hckrnws
>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generations to solve the problem, but it’s there looming.
A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.
What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries.
You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"??
What on earth am I reading?
This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
Too far is an understatement.
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
And it's only going to get far, far worse.
The entire point of having human intelligence is being able to ignore or overthink or delay or prevent any primal urges. We also have urges to kill and rake and destroy but I doubt you’re going “laws are bad because they prevent out primal urges”.
Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.
Throughout most of human history we have had less than a billion people.
More people are alive today than have ever lived.
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.
One third of arable land is undergoing desertification
Insects and other species are dying off precipitously
Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.
That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.
This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.
> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
I had my children at 36 and 38, and I'm the mother, and energy-wise, I've had no issues. Yes, they considered me to be of "advanced maternal age" in the OB department and gave me special treatment due to it, but my doctors told me that the "advanced maternal age" threshold (35) was based off outdated research anyway. In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+.
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family.
Felt really awkward for small talk.
My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone.
I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap.
At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract.
You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family.
I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
Yeah, this is exactly something to discuss early. My wife and I were on the same page from earlier in dating about having kids in our 20s.
> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
Comment was deleted :(
> In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mother-birth-age...
Bubble implies that it's going to burst. I don't see it. Women aren't going to stop wanting careers, and HCOL is coming for everybody. I expect the whole country to join SF in this "bubble".
Bubble in this context means a unique environment that is unlike places on the outside of said bubble. It's not referring to a bubble like in the sense of a inflating market bubble.
Comment was deleted :(
Comment was deleted :(
I wish they called it "advanced maternal age" here. They use the delightful phrase "Geriatric pregnancy" in Australia
My wife is a retired nurse ( American ), she uses that term when referring to such pregnancies.
I had kids in my late 30s and they tested my patience and emotional regulation to an extent greater than any other experience of my life. I was somewhat emotionally volatile in my 20s and I can't imagine my kids having better outcomes if I'd had to learn to parent at that time in my life.
My children are 12 years apart in age and being a parent in my 20s was a much better experience. I had less money, but I had more time. I wiser now, but I had more energy. I could relate to being a kid more.
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I did not have more time in my 20s. In my 20s and early 30s, I was busy “getting out there”. Building my life, my interests, my foundation (not just my career). Now I have a happy life to stand on, and can devote more time, attention, and energy to my family.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
I was “getting out there” too! So many major life milestones. But actually it has never stopped. Most of my major career changes happened after the second child. I have entirely new interests now.
I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
That’s interesting. Because I genuinely feel I’m much better cut out to be a parent now. Is it different for you? I have so much patience and understanding, and I see that lacking in many of the younger parents around me. I see them and I remember myself.
And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I never would have wanted.
But I guess we have to agree to disagree. For you, being a younger parent worked out better. For me, I’m certain I got my child at the right time. In any case, I find OPs general recommendation that if you want children, you should have them by 30, to be ill-advised to the point of being harmful. Many people would benefit from waiting until later.
> I have so much patience and understanding
I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
Comment was deleted :(
Obviously I think the answer to this question depends so much on individual circumstances that all any of us can do is offer anecdotes. I think that while energy levels do decline as you get older, the degree of the decline depends largely on how much you stay in shape. My partner and I are very active and find ourselves only marginally less physically energetic in our 30s as our 20s. I've seen friends of ours with more sedentary lifestyles having a much sharper decline. If you're inclined to stay in shape then I don't think age makes as big of a difference (within reason.) But YMMV.
Comment was deleted :(
> A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
Comment was deleted :(
We did wait for the “perfect” time, and are very happy we did.
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
> but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric.
biologically, and for pregnancy, yes you are.
I didn’t say get pregnant at 50. I said I became a parent at almost 40, my wife is a couple of years younger. No problems whatsoever, and I seem to have more energy for parenting (and especially patience) than the parents in their 20s who haven’t even found themselves yet.
