drug. I'd much rather do coke or molly, to me those feel significantly safer than alcohol. And they're better, and they don't ruin the next day to the same degree alcohol does, at least not in my experience.
And yes, alcohol absolutely can make people undress and walk out into a busy street. It can also make people aggressive. One time my father came home shitfaced, furious at me for no apparent reason, punched a hole in my bedroom window, came into my room and started screaming at me while bleeding everywhere from punching the glass, then grabbed me by the neck and started choking. I can't remember how it played put after that but I ended up spending the night at my aunt's place. The next day he was in shambles, he would never do anything like that sober. And for the next few years until I moved out, I was anxious every time he went out.
I still do illegal drugs. Not very frequently, I'm a regular guy who works a decent job, is dependable etc. I'm not going to work high or anything like that. Just like most people don't get drunk at work. I know many people with similar lifestyles. I'd bet the majority of illegal drug users are just like me, they have their fun in a responsible way and live normal lives. Just like with alcohol the really messed up addicts are the exception, not the norm.
Go to a psytrance festival and see for yourself. I've been to many and I haven't seen people running around naked. If anything, I feel safer there than on many large events where people drink.
I'm really sorry about your loss. Situations like that are awful. I think it's really important for people interested in psychedelics to try them in a safe environment with people who have experience with the given drug and are willing to stay sober and keep an eye out. Every time I've encountered psychedelics (hundreds of occasions) it's been in situations like this, and they prevent tragedies.
Those of us who are arguing for legalization are basically arguing for society to create these kinds of safety nets writ large. Rather than counting on having a wookie friend nearby you can straight up call up 411 or something before doing a drug. I know it sounds ridiculous but if people are going to do these things anyway... I mean we're happy to have society teach eachother how to have sex safely, why not drugs? And that includes alcohol.
The equivalent to that are towns that forbid the sale of marijuana in states that legalized it. It's still legal to use and possess.
In general, many behaviours influence the chance of bad things happening. Eg getting behind the wheels of a car in the first place increases the chance of vehicular manslaughter (compared to walking).
Society can punish the probabilistically bad behaviour, or the bad outcome or any combination of the two (including none).
If the punishment is purely financial, and enforcement is certain and actors have deep pockets, it doesn't really matter which combination you pick.
You can emulate the deep pockets by requiring people to get insurance. Even if the law only polices the bad outcomes, a rational insurance company might want to police its customers behaviour. (Eg your health insurance gives you a discount, if you show them evidence of healthy habits. That's equivalent to charging people who fail to provide that evidence more, but the discount is more PR friendly.)
Both driving at all and drunk driving increase the chance of a person committing vehicular manslaughter. Societies largely allow driving, but ban drunk driving.
Drunk driving is dangerous, mainly because drunkards have slower reaction times and are more prone to taking risks. The more alcohol you have in your blood, the harsher the fines and punishment. But we typically don't check people's sober reaction times and risk appetite, and charge them more for driving sober.
It's all about trade-offs.
In the case of vehicular accidents, most people don't necessarily have deep pockets, and the damage of injuring or killing people can't be undone by paying money. However we eg still let old people drive, and only do something about them when they actually get involved in an accident.
This is fundamentally nothing to do with economic trade-offs: it's about generally disincentivizing risk-taking when in command of a multi-ton vehicle moving at speed.
We can know this because even if a "bad" driver is objectively more risky than a professional race-car driver who is 20yo, but has drunk a beer; it's the latter that's committing a crime when they drive.
People didn’t pick 0.08 BAC and then lower it because they found 0.08 BAC wasn’t low enough, instead the same organizations kept pushing for ever lower limits so they keep dropping independent of any actual impact.
Nobody advocates for drunk drivers as a group so there’s no equilibrium reached, just ever harsher penalties and lower limits. I don’t drink, but it’s obvious that using literally 0 as your threshold will pointlessly waste money going after edge cases unrelated to drinking.
Using meth is as victimless as using alcohol, and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
Just because it's legal, doesn't mean there's no victim.
