In this vein, liberals have concocted some balderdash deemed the "prison industrial complex". Apparently, there's a massive, but ironically furtive, effort to profit off increased prison populations. To note the scale of this collusion, the process supposedly involves street police officers, administrative level police officers, lawyers, judges, juries, politicians, state government, federal government, and large corporations. Now of course, the left claims that this massive chain of egoism represents an immoral scam that does nothing but punish potential Rhodes Scholars and Ivy Leaguers. [Is the argument completely bunk? No, but the mere fact that some profit off a given initiative doesn't equate it with immorality, especially if said process is ultimately beneficial.]
And how do they make this argument? As Raina Kelley does in this article, liberals glibly boast about decreased crime rates and use this data to belittle conservative apprehension about violence. The left contends conservative policies derive from irrational paranoia as well as selfish interest in procuring votes and corporate donations. But perhaps, they're missing a rather clear implication of overcrowding jails and a "tough-on-crime" mindset, one that ultimately underpins the falling crime rate.
I'll use this graph to illustrate:
Now the crime rate didn't drop immediately. It started decreasing in 1990, so perhaps there was a critical mass that needed to be reached for the avenues of crime to be weakened (drug trade, gangs, etc...). Or perhaps, the advent of punishing first-time offenders, what I logically consider a preventative measure, engendered the crime rate drop. These offenders would likely gradually progress to more violent crime after a significant amount of years. So unlike previous decades, ten years out these first-time offenders were no longer around to cause trouble. Finally, the explosion of the illegal drug trade in the 80's took ample resources and time to adequately combat.
Nonetheless, the data is pretty straightforward and does well to substantiate the "exclude not rehabilitate" paradigm. In my opinion, Occam's Razor supports this explanation as the most reasonable. [I'd also add an aging population as a viable explanation.]
47 comments:
I avoid discussing criminal justice with liberals. Some topics I enjoy arguing with them about, but when they discuss criminal justice, they just shows how naive they are and it gets annoying rather quickly. Naturally, most of the liberals I discuss criminal justice with live in areas where crime means someone was playing their stereo too loud or some teenagers TPed another kid's house.
Is that graph normalized for population?
Liberals really do have a perverse need to enable criminals, especially violent ones. Not only do they want to keep them from being arrested and put in prison, they want to move them into our neighborhoods and even make us ride mass transit with them. And of course they want to make sure only criminals are armed so the victims can't fight back.
The problem is that while most people can see this, they assume that in the end "cooler heads will prevail" when it comes to liberal policies. They assume that liberals don't really mean what they say and argue, and that when it comes down to it they will act rationally to protect the innocent. But just like with affirmative action, the reality proves this isn't correct.
Look at how far liberals take these policies in Europe. In the UK violent criminals are routinely given very short prison sentences, and then released long before completing them. Criminals prefer to rob homes verses burglarize them because entry is easier with people present and they know the homeowners don't pose any threat to them. Not only are the homeowners prohibited from owning a gun, but in a recent case a woman who grabbed a kitchen knife when thugs were preparing to break into her house was warned by the police that this was illegal. In Germany not only are knives and guns out of bounds, but even large-ish dogs are made impossible for ordinary people to have by all sorts of regulation.
"
Nonetheless, the data is pretty straightforward and does well to substantiate the "exclude not rehabilitate" paradigm. I"
Normally that graph is used to show that legalizing abortion reduced crime.
"Blacks do, indeed, have much higher rates of abortions than whites or other minority groups. In 2000, while blacks made up 17 percent of live births, they made up more than twice that share of abortions (36 percent). If those aborted children had been born, the number of blacks born would have been slightly over 50 percent greater than it was.
The comparison with whites and other minorities is striking. Whites made up 78 percent of live births*, but only 57 percent of abortions. Non-black minorities had 7percent of live births and 5 percent of abortions. If the aborted children had been born for either group, the percentage increase in the number of children born to these groups would have been less than that for blacks: 16 and 32 percent, respectively.
"
The black fertility rate was well above 2 up until the 90s. The adolescent black fertility rate was also very high before the 1970s and dropped gradually through the 1980s. Those rates gradually declined and might be responsible for the later decrease in crime rate.