It's actually the age of the egg that matters most, not the age of the mother during pregnancy.
Paternal age is also a contributor. Children with fathers over 40 see an increase in potential diseases, a shorter lifespan and higher infant mortality, likely due to DNA mutations.
It seems kids procreated by older parents (aged 35 years or older) have increased risk of Down Syndrome. The effect is most pronounced when both parents are older than 35 years: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12771769/
According to that page, the whole issue seems to be very nuanced. It also contains the quotes I attached below.
Be it as it may, I conclude that there is an elevated risk for problems the older you get (although for some issues, cause and effect may be reversed, which is hard to resolve), but that that risk may not be so significant as to outweigh other advantages.
> A simulation study concluded that reported paternal age effects on psychiatric disorders in the epidemiological literature are too large to be explained only by mutations. They conclude that a model in which parents with a genetic liability to psychiatric illness tend to reproduce later better explains the literature.[9]
> Later age at parenthood is also associated with a more stable family environment, with older parents being less likely to divorce or change partners.[43] Older parents also tend to occupy a higher socio-economic position and report feeling more devoted to their children and satisfied with their family.[43] On the other hand, the risk of the father dying before the child becomes an adult increases with paternal age.[43]
> According to a 2006 review, any adverse effects of advanced paternal age "should be weighed up against potential social advantages for children born to older fathers who are more likely to have progressed in their career and to have achieved financial security."[63]
How are these two measures different? Oocyte formation happens before birth.
I believe freezing eggs is considered to be keeping them at the age they were when frozen?
It's lead.
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932
[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...
It is insane to just confidently assert that the only factor in the decrease in crime is Lead. Treating an insanely nuanced issue as an absolute doesn't make your argument more compelling, it is actually kind of baffling.
Why bother stopping at crime rates with that confidence?
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
If you do the same comparison of the rates of leaded gasoline during childhood to adulthood crime rates across different countries which have different histories of leaded gasoline usage, you notice that the correlation persists. While of course correlation does not imply causation, it's a link that's fairly well-established in literature, it's not a spurious correlation, and we know that lead has concrete neurological effects, so it's plausible from a pharmacological basis.
Since 1970 testosterone has declined 1% per year and it’s well established higher testosterone is linked to impulsive and violent criminal behavior and in countries like the US crime rate is at a 50 year low correlating with this decline starting 1970.
There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.
There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:
Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.
Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.
Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.
The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.
Comment was deleted :(
But it's so satisfying to one's ego that a single cause is the issue. All complexity of societal changes in the last 50 years can be outmanuevered. Simplification is sexy.
Comment was deleted :(
There was a crime decline in many rich countries from the 1990s as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Decline_since_the_e...
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
Yes, leaded gasoline was being banned in many rich countries at about the same time, and there's a positive correlation between the year it was banned and the year that violent street crime began to decline.
So reducing lead exposure immediately changes your brain to do less crime?
No, there's an offset of about 18 years, if I remember correctly?
Comment was deleted :(
I think lead is nasty stuff, but if it was the single cause of high crime, surely we'd see a similar effect in other domains, like a rebound effect on IQs (another thing lead was blamed for)?
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
below study claims test score variances are mostly related too declarative knowledge side note, i wonder how internet had an effect on iq scores.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
The only reasonable conclusion is that lead causes crime by making people smarter.
or maybe intelligence doesn't correlate with likeliness to commit crime?
plenty of criminals are intelligent.
Lack of boredom is also a factor.
Social media and modern games are keeping them occupied.
People also have fewer possessions worth stealing and trying to hock? It's not like TVs and radios cost that much anymore. People wear less jewelry. Though this is not a significant factor, it might be worth putting on the list still.
The most valuable things on a person these days (credit cards, phone) are also incredibly easy to lock down and make worthless. Many of the things like jewelry, are also now rendered essentially worthless because a lot of jewelry now is cheaply sourced; pawning off crap from fast fashion is not going to be worth it.