>and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
This is getting into hair splitting territory. Meth has therapeutic value. It's available as a prescription drug under the name Desoxyn, and it's indicated for treating ADHD and obesity. It's possible for someone to get illegal meth and use it to self-medicate their ADHD responsibly, but that's not the typical use case. The typical use case is someone taking far above the therapeutic amount, getting tweaked out, and engaging in harmful behaviors that hurts them and their community. Sure, you could argue that using the drug itself isn't harmful because theoretically you could be using it responsibly, but it quickly leads to a slippery slope. Is driving drunk victimless, because if you don't crash nobody is harmed? Is violating health codes victim less as long as nobody gets sick?
We have no idea how many people would be using it responsibly in other situations but the current one so your examples are flawed.
The whole reason addiction is a problem is that it alter decision making, once someone is addicted. So you incur much of the moral responsibility the first time you decide to take the drug for fun.
And also, opioids are a curious example for responsible drug use, given how many people who used prescribed painkillers became addicted to them.
This is true, but there are many things people can become addicted to and only some of them are illegal drugs.
Hard drugs are really, really bad for you, and really bad for society. It really is the drug that is the problem - some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation. If you choose to take them, you're rolling the dice on where you'll end up, and that makes it a crime with society as the victim.
If we follow your "it's illegal because there's a probability" theory of law enforcement, then it should only be illegal to do drugs while poor, which is pretty much where the law stands today without the deceptive veneer of equality. Now, that should sound like an absurd legal take, because it is. The reasonable response is that it's poverty that's the problem, and it's not a problem we solve by throwing all the poor people in jail.
The Poverty Industrial Complex (i.e., law enforcement, gov agencies, non-profits) is quite content with a persistence of the status quo.
Do you have hard data on this? Because otherwise you are creating lots of victims with the war on drugs, who would otherwise just use drugs recreational without harming anyone.
It's a big consideration in what's OTC vs Rx, and what guardrails (inpatient only, regular blood draws, etc) are needed.
There was a good "magic quadrant"-style plot of this against addictive potential, but I can't seem to find it just yet. (This [2] is close.)
It doesn't consider externalities, so it's not great for the "do drugs and you'll end up unemployed, and if you're unemployed you'll end up homeless, and homeless people are a cost on the community" class of arguments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_%28mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence%29.svgIt's the same externality as being in a depression or bipolar for instance. I see the moral argument where intent is taken into consideration, but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
Right but what does it mean in terms of legality? We have mechanisms to deal with store theft (eg. anti-theft systems, insurance), does that mean it's okay to steal stuff?
Personally I draw the line at "are you directly acting on someone else or someone else's property ?".
In this case, and in the case of simple substance use, I'd say no, it doesn't cross that line, and there's a decent argument for depenalizing it.
Like: if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right? Or: if my friends and I get together to plan the burning of a synagogue, there's no victim. Or: if I offer to pay you to kill that pesky neighbour, there's no victim (until you go through with it). Or: if I offer to buy goods off you that have you stole, what I am doing has no victim (the goods were already stolen).
The notion that "victimless" crime is somehow in a category of crimes that are lesser or "not proper" crimes is unjustified.
We have above: attempted murder, conspiracy to commit arson, soliciting a murder, receipt of stolen goods - most of which I think people would regard as serious crimes.
Societies criminalize things that are considered "bad", victim or no - and that reflects the contemporary moral viewpoint of the society. Sodomy (of the consensual variety) was a crime many places, and now it generally isn't.
The notion of a victimless crime is therefore ill-formed: the purpose of the criminal justice system isn't just to penalize people who create victims - it's created to apply penalties to specific acts/mental states that have been deemed morally culpable.
When people talk of "victimless crimes", they don't actually mean crimes that lack victims - they just mean those sorts of criminal acts that they don't really think are actually morally culpable.
Unless he was completely unaware that you tried to do so, of course there's a victim - anyone would be severely traumatized from an attempt on their life, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful.
Secondly, everything we do has externalities in some variably extrapolated way and that by itself is a bad, hazy-logic reason to blanket ban it. Instead, you create reasonable checks and try to ascertain motives (as we do for so many other potentially dangerous activities without banning them). If one's motive is to get high in their own private context but they can't do so without becoming a burden on the criminal justice system (because their otherwise personal activity suddenly became a public cost and the target of some bullshit moral crusade), then maybe your anti-drug laws are the bigger problem, not that individual's personal choices and their artificially constructed effects on "the community".