But it could just be a change in the laws. Maybe it became harder to become incarcerated. Clearly it became easier in the 90s in the first place.
One of my favorite recollections of lefties and crime is the story of arch-liberal Norman Mailer and the murderer Jack Abbott. From Wikipedia:
In 1965, aged 21, Jack Abbott was serving a sentence for forgery in a Utah prison when he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. He was given a sentence of three to 23 years for this offense, and in 1971 his sentence was increased by a further 19 years after he escaped and committed a bank robbery in Colorado. Behind bars, he was rebellious and spent much time in solitary confinement.
In 1977, he read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer, alleging that Gilmore was largely embroidering his experiences, and offered to write about his time behind bars in order to provide a more factual depiction of life in prison. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer.
Mailer supported Abbott's attempts to gain parole. Abbott was released on parole in June 1981, despite the misgivings of prison officials, one of whom questioned Abbott's mental state and whether he was rehabilitated, saying, "I thought ... that Mr. Abbott was a dangerous individual ... I didn't see a changed man. His attitude, his demeanor indicated psychosis." After leaving prison, Abbott went to New York City and was the toast of the literary scene for a short while.
On the morning of July 18, 1981, just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott went to a small cafe called the Binibon in Manhattan. He argued with 22-year-old Richard Adan, son-in-law of the restaurant's owner. Adan, a budding actor and playwright, told him that the restroom was for staff use only. Abbott stabbed Adan in the chest, killing him. Abbott maintained that he acted in self-defense.
The very next day, unaware of Abbott's crime, the New York Times ran a positive review of In the Belly of the Beast.
After some time on the run, Abbott was arrested in Morgan City, Louisiana, while he was working in an oilfield. He was charged with the murder of Richard Adan. At his trial in January 1982, he gained the support of such celebrities as writer Jerzy Kosinski, and actress Susan Sarandon, whose son Jack Henry Robbins is named after Abbott. Abbot was convicted of manslaughter and given fifteen years to life.
Apart from the advance fee of $12,500, Abbott did not receive any revenue from In the Belly of the Beast, because Richard Adan's widow successfully sued him for $7.5 million in damages, which meant she receives all the money from the book's sales.
Norman Mailer was criticized for his role in getting Jack Abbott released and was accused of being so blinded by Abbott's evident writing talent that he did not take into account the man's violent nature. In a 1992 interview in The Buffalo News, Mailer said that his involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in." Kosinski admitted that their advocacy of Abbott was in essence, a "fraud."
In primate troops, high status individuals harass low status individuals. This serves several functions:
1. Reinforces their relative status.
2. Keeps low status individuals.off-balance and less likely to usurp power
3. Disrupts coalition forming.
It seems likely that such behaviors have been retained in humans and have morphed to suit our particular social settings.
Someone needs to do a study showing how criminals are getting both younger and dumber. This is especially true of NAM offenders, who are laughably inept in what they do.
The police don't have to do any actual police work anymore. Catching these stupid, blatant and sloppy NAM criminals is like shooting fish in a barrel in a lot of cases - they've got short time horizons and very little to lose by being arrested or incarcerated since they lack any sense of shame at running afoul of the justice system.
Also, as to the question of arguing with liberals, many of them will claim that the war on drugs is filling prisons with low-level drug offenders. If you look at charges only that may be true - a lot of offenders are certainly locked up for possession/distribution. However, what these liberals don't realize is that both police and prosecutors tend to pursue only the drug-oriented charges. Drug charges are normally accompanied by actual physical evidence and sufficiently long sentences - most convicted drug dealers are also guilty of a litany of other offences that are a waste of time to pursue and may not show up in the list of charges at sentencing.
@Camlost
Also, as to the question of arguing with liberals, many of them will claim that the war on drugs is filling prisons with low-level drug offenders. If you look at charges only that may be true...
