Reddit reviews When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
We found 4 Reddit comments about When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Urban communities of color are over-policed, and our sentences for almost everything are too harsh. I know, I know, this sounds like liberal SJW party line talk, but the facts bear it out.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration on the planet (and by far a higher rate of incarceration than any industrialized/European country we view as our social peers). If you start parsing out demographics, black and latino Americans have incarceration rates that somewhere around 10x any comparable nation. I'm talking gulag/apartheid level incarceration rates for these subgroups. (Sorry for the lack of figures throughout this post, but it's too much work to bust out the books each time. In general, these figures are what I remember from Crime and Public Policy). To me, the most convincing piece of evidence is the disparity between arrest rates for drug use of adolescents by race. White and black teenagers use at about the same rate, but black teenagers are arrested far more frequently. Are black teenagers made safer by that higher arrest rate? Are white teenagers made worse off by their lower drug arrest rate?
I think the answer (on aggregate) is a resounding no on both counts. That's over policing right there, where fewer contacts results in better outcomes.
So what do we get from this? We lock people up for far longer than any of our peer nations do for similar crimes (the common anecdote here is a life sentence in the UK is only 15 years) and for far longer than we did historically (again, anecdotal but look at some of the sentences in an old crim law casebook. I'm talking 7 years for 2nd degree murder). Yet, we also have a middling to high rate of crime (particularly homicide). Either American's are particularly criminal, particularly insensitive to incarceration, or other nations have a better system (i.e., one that achieves better/comparable results with less incarceration). That's what I mean by draconian charging; we could have less incarceration and the same or better crime rates with the right system. And these excessive sentences create other problems as well, such as giving prosecutors disproportionate power to dictate punishment.
So where can we trace these phenomena to? The explosion of inner-city crime from the 1960's to the 1990's. This unprecedented level of violence and crime caused an overreaction of law and order, so this is where we start getting 10-25 year sentences for possession of drugs. Just think about that, we are penalizing simple possession more harshly than most of sister nations do for murder. This escalation in drug sentencing caused an escalation in everything else, because once you're getting heavy sentences for mere possession it seems weird to give out a lighter sentence for manslaughter or assault. The concentration of violence in the inner cities (the cause of which is still up for debate, see When the Work Disappears or Don't Shoot or even lead) means that we concentrate these harsh sentences on on inner-city residents who are primarily minorities.
Finally, if you have any interest in this area at all, read "When Brute Force Fails" by Kleiman. It's only like 80 pages, but it lays out the theory and the basic stats for why our current system should be considered to over-police but under-protect.
Gun ownership bans have no real affect on crime. A reduction in gun ownership "by 10 percent... would be expected to shrink the number of homicides by no more than 3 percent, with no measurable effect on other crimes."
When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman
Pretty cheap if you get it used.
One of your questions I can answer definitively. 100 year "life" sentences wouldn't change violent crime rates at all. zero. Why? because human brains don't truly comprehend time going that far into the future. I won't try to quote an exact optimum, but the effect of increasing sentence lengths for crimes disappears very rapidly. If the goal is to change behavior there are much more effective methods to "train" criminals to do right. I highly recommend everyone read When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime AND Less Punishment
As for your other pondering points, I think it could go both ways. Some might take worse care of themselves and procrastinate. After all, they have 300 more years to figure it out and medicine is sooo much better these days! Just depends on the type of person I guess.