gottorf
In fact, this condition might be the cleanest definition of "bloat".
Only true for federal inmates, which is <10% of all prisoners in the US. When you take into account the rest of the prison population, the majority are in fact imprisoned for violent crimes[0] (homicide, assault, rape, robbery, etc.).
> In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer
I'm flabbergasted that anyone could believe this on its face. Do you not think that the behavioral factors that drive someone to murder correlates with a whole host of other antisocial behaviors?
In actual reality, studies in criminology repeatedly show both that people who commit one kind of crime tend to commit other kinds of crime; and that there's a strong power law distribution in crime, where an extreme minority commit the great majority of crime. Most people do not commit any. It's farcical to suggest that the average Joe off the street is as likely to be a fraudster as a convicted murderer, or really as any other kind of criminal.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-...
Given that America has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries, it stands to reason that its overall criminality is higher, and therefore we can expect to see more people imprisoned per capita than in those other countries.
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
Crazy that Heroku with its head start has become abandonware. Goes to show that no incumbent is immune to change.
There isn't a true (and viable) "weaker federal government, stronger state and local governments" party in this country at the moment. And the two party system being what it is, voters have to pick one out of two choices, neither of which will represent the voter's beliefs fully, or even mostly. Even the "pro-Trump MAGA camp" disagrees with itself on a ton of issues, perhaps more so than the camp on the opposite side[0]. I personally know many people who voted for Trump in 2024 and would describe themselves, ironically or not, as MAGA, who all did so for different reasons and are from very diverse backgrounds.
Though, if there indeed was a peep from any of them against this particular project, would you even hear it in today's fragmented informational spheres?
[0]: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....
Emirates claims no subsidies at all; BYD's disclosed direct grants alone are about a third of their cumulative lifetime profit, let alone indirect subsidies.
I follow what you're saying, that the downsides of drug addiction outside of the user's own body is imposed by the people around them. I suppose that's almost definitionally true. I and many people do in fact find it unpleasant to be around people who are high out of their minds. I do not wish to associate with such people while they're in that state. I do not think that society would be better off with more of them, so I would prefer that society actively disincentivize such behavior. And you could certainly make the argument that this is the same thing as wanting punishment.
But if you're making the argument that being high on drugs might lead a user to job loss organically, I find that hard to believe. What if I didn't even know what heroin was, and saw that an employee was nodding off on the job? Wouldn't I be inclined to fire him?
Taking a step back, why doesn't society have a legitimate interest in making sure that people aren't able to take that first hit?
This is but one crime, but the homicide rate in the US is 5.9 per 100k, which is about 10x higher than in Korea.
Again, this is not anything written in stone. For example, consensus in criminology is that the certainty of punishment is a strong deterrent even when the severity of punishment is not, so the detail of the punishment matters.
And because criminality follows such a strong power law distribution, where a single-digit percent of people are responsible for over half of the crime, it is trivially easy to see that by permanently incapacitating that single-digit percent, you can actually lower the crime rate a lot. El Salvador's homicide rate dropped to 1/100th in ten years by doing precisely this.
To the degree that criminologists say that "punishment is a very poor method of reducing the crime rate", what they really mean is that in the context of today's liberal western democracy, there isn't punishment that will adequately prevent an offender from reoffending while remaining palatable to discuss in polite company. Popular opinion does appear to be shifting on this as we speak.
> the underlying desperation and inequality that drives people towards crime
From what I've seen, smart, empathetic people such as yourself are actually really, really bad at modeling the minds and motivations of petty criminals and others in the bottom of the distribution of cognitive capacity who engage in antisocial behavior. It seems to be such an enduring blind spot for many people on the opposite end.
The vast majority of people who commit crime are not Jean Valjean or Aladdin. They smash a windshield that costs $800 to replace for fifty cents in loose change, they assault people to look tough to a girl, they vandalize just for fun. They only steal from stores things they can fence for money, not bread and milk and diapers. Sometimes they'll put in surprising amounts of effort into committing crime; effort that could really have gone into a productive endeavor. There's precious little desperation involved. It's mostly just what feels good to them in the moment.
The vast majority don't need "help", and in fact no one has figured out a way to help these people out of doing what they do. At best you can provide what I would euphemistically describe as palliative care, at great taxpayer expense, to people who would go back to doing what they were doing the moment that help stops.
One caveat: your username suggests that you might be from a homogeneous population with smaller tails on both ends of the distribution, so it's likely that your experience is different than mine, and that you encounter more Jean Valjeans and Aladdins than is the norm around the world. But I would caution that if you can't envision a person who does bad things not out of any articulable reason but just because, as opposed to "like you or I but under worse circumstances", then that is a failure of your imagination.
On food insecurity: the five states that are the least food-insecure are a swing state, two solid red states, and two solid blue states[0].
On housing insecurity: the states with the most affordable homes (median house price to median income ratio, or share of income spent on housing) are for the most part solid red states[1]. I would wager this is largely due to stronger private property rights in red states that make it easier for supply to rise to meet demand and establish a better-functioning rental market[2].
Let's not make the mistake of judging politicians and government programs by their stated intent and not their factual outcomes. Whether someone "wants to" fix society in one way or another is very, very far removed from whether it actually gets fixed under their leadership. Plenty of times in history, the problem actually got worse!
On income and wealth inequality: unfortunately, these things cannot be fixed except by fixing the fact that different people have different abilities, talents, preferences, and tastes, and some of those differences include the ability to make money and build wealth. Nobody would look at me and think I have an equal chance of making it in the NBA as, say, the guys in this picture[3], but for some reason we're supposed to believe that when it comes to the skills of moneymaking and wealth-building, anyone is about as good as anyone else.
[0]: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/food...
[1]: https://www.affordabilityindex.org/rankings/states/, https://www.businessinsider.com/every-state-ranked-by-housin...
[2]: In parts of California, tenancy laws are so insane that it could take a landlord over a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to evict a nonpaying tenant. There's a whole cottage industry of landlords paying those same nonpaying tenants good money to just leave quietly. If you had property to rent, how much extra money would you charge to compensate for this risk?
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft#/media/File:NBA_Draf...
What would this incredible generosity on the part of the taxpayer achieve? I find it difficult to model your chain of reasoning. Taxpayer-funded benefit programs generally at least purport to have some kind of positive social outcome. What is the positive social outcome of giving drug addicts more drugs? Are we trying to feed a utility monster, where someone's desperation is justification for their actions?
> probably save money in the process
That the criminal justice system in the US is slow and expensive is a shame, but it's not written in some divine stone that it has to be that way. It's largely just downstream of the Warren court.
In fact, were Americans not constitutionally averse to stronger government, even more people would be locked up. People do stuff in America day after day that would not fly in Korea.
I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.
It appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.
> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane
Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.
The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.
> The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Social progressives would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
Communists would strongly disagree.
> Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Several UN member states that are absolute monarchies would strongly disagree.
We could go on and on. The UDHR is just a distillation of the postwar liberal consensus, voted on by only 58 countries back in 1948. Hardly the stuff that moral authorities are made of.