Yes, I know that some people high on meth, cocaine, PCP, etc can become mentally unstable and commit violent acts or crimes, but people in all kinds of reasonably, widely legal situations can also do the exact same things without whole categories of consumption and behavior and activity being banned in a heavy handed push for social purity.
You are still spending money, but one solves the root problem and the other solves only one specific crime.
For instance teens dieting to look thin to the point of getting eating disorders have an effect on their parents every day life, friends (who are also at risk of getting ropped in and follow the trend too), and the general public including the medical system. How much do you want to blame anorexic teens for that ?
What about rage/emotional violence? Is it a deranged crime?
Plenty of consensual acts are detrimental to the society.
2. Tobacco and alcohol are legal, yet you don't see people selling to kids. It happens from time to time to teenagers, but not to young children. The reason why is precisely that children don't have the mental faculties to understand the full scope of their decisions and therefore can't give informed consent.
3. If gambling is legal there's no need for it to be underground, it can just be out in the open. Where are you more likely to get scammed, in some clandestine gambling den, or in a licit casino?
4. A protection racket is clearly not consensual. "Give me money or I'll damage your property" doesn't require consent of the victim.
No one who has those things - and recognizes it - settles for bottom-barrel surrogates like the ones you've listed. Someone who is starved for them absolutely will.
Drugs are fun. That's the reason a lot of folks do them. It doesn't mean you are desperate in ways that other people aren't. You are just using your time differently.
It isn't even that your comment isn't true some of the time. It does read like DARE propaganda.
If the police wanted a big bust on coke use, they could just raid a financial district.
Or because almost everything is a crime in some way.
This is a standard tactic of authoritarian states: create enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, and then use selective enforcement of those laws as a mechanism to control the population. Whether or not the USA's promotion of drug laws of this nature qualifies it as an authoritarian state, well, that can be left as an exercise for the reader. The fact that the USA has the world's largest prison population, and that a very significant fraction of that population is there on drug charges, and that wealthy politically connected people rarely get incarcerated on drug charges, are all factors worth considering.
As far as harm caused by fentanyl, if it was legalized and passed out to addicts in the form of transdermal patches in conjunction with addiction treatment and counseling (the original fentanyl formulation for treatment of cancer pain[1]), most of the violent crime associated with fentanyl would vanish. Note also that alcohol itself is far more associated with violence than the opiates are in terms of the direct effects of the substance.
[1] https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fu...
I think you mean this research, discussing Oakland: "Setting the record straight on predictive policing and race" - K Lum, W Isaac, 2018 [https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-on-predict...].
Her full bibliography is at [1] and X/Twitter is @KLdivergence
> drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs
Right. Second, without knowing their definition of "drug use" or "drug crime", that could mean anything from minor stuff like smoking/buying/possessing marijuana by under-18s, possessing or transporting >1 oz of marijuana, all the way up to possession or sale of large quantities of meth or fentanyl.
Third, and what would be obvious to anyone familiar with the Bay Area 2020-22, if predictive policing used "drug crime" (convictions? or arrests?) as opposed to "drug use", then when the then-SF DA stopped prosecuting possession of personal-use levels of meth, SF police tend to reduce or stop arresting for it. So the arrest, prosecution or conviction data from SF would differ sharply to Oakland or pre-2020 SF or 2023 SF or San Mateo County.
All the above factors combined seems like a huge combination of "data drift", "feature drift", "label drift", "model drift".
[0]: https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22
Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher.
Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality.
Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law.
It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.
This demonstrates that criminality/social dysfunction causes poverty, not the other way around.
I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s? Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace lawbreaking that it has now.
When our great grandparents were around most cops probably didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great Depression
Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts, but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from dealing.
Antisocial behavior is the common denominator.
No this does not follow from what I said. "Group A is more likely to do X than Group B" is very different from "The majority of Group A does X". One is a comparison between two rates, and the other is a comparison of one rate to an absolute threshold (50%).
Seems like the world's most obvious and easiest to solve problem tbh. This is like saying "I showed version A of my site to 1000 users and version B to 100. And version A lead to 500 conversions while version B only lead to 75. Therefore, version A is better because it lead to more conversions."
1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others. Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes.