I was thinking that as I was getting ready to sell my house. I'm not a particularly materialistic person to start with, but there are hardly any physical objects in my home that I value that much besides (a) some photo albums/pictures and yearbooks - and for newer generations these are mostly digital I guess, (b) my violin and (c) my espresso machine and grinder. I guess you could throw my cellphone in there as well - easy to replace but would be a PITA, like losing my wallet. It'd be a pain to replace all my furniture and other stuff but I certainly don't feel any attachment to those things.
Right, there has been a huge reduction in home burglaries over the past several decades. The only stuff really worth stealing anymore is cash, drugs, and firearms.
That's funny to see. Sometimes I get stressed about the lack of security around my house, but I'll stop and think, if someone broke in what would this hypothetical thief actually steal anyway?
Let's add an example to illustrate the difference:
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
No it's not. Not entirely anyway.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
Industry and highways and other high sources of lead pollution were built in the areas with higher juvenile delinquency. Not in rich, privileged areas. I think you can also correlate the rise in violent crime to amount of lead contamination in the soil, some articles claiming down to the city block level.
Which order did these things happen in?
Maybe industry and highways increase lead exposure which leads to crime, or maybe areas already high in crime are cheaper so that's where industry and highways go?
I'll do you one better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
Comment was deleted :(
Can we blame lead for the US’ electoral landscape too?
I don't think it shifts the red blue much which is probably what you're getting at.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
You could, if you wanted to misdiagnose the problem.
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
> Can we blame lead for the US’ electoral landscape too?
More of a pet theory, but voters born between 1950 and 1980, boomers and Gen X, have had a well-documented set of policy preferences.
What if I told you voters born between nnnn-yyyy had a set of policy preferences?
There’s supposedly a cycle of attitude between generations. If your parents are X, you want to be Y. If your parents are Y, you want to be Z. If your parents are Z, you want to be X
Boomers were essentially statistically indistinguishable from Millennials in the 2024 presidential election: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-generations-voted-trump-...
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president. Although I'm sure all of the lead poisoning didn't help.
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president.
No. You can’t blame lead. There is zero justification for making the average person less responsible for their own worldview and choices in leadership.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone explicitly say they don’t want to understand causal factors because it would reduce the ability to tell people they should bootstrap themselves.
And abortion access.
Probably not. That played out in the last wave of crime reduction.
What exactly are you claiming?
Your points say old people have more lead, but then you say young people are more violent. That doesn't square with the articles point that incarceration rates are falling.
The flip-side of an aging society with declining fertility is that older people, with fewer children are likely to be less sympathetic to children, and you could see the incarceration rates increase, or remain steady, as less severe infractions are punished more harshly.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
Australia has had pretty terrible “jail children like adults” opinions for a long time. Politics in Melbourne constantly turns on fears of youth [black immigrant] crime waves that are making people afraid to leave the house.
Queensland seems to be making a lot of noise about that at the moment as well.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
The entire premise of the article is that fewer crimes are being committed by youth because arrests are down.
That's wrong, actually what's happening is police have just given up on arresting kids who will be released.
But it's not uniform. In the span of ~60 years, the average birth rate doesn't matter as much as the distribution and how much the children model their parents.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
Comment was deleted :(
We still need to improve the numbers regarding single (&absent) parent households.
Comment was deleted :(
> All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available.
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
I doubt there is a single explanation. I think it's multiple factors.
Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.
If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.
And lead paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
The drop in crime also correlates very well with releases of popular violent video games: http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2008/04/08/downard-spiral/
Yes but I'd say reduction of lead use in general.
Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly. Too bad the republicans are going to try to ban all porn pretty soon, according to their stated agenda. They do love their wealthy donors that run the prison-industrial-complex.
A lot of the current drop has decriminalization of drugs as a contributing factor. Same principle.
This would be a good theory if it was supported at all by data. There has been a decrease but if you squint it's a flat line. The best you can really say is that the availability of pornography is neutral.