Excellent point. Guy White had an excellent post about this here: http://guywhite.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/doing-prison-time-for-victimless-crimes/
Your Lying Eyes looked at this from the other direction here: http://lyingeyes.blogspot.com/2010/03/hey-what-happened-to-all-those-non.html
The left contends conservative policies derive from irrational paranoia as well as selfish interest in procuring votes and corporate donations.
Then to add to their other problems, the left are ignorant as to who it is that corporations donate to - they donate to the left.
Why don't you ever criticize conservatives for their views? Conservatives don't believe any person has a near immutable genetic propensity for crime and low future time orientation. Many don't even believe in evolution. They think that Christian values or some bullshit will cure the ciminal underclass.
As forgiving as liberals are to criminals, they have a more accurate perspective on what causes crime because by blaming the environment they are at least blaming a force outside free will and personal responsibility. Indeed, testosterone levels, propensity for aggression, frontal lobe size and a number of other genetic factors heavily influence criminality, and those are not things a low IQ individual can take responsibility for and manage on their own.
And ultimately, by backing abortion, liberals are really the ones that back the policy which has the greatest potential to reduce crime. Conservatives and bitch all they want about being tough on crime, but if they want to make it impossible for the lower classes to access abortion, their policy will increase crime manifold.
It doesn't look like the graph is normalized for population, but even so, the concept illustrated is still dramatic. It shows a five-fold increase since 1980. The US population sure didn't grow that much.
Otherwise, let's not get drawn into the Fox Butterfield Fallacy
http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=326
FeministX,
I'm surprised you didn't bring up Huckabee and Clemmons. Huckabee was known to be soft on crime and some questioned whether his softness emanated from his religious beliefs.
I've read Sailer's critique of abortion as a factor in reduced crime, but I remain convinced that there is some validity to the theory that legalized abortion reduces the number of potential criminals. In which case, the "pro-life" position might be the pro-abortion-within-high-crime-communities position.
Targeted financial inducements to voluntarily self-sterilize would save us tons in future welfare as well as crime and side-step the whole moral quagmire of abortion. But, that's a pipedream in dysgenic America.
-Killer Bee
@FemX
Conservatives don't believe any person has a near immutable genetic propensity for crime
Who does believe this? I think you have fundamentally misunderstood the difference between individuals and groups, and therefore the entire concept of HBD.
@FemX
Conservatives don't believe any person has a near immutable genetic propensity for crime
I guess that FemX is saying that Conservatives (i.e. Repubs) don't subscribe to HBD openly as a part of their public political platform. And that is certainly true, but we all know that liberalism and "blank-statism" dominate public discourse to that degree that no politican can endorse HBD and retain any hope of being elected.
It shows a five-fold increase since 1980. The US population sure didn't grow that much.
Foreign-born population, 1980 = 14 million (39% from Europe)
Foreign-born population, 2010 = 38 million (<13% from Europe)
A threefold increase overall, however the Latino-born population increased from 4 million in 1980 to 18.5 million in 2010, nearly five-fold.
Conservatives don't believe any person has a near immutable genetic propensity for crime and low future time orientation.
You crack me up when you try to pretend to be smart. There is no such thing as an "immutable propensity". It's an oxymoron. A propensity, by defnition, is mutable.
Not only are you ignorant of genetics and HVD, your English is not too hot.
***Now the crime rate didn't drop immediately. It started decreasing in 1990, so perhaps there was a critical mass that needed to ***
Increased prison numbers was one of the major factors in reducing crime through the 90's.
Levitt, Steven D. (Winter 2004). "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not" (PDF). Journal of Economic Perspectives 18: 163–190.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf
"There is no such thing as an "immutable propensity". It's an oxymoron. A propensity, by defnition, is mutable."
I said "near immutable". And such a thing does exist. People with certain kinds of brain damage (not inherited) don't have a real ability to contain their criminality.
If a men is highly androgenized, IQ 83, and has impaired frontal lobe function, how can it be reasonable to suggest that such a man can police his criminal impulses through calm mediation?
It's not to say that all people are blameless for their crimes because the tendancy to commit them is genetically based. I could avoid paying taxes this year. It would be a criminal act because I can and should know better. But some people aren't really capable of "knowing better" in the heat of the moment.
As for abortion, Steve