2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat. Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs, smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty. Something else about the world has changed other than "poor people need money so they resort to crime."
3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of these problems. Whether it's through the influence of technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes, many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-term.
The line between a raging horde of criminals and an army has been razor thin through history.
Isn't violent crime at an all time low, historically [0]? It seems like every other day some rationalist is trumpeting the relative safety of our affluent society.
> Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others?
This happens all throughout history. Periods of acute poverty are rife with examples of people turning to banditry, literally Kurasawa made a movie about it.
> No, I don't think it's poverty.
I would recommend reading any of the studies linked elsewhere in the thread, empirical evidence disagrees with you big time.
> trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals
I think that writing off criminals as "low-IQ" is a huge error. Sure they may be less educated, but I don't know if it's possible to concretely prove that the potential for intelligence is lower among someone committing a B&E than some random office worker. I would actually argue that many criminals are much smarter than they are given credit for. Certainly any successful criminal able to evade arrest for a serious amount of time is probably quite intelligent. Pretending like everyone who decided to rob a liquor store at age 19 is some idiot brute whose sole motivation is acting like a thug I think is one of those convenient narratives that feels true, but which overlooks a lot of what would push a person to actually act that way.
[0] https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel...
I suspect that often what happens for the most disadvantaged people is that the arrow of causality gets reversed - the deck gets so stacked against them that it's almost a crime to simply exist at all. And that, in turn, puts them into a desperate situation.
There was an interesting piece of investigative journalism in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that I read maybe 10 or 15 years ago showing how policies set up by (then County commissioner) Scott Walker more-or-less made it implicitly illegal to live below the poverty line in a majority Black neighborhood in Milwaukee County. Not through any one law, but through a series of edge cases related to the interaction of laws and urban planning initiatives that were almost impossible for anyone without significant resources to navigate successfully.
Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes. People get angry. They feel disrespected. And some of them even just think violence is flat-out fun. The "desperate people" model doesn't really hold water with respect to the most serious crimes we care the most about.
Second, I am aware that this sounds like some kind of right-wing talking point, but you should consider that it's true: a job at Dunkin Donuts is more remunerative than stealing catalytic converters. It's not even close, really. We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd.
If they were genuinely just desperate, they'd take the job at Dunkin.
We'll never effectively police crime if we can't even acknowledge its true nature.
Sure violent crime is complicated. I'll walk back my claims with regard to things like domestic violence or violent crime resulting from a fight or something. However there is still the large component of violent crime that is things like an armed robbery, for which I believe my claim applies. Somewhere else in the thread someone brought up the link between impulse control and poverty, which I think also has bearing here. Poverty has been documented to increase baseline stress, and I would imagine that someone working multiple part time jobs just to afford rent and food is going to have a way shorter fuse than like, some tech worker earning a quarter million a year, but that's just speculation on my part.
> We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd.
I see your point here, and I don't think it's totally invalid, but I do think it fails to acknowledge the whole problem. For one, I think we would need to get some sense of how many people both work at DD and steal cats out of cars. I would imagine that it's not a small fraction of the population. While slinging donuts probably pays more than petty crime, it also requires more time. If you're already working one fast food job maybe you're just going to augment that salary with some theft rather than take on another 20-30 hours of work. There's also the pride factor, FF jobs can feel very degrading whereas some varities of crime are self-employment, you get to set your own hours and working conditions. Additionally FF jobs may not even hire you if you've already got a conviction or consume certain drugs.
I do overall agree that there is some cultural stuff at play, a young man who grows up in a poor neighborhood and meets a lot of criminals is likely going to feel pressured to himself start committing crimes, but I also have to ask if you can truly blame someone for making that choice and if it makes sense to separate that choice from an overall feeling of desperation? If you're a young man who believes he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever to actually "succeed" following the typical career path then that means you have little to lose, and coming from that mindset I don't think it's totally unreasonable to say "fuck it" and start operating outside the law, even if it pays less than slinging burgers. Desperation breeds disaffectation, which in turn results in seriously anti-social behavior. If coolness was the only factor every affluent suburbanite teenager would also be cutting catties, but clearly that's not the case. Yes the ultimate consequence is something more than "I just need money so I'm going to turn to crime", but the underlying agitation which kicks off the chain of events is often socioeconomic disadvantage.