America closes a college per week and multiple primary schools per week. There are fewer youth to commit crime or otherwise.
In NYC the black community has a majority of pregnancies not end with the birth of a child. This is where abortion policy is focused.
It’s simpler and less nefarious than that. Kids have to meet up to produce offspring. If kids don’t meet up, no drugs, no sex, no kids having kids. Video games, smart phones, and chat apps are more likely the cause of this change.
That correlation has pretty much been debunked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
Dubunked does not mean critiqued.
Comment was deleted :(
That would also explain why the current administration is banning abortion. Got to keep the prison slaves flowing.
Why abortion and not contraceptives?
Maybe people who are bad at pre-planning are also potentially poor parents.
Why not both
one can be prevented by the other
No contraceptive method is 100% effective.
hence "can be"
not prevented… (trust me :)) but best we can do!!
They probably aren’t using them.
Women's contraceptives in the states require a prescription. Which requires a doctor's appointment + insurance. If you are poor or live with strict parents (ironically), you are much less likely to seek them out.
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
In the 1980s, condoms were "behind the counter" things you had to ask for and suffer the critical eye of the pharmacy worker (at least in small town USA).
It's no wonder we had so many teen pregnancies.
I'd wager that the foster system is a huge factor. Poverty is likely the rest.
When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...
[dead]
This is good news. The level of crime and number of offenders has decreased.
Quotes from the article:
> As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
> But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.Like all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
>ike all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out
And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.
So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.
Drugs. Don’t overthink things.
To dig deeper, not only are young people doing less drugs (good), but we've also stopped being so unbelievably fucking crazy with our policing of drugs. In many places marijuana is basically decriminalized, although not outright legal. Not too long ago even just carrying around marijuana could land you decades in prison, depending on how black you were.
Still can in many states, although the average internet seems to be unaware of this. I saw someone getting torn apart for defending their husbands felony marijuana possession conviction as “not a bad person” because people think that today you only get that charge if you were driving a truck full of the stuff with a body in the back, but in e.g. Florida it’s still up to 5 years for 20g plain possession.
https://www.findlaw.com/state/criminal-laws/marijuana-posses...
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth
May be the result of a rapidly declining birth rate.
Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated
Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
I'd like to see stats on how many people are getting arrested for petty crimes e.g. marijuana (which isn't even a crime in some contexts any more) back then vs now.
In part due to simple demographics?
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...
Compare 1960 to 2020.
The Atlantic suggests this results from the release of those convicted during a decades long crime wave, which apprently took place when many of us grew up. Perhaps it also tracks with a progressive decline in law enforcement. Whether that is because crime waves not longer exist or whether it is some other reason is a question for the reader. A substanbtial amount of crime is now done via internet. Few are ever convicted.
Of course it does. The framing is from the establishment. The surge in crime and rise in prison population is because we criminalized existence EG "the war on drugs". Now we're getting rid of some of the worse things.
Marijuana possession was the number one crime and is now legal in a majority of states. This seems like the high-order bit.
At what point in the last 30 years did cannabis possession account for even a plurality of incarcerated persons, in any state or federally?
Cannabis is not the high order bit.
^ This. The drug war was an attempt for conservatives to punish poor people for using a harmless drug (marijuana) to help cope with systemic inequality, and kids for wanting to have fun.
From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.
But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
Comment was deleted :(
Crime is also down compared to where it was if you ask people directly [0].
How much of this is due to smartphones? The years seem to line up.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
A big part. But pagers too. The decline of drug "turf" crime when things transitioned to networks of contacts correlated with the decline in violence on the streets which probably only accelerated with smart phones. No longer worth fighting over corners.
Or maybe video games. Lots of teen boys staying at home playing Xbox instead of getting into trouble.
I blazed that trail in the 80s.
