Except longer prison sentences don't work.
Sure they do, Fox. Every day spent in prison is a day they are unable to victimize the rest of society.
It's lead to the USA having the highest prison population in the world. Yes, we have more prisoners than China. Long prison sentences INCREASE the odds they'll reoffend when they get out. Unless you want to pay for life in prison for just about everything, we need prison reform. Why? Because it's cheaper.
Are you not aware that China is chock full of
Chinamen? AKA, "The demographic on the face of the earth with the lowest rate of violent crime?" NE asian decent crime rate is a smallish fraction of the white/euro crime rate. On the scale of 0.25 to 0.33 relative to white/euro rates. But, America is also ~13% black (~8.0 vs white) and 13+% hispanic (2.5 vs white), with their higher rates of violent crime.
It should come as no surprise that we have more prisoners, since America has a population several times more criminally inclined than China.
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Prison reform is not cheaper. Oh, maybe in gov't expenditures, but the cost to the citizens of crime is much, much more than that. The cost of crime victimization is almost never accounted for. And almost never comes out of the hides of those proposing the "reforms."
And yes, life in prison for career criminals is cheaper,
if we take into account the cost of crimes imposed on victims.
Programs piled onto programs? Generally not. What you think of as 'programs piled on top of programs' tends to actually be a number of 'pilot projects' at different prisons, and many of them end without renewal, despite promising results.
Now yes, I don't support 'programs piled on programs', instead supporting a consolidated effort, but we at least need to make the effort.
Turns out, polishing a seems to work surprisingly well.
Reform works.
The New Republic article talks a lot about cost, but never gets down to brass tacks: violent crime rates
Overall, since he was elected at the end of 2010, Georgia’s incarcerated population dropped from an estimated 56,432 to 53,383 at the start of this year. That reduction virtually slashed the state’s backlog of inmates in county jails who were waiting to be transferred to a prison or probation detention center. Keeping inmates in local jails typically cost the state $20 million annually. Without the backlog, the cost associated with transferring inmates “plummeted to $40,720,” per the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform February 2015 report.
Wonderful. How's about we look at the murder rate in 2010 and 2014?
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/gacrime.htmyr pop murders rate
2010 9,712,157 555 5.71449E-05
2014 10,097,343 580 5.74409E-05
Slightly UP since 2010. But, since this is Georgia, most of the increase in murder victims is in the black community, who cares as long as the gov't is spending less? Amirite? I guess black lives really don't matter--to prison reformers. [For an exercise in how policritters manipulate the data, look at the source data. Most rate calculations carried out to FIVE significant digits. But not murder, the most reliable (for many reasons) index of violent crime. Only TWO significant digits. That allows the data compiler to show no change between 2010 and 2014. "5.7 per 100k" Well, if you go out to THREE significant digits, as would be usual mathematical practice when the operation's number with the fewest sig digits is three, you see the rate tick up a smidge. Granted, this is barely shading hte numbers relative to many other manipulations.]
Given that law & order is one of the few legitimate powers of gov't, I don;t mind paying to keep "Feral Americans" locked up.
Well, yeah, but how about proposing some specifics? What sort of changes would you make to increase the number of jobs available?
Let me make this as plain as I can:
Criminally-inclined low-IQ folks are unemployable. In past times, before the advent of gov't-run large prison, they would have been hanged and their bodies left hanging to rot as an example to others. They would have finally become of use as compost. Seeing as we are so far advanced & all, nowadays we let them out of prison periodically to prey on their communities until they are caught again.
The only thing you can hope for is divine intervention, because it is beyond the power of man and his institutions to fix some problems.
For the non-criminally-inclined low-IQ folk, we can stop kicking them in the gut (while quoting Ayn Rand and ridiculing them by sneering, "Muh jerbs! Muh jerbs!") by reducing the number of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, into the the USA to compete with them for jobs. We can also keep the criminally-inclined native-born in prison so they neither compete for the same pool of jobs nor victimize them.
Of course, you're projecting that I actually support that stuff. I was merely reporting what I've heard - you get less crime with them spread out.
I am sure you would not intend for your social engineering experiment to result in adverse consequences. But, then, that is the nature of unintended consequences.
Or don't you realize that crime, especially violent crime, has dropped rather drastically over the last couple decades?
Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
Funny how that drop coincides with the drastic increase in incarceration.
Ghetto trash are that way mostly because they grew up in a ghetto. Their kids start losing those attributes if not raised there. Just like immigrants, it's going to take a few generations. Also, not all of those from a ghetto are criminals.
Yeah, not so much. Turns out Finns in Minnesota's Iron Range have crime rates similar to those of Finns in Finland. Han Chinese in Taiwan, Signapore, the USA, and the Chinese mainland have similar crime rates. And that those with West African heritage have crime rates comparable to one another when living in the USA or West Africa. I could go on, but shared and non-shared environment account for somewhere south of 50% of outcome. We understand this with other critters, but develop a block when it comes to humans. A wolf pup taken from wild wolf parents and raised in a litter of border collies does not become a fine shepherd's companion.
Captive wolf puppies are usually taken from their mother at the age of 14 days, preferably no later than 21 days.[2] Wolf pups require more socialisation than dog pups, and will typically stop responding to socialisation at the age of 19 days, as opposed to dogs which can still be socialised at the age of 16 weeks. For the first four months of their lives, wolf pups need to be kept isolated from adult canines, except for a few brief visits per week, in order for them to properly imprint on humans.[2] Pups will typically develop behavioural abnormalities if raised without another member of their own kind...
American biologist, Stanley P. Young, described tame wolves as thus:
Generally speaking, on the basis of their experience, tame wolves are strictly "one-man dogs". They may be confiding and playful with the man who raised them, or even with his whole family, if fed and cared for by them, but they are suspicious and timid in the presence of strangers. They invariably retain certain reactions of wolf nature, as for instance, an incorrigible desire to kill chickens or other small livestock whenever opportunity arises.
[Now, the liberal/progressive sort have been working backwards in time/age. Thus the call for "early intervention" and the emphasis on the failed Head Start program. KG is too late, they find. So is pre-school. I guess the next step is to strip the mother of their child at birth and then maybe hte fertilized egg from thier uterus as the final solution when all the other programs fail.]
If we keep our view narrow and look only at the USA, your contention has been shown false. See just this social engineering experiment in Memphis, TN.
And your contention that immigrants soak up the magic emanating from the soil over a few generations to become indistinguishable from Americans also has problems with reality on the, uh, ground. The vast majority do better the second gen due to increased English facility, but then stagnate and become more criminally inclined than their immigrant ancestors.
As for screwing people - when the new system is actually cheaper and lowers crime, I don't see how it's screwing them.
Or are you the type that considers yourself screwed when they take a homeless person costing $40k/year on average and stick them in a house for $16k? Do they lament all the way to the bank to deposit that $24k?
It may be cheaper for gov't. And the most reliable crime stat--murder--did not show improvement after implementation.
Do you meet many "homeless" people? Most are nucking futz and a small proportion are in their right mind, but scam-minded. And another small proportion are actually folk who rolled snake eyes, but have hte capacity to recover. Plainly put: the majority belong in an asylum.
To be clear, I'm not some sort of liberal. I'm not for 'pie in the sky' policies. I'm for evidence based policies. When people demand the more expensive solution that leads to more human suffering, I see them to be as ignorant as the liberals that put policies in place that destroyed families, economies, etc...
Heh.