You recognized that drug possession is widespread and illegal in SF. Are they committing these crimes because they are desperate?
Since it really depends on the crime you cant largely attribute it to 1 factor.
A relevant reference: "Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing" - https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policin...
In any case, recreational drug use might be uniformly distributed (and there is an interesting question of what anti-social activities are labeled "crimes"), it is definitely not the case that home invasions, car jackings, robberies, etc. are uniformly distributed.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.
If you're looking for a single summary of why people commit crime, a better summary is: people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught. Desperation doesn't explain all that much.
Sure I don't disagree with that, and I'm not saying that all ML models are useless in this space. However the original article's point (that currently implemented predictive policing software doesn't function) I think is very much in line with Lum's work. I'm just attempting to give a more concrete case for the point, as I felt the Gizmodo article was pretty lacking.
> people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught
My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the nation (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery). This was absolutely not because it was hard to get away with it (my mother has left her car unlocked every night since I was a teenager, it would be trivially easy to rob her and escape). My town also was extraordinarily wealthy, among the richest nationwide. Now, maybe (probably) there was a lot of white-collar crime or domestic violence. However in terms of public violent crimes there is a clear effect of socioeconomic status. Yes someone in total destitution probably will not commit a crime if they think they will immediately get arrested, but I think the calculus is far more tolerant of the downside risk of arrest if the upside risk is that your kid gets dinner that night. This is what I mean when I say that desperation is a major driver: that it raises the bar on "how much risk of prison am I willing to accept in order to get what I need".
To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after all, it's predicting which defendants will skip their court date or commit a crime on bail), then there's plenty of evidence that we have good ones. Even a simple logistic regression over the charged crime, defendant age, and gender outperforms most judges: https://5harad.com/papers/simple-rules.pdf
If I recall, KL has written guides for DAs adopting pretrial risk assessments as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge. These models work today.
> My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the nation (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery).
Even if poverty is a necessary condition for violent crime, to the extent you ignore crimes like domestic violence to bolster your argument, that does not mean it's a sufficient condition. As a result, your simplification about crime being driven by poverty is still misleading.
> This is what I mean when I say that desperation is a major driver: that it raises the bar on "how much risk of prison am I willing to accept in order to get what I need".
Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response. The supplemental poverty measure suggests poverty was reduced by over 50% through extended unemployment, the super doles, and child tax credit expansion. And yet crime of all types (homicide is the easiest to measure) has skyrocketed.
(As a bit of an aside, because policing in America is funded by local jurisdictions, my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught. Either by the community or by police officers with little else to do. A statewide police force could redirect funding from rich, low-crime neighborhoods to high-crime neighborhoods and better reduce crime overall.)
I think this is a fundamentally different ballgame than predicting where and when crimes will occur with the intent to prioritize police presence, but I do take your point that simple models can outperform human decision making in these cases. What's absolute classification error of these models?
> Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
Not really disputing this, my point is "Need to Steal to Eat" - "Certainty of Punishment" = "Decision to Commit Crime". I don't really understand why "Certainy of Punishment" would be expected to impact "Need to Steal to Eat", but I'm not surprised that the empirical studies you refer to didn't find a relationship there. Would you be able to provide a reference on this one?
> As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response.
Not sure the extent to which the results of this are generalizable. The proper counterfactual here is not "crime-rates pre-pandemic" it's "crime rates post-pandemic in a world where we didn't provide anti-poverty measures". The former is a very poor proxy for the latter, IMO. I wonder if anyone has compared across states or countries with different pandemic responses?
> my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught
Yes it had a very well-funded police department who did very little day-to-day. I can say with certainty that they were very bad at tracking down the local drug dealers as our drug trade was positively thriving. Possibly they would be more motivated to catch petty thieves, but this wasn't really tested while I was there. The occasional bit of vandalism or other hooliganry did not typically get punished, as I recall.
This assumes that the police actually _want_ to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods. It's hard for me not to think that using ML models is intended to be a way to insulate the decision makers from accountability; pick a model that gives the results you want, don't divulge the details, and you'll never have to explain your actions because you were "just following the model".
If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that. There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.