Devils advocate: smartphones have made antisocial tiktok trends, "fast money" hacks and paint an unrealistic portrait of success. Before, only rappers could be young and rich and flashy. Now, seemingly regular teens are millionaires and this is constantly fed into young people's feeds.
That might be true but it’s another topic.
If your point is that the benefits of crime reduction due to smartphones are outweighed by harms to mental health, then I think most people would disagree.
But this is also probably painting far too rosy a picture of what Meta is doing.
I hear your point as: up until then scams, gambling and Ponzi schemes were for adults with strong purchasing power (could sink all the family's money in one single decision), when with smartphones everyone gets to enjoy screwing themselves directly.
My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
Is it possible that incarceration had the intended effect? Did an entire generation grow up seeing their fathers and uncles locked up and decide that there must be a better way?
I would argue that not having a male role model in your life is way worse than seeing the consequences enacted on another.
This even if their was a gain from watching others suffer, the lack of discipline, guidance, sternness, is way more detrimental than the positives of fearing the consequences
there is no research to support the notion that mass incarceration leads to a reduction in crime; full stop.
The scholarly debate is over how large and how lasting the effect is, not whether any evidence exists.
This is interesting. I don't know why it's happening. However, this book deserves a mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... . It shares statistics on how violence has been decreasing throughout the history of humanity.
I don't know how good that book actually is, but I read acoup blog and it criticizes that book very often. Instead it recommends readers to Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization instead https://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/01...
as a followup to that (excellent) book, here's Barry Glassner - A Culture of Fear. The Better Angels of Our Nature talks about how violence has always been declining. A Culture of Fear talks about how the rate of that decline has been increasing since the 90s but people actually perceive things as becoming more dangerous rather than less, and attempts to come up with an answer as to why that may be the case.
The most obvious answer is large-scale media. I can learn about a shooting on the other side of the country within hours of it happening, and think "that could happen where I am". Likewise with any other news, which by definition is about out-of-the-ordinary events. There's more news about violence because there's more news, not because there's more violence, but it feels like there's more violence.
"if it bleeds, it leads" is (or was, i'm old) a common saying regarding the news media. It may be that there is more news that scares us because scaring us is profitable
20 century features pretty much largest genocides ever. Multiple of them. And in addition, things that we do not count as genocides, but still involved deliberate killing of millions.
That particular book was criticized by historians a lot.
Maybe that violence is just better organized now. Personal violence is declining (assault, murder, ...), but not organized violence (war, genocide, ...).
One more thing to throw into the mix. The treatment of ADHD might be helping:
"ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
In the light of that dynamic I fund it curious that Russian prisons population is rapidly declining too, but for very different reason.
You might be half joking, but your hypothesis is interesting to show how many different reasons can exist for the same phenomenon. Lots of people here talking about lead, for whatever reason, but also decriminalisation of drugs, abortion, etc. Most are logical explanations, even if contradictory. Very nice to see how we need to be super aware of statistics; we can force the numbers to say anything we want.
This is an amazing domain for correlation vs causation, because a lot of hypotheses make sense.
The best stat is that nearly 90% of prisoners had absent fathers.
The question not even asked by the article is ... why?
From what I've read, mostly sentencing reform and less aggressive drug prosecution/more drug diversion. That and the general trend for crime to recede in wealthy, stable societies.
It's not just law enforcement and sentencing - there are verifiable numbers for the results of certain crimes - homicides and auto theft come to mind - and most have declined precipitously.
E.g. Boston had 1,575 reports of auto theft in 2012, compared with 28,000 in 1975; Massachusetts had 242 murders in 1975, and 121 in 2012. (a 56% drop in homicide rate, as population went up 14%)
That car theft number is blowing my mind. I would have easily guessed 10x that.
Are there any aspects of the crime that make it less appealing? Electronic counter measures too good? Price of replacement parts no longer carry a premium? Too easy to get caught?
Consumer goods went on a 50 year deflation streak while health care, housing, and education pumped to the moon. That's its own problem, but it's hard to steal any of those three things.