They may not need models to justify it, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be helpful for them to avoid accountability. I obviously can't say for sure whether or not the police are actively trying to avoid policing any given wealthy area, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that if that was a goal, then obfuscating the source of that decision would be helpful, even if it might not be required.
> There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.
That's not at all what I said. My point is that someone who wants to influence _perception_ of where decisions were coming from could make use of ML to make their decisions seem to be the result of "objective" data rather than personal bias.
Any data on type and frequency of drug used?
(Fentanyl clearly poses legitimate problems for various reasons, but people have increasingly treated it like it's some kind of sci-fi chemical weapon instead of a medicine that's routinely used in hospitals and nursing homes around the world.)
If cops, for whatever reason, have a history of targeting a particular neighborhood, arresting people that fit a certain profile, etc, and suddenly their new computer system tells them to focus on other areas or demographics, then that system is broken to them. They "know" where the crime is, and if they listen to the system that tells them otherwise, criminals will get away and/or they won't be able to make easy arrests they want to make.
Law enforcement is also incentivized to buy systems that they can point to and scapegoat if they do something wrong. "I'm just doing what the computer told me to do and machines can't be biased" is a good enough justification to a lot of people, including the justice system.
This process is already a common complaint of police, without predictive software.
Nayib Bukele locked up all his country's criminals, and by doing so made a massive difference to the quality of life in his country. The truth is, crime causes poverty at least as much as poverty causes crime. There is no tradeoff between "arrest criminals and get them off the streets" and "fix poverty", the latter in fact depends on the former.
That means your prediction that eats data with mostly legal stuff all day must be extremely accurate to be useful. Let's say you wanna predict who a terrorist ist by the way they are walking at an airport. Given the high volume of people the answer will be: nearly nobody, except when they are. So your mechanism just produces false positives all day long and might encode stereotypes on the way.
The most important aspect for me would be that we actually demand scientific evidence of such a thing working before our executive is allowed to use it. Everything else is a huge risk for civil rights and doesn't help to prevent actual crime either.
Issue: police are not trained to, nor are they responsible for fixing, the underlying "sickness". Police, social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists have very different missions, training, skillsets, perspectives, and dispositions. We can argue that society should invest more in social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists, but not that police should become social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists to cover for insufficient resources in those areas.
The data on poverty and crime isn’t directional. It’s not proven that poverty causes crime. It’s just as likely that crime causes poverty, or some other variables cause both.
No, they look up to the criminals. Being a gangster is cool and respect is everything. You need to respond violently to the most mundane things or you risk losing the respect.
The ongoing conflicts started because of some truly ridiculous things, like someone not being invited to a robbery and feeling humiliated/jealous when they bragged about the crime. It's always some personal reasons where someone thinks they are being disrespected, and never about turfs like you would think.
It turns out, you can predict gunshot victims quite well: They generated a large dataset for Chicago, then produced a list of the top 100 (IIRC) likely victims of gunshot wounds in the next year, and the people on that list had something like a 10% likelihood of being shot in the next year -- a more than 100x increase beyond the average Chicagoan.
Dr. Heller's point, rather than being one about predictive policing in general, was that it's probably more effective to try to prevent people from becoming victims. They're actually running a longitudinal study right now -- Dr. Heller alongside Dr. Christopher Blattman -- looking at methods of preventative, positive intervention to reduce crime. Dr. Blattman has actually run some studies on this in Africa in the past, looking at giving people money, therapy, or a combination thereof, and found pretty impressive impact on reducing future criminal behaviour by giving people a modest monetary infusion alongside social support in the form of therapy and group sessions.
Area A: We had 10 patrols of which 5 found drugs. Area B: We had 30 patrols of which 12 found drugs.
I don't think it's too hard to notice that A is the better target for future controls, even though more drugs were found in B (when going by total numbers.)
I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others.
You could probably answer this question by reading the original work, it's linked somewhere in this thread.
> I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others.
Are you simply unaware of the 4th amendment? Or do you just not value it?
In any case, I wasn't talking about "let's search this person's car because the person belongs to a minority",
but rather "we control 10% of cars (randomized) passing through this intersection, because there's lots of crime in this area, and if the persons searched don't reflect the overall population mix, that's okay."
The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.