The answer is likely unknowable, but I can think of several factors that tie into the plummeting birth rate:
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
>how awful the dating market is especially for women
"World Ends, Women Most Affected."
...about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica
I think that demographically we might be in a trough, of new born children. Also children born to the last major cohort (the children of the baby Boomers) are just becoming tweens and young teens, or very young adults. There might be a spike in crime, in the next 10 years, as they start to mature. It helps that they are more spread out, and not born in the same few years like the Boomers were, (a more flattened and spread curve).
Very rough midpoint years; Baby Boomers 1949, Gen X 1979, Millennial 2009.
> After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009
> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.
Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?
That's what the article goes on to describe, yes. Declining crime rates mean fewer new prisoners, but high recidivism rates plus long sentences means many old prisoners are still in prison. As those old prisoners die off or for whatever reason don't commit more crimes after release, the total population declines.
Mandatory minimum sentences can be 10, 15 or 20 years depending on the quantity of drug and other factors. Often just for possession. The US spent several decades filling our prisons with people using those sentences, and we still do, just not as aggressively.
There are many reasons why crime is in decline, but ultimately its economic.
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
not forgetting that CCTV is absolutely ubiquitous and high def, where previously it was reasonably rare and low quality
I am doubtful widespread recordings are making much of a change. Unless you are Luigi Mangione, are police actually following video footage trying to tie up a crime? Even with a city wide alert, he almost escaped.
It has been a common refrain that someone has an AirTag or other electronic surveillance they used to identify a thief, for which the police do nothing.
And most young people would rather have social media that lets them easily be tracked than staying anonymous for the purposes of committing crimes.
Even if you leave your phone at home to create an alibi for yourself, it is very likely that CCTVs will see you enroute to the crime scene, if not at the crime scene itself. Between businesses with cameras, front door cameras on houses, and traffic cameras, it's very difficult to travel anywhere without leaving a trace that investigators can pick up after the fact if they're sufficiently motivated.
From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
> 120 per 100,000 ... Is there a reason for this?
Crime statistics (e.g. homicides) are often quoted as 'n per 100,000 population'.
It's probably also easier for mental math, e.g. here's a city with 1 million population, that's 10 100Ks, so 1200 people in prison.
It also lets you abstract away or compare to stats that are scaled to population but might not be 1:1 with a person, e.g. "thefts per 100,000 population per year" where one person might either commit or be the victim of multiple thefts in a year.
120 per 100,000 includes significant digits. 0.12% could be anywhere from 120-124 per 100,000. You'd really want 0.120%, but that's confusing for different reasons.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
"120" and "0.12%" both have 2 significant digits. "120." and "0.120%" have 3 significant digits.
I would presume, perhaps incorrectly, that “120 per 100,000” has 3 significant digits and “12 per 10,000” has 2.
I’ve never seen a period used like that in census data. It seems like a conscious choice because the period is confusing when used in the middle of a phrase. 12E1 makes more sense but is abnormal notation for many people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
> Trailing zeros in an integer may or may not be significant, depending on the measurement or reporting resolution.
120 is either two or three significant figures, and you can't know which without knowing how the number was arrived at.
only because the US is soft on crime - so soft that drugs that were illegal are no longer illegal
GOOD
Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?
Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people.
Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.
Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
This article claims that the inmate costs per state range from $23k/year (Arkansas) to $307k/year (Massachusetts).
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
It's unclear if the decline in prisoners stems from a decline in crime. While I generally believe the statistics that violent crime has decreased, it may be the case that the judicial system and even the government in general just have no enthusiasm for prosecuting or punishing it.
In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Asset Protection manager here. Our protection decisions are based on theft trends independent from our staffing. And generally, the theft scales with how much business a store receives, rather than how many staff they employ.
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock.
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
I think a public trial serves as a form of oversight. Widespread plea bargaining means we'll never know how many of these people even committed crimes, much less how the justice system operates.
The problem is not the judge that approved a plea deal - the problem is the prosecutor who gave (negotiated maybe is a better term) such a lousy plea deal. After fleeing the state and being brought by US Marshal service I would think the prosecutor should have pushed for some state jail time.
> those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
> The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
[flagged]
This turned out to not actually be a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
pengaru did not say anything about organized shoplifting. The lock and key were definitely a thing, and still are. Please read comments before responding to them.
Come visit SF and let's go shopping downtown.
Bad news for prison owners
Crime is also way down over the last 20 years:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
At least in Seattle, crime is "way down" because many businesses have stopped reporting it, because the police don't respond to less serious crimes anymore.
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
You have any data to support that? I've lived in Seattle for 40 years, and crime here is way less of a concern now than it ever has been. Especially violent crime.
My experience also seems to match statistics. So, it would seem that your friend's experience might be the outlier -- I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying their experience doesn't match the data and there's at least one anecdote (mine) that runs counter to their anecdote. Seems like a good opportunity to try and find data that supports your hypothesis?
Googling "crime down in seattle due to lower reporting rates" results in:
"While crime rates in Seattle have recently shown a decrease, some reports suggest this may be partially attributed to a decline in reporting rather than a genuine reduction in criminal activity. Specifically, some authorities have noted that crimes against businesses, in particular, are frequently not reported."
"The police chief specifically mentioned that a 10% drop in property crime might not be entirely accurate because many business-related crimes go unreported."
“Data on the things that no one is reporting”
Don't be facile.
Police reports aren't the only source of data. If this was a widespread impact then there would be other sources of data that could be used to build this case.
Additionally, we cannot make policy decisions on "just trust me, my friend said...". Maybe we can't get a perfect signal, but if you are going to challenge the prevailing data, I expect you to bring something novel beyond vibes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but a single anecdote plus "I believe it" is not sufficient to oppose what the data we do have is consistently saying -- crime is lower in Seattle, and has been consistently lowering over time.
Um you are more gracious than me. I will just flat out call out as his friend as lying
This is why the headline statistic for crime tracking is usually homicide, which is also down.
Because of those tough on crime republicans.
Lets see if cutting education has any impact over the next 20 years.
Crime reduction is strongly correlated with an aging population. Crime is largely a young man's game.
this is great news. but...
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
Just get a few more Ciavarellas[0] elected and boom! Kids for Cash 2.0 - Little Timmy will never mouth off in class ever again.
Detention facilities for deportations is an inherently fast shrinking population.
at some point, maybe. i have no trust in DHS whatsoever.
But do you think they'd start letting more people into the country, just to charge to detain and deport them? It's actually sort of an ideal solution. Big business gets back labor that it can threaten to deport if it demands anything, then they can clean up on the public-private deportations. Factory managers could send ICE a list of their most annoying employees to visit. It would be so 80's, I almost typed "the INS."
what you're describing is more or less already happening. don't think h1b visaholders won't become a target.
You think if an H1B is canceled that they would illegally overstay?
> i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers
Most of them (probably all) have contracts that stipulate they get paid per bed they provide, whether or not it's occupied.
sure, but if the beds are empty, they're less likely to get new contracts.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Sorry, is this sarcasm?
That's a frequent racist dog-whistle to justify systemically unjust (read: racist) policing; I'm surprised to see it on HN.
you shouldn’t be :)
Everything bad is due to lack of intelligence and everything good is caused by intelligence. Average day on the HN.
They fail to mention the reason the prison population soared in the 70's and 80's, because of ultra-harsh prison sentencing for drugs. In retrospect, those laws appear to have been deliberately designed to create a massive and permanent prison population, far beyond what locking people up only for non-consensual crimes could ever sustain.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
Does this include those sent to the gulag in El Salvador?
Crime has been going down since the 90s, video games and online porn probably helped this
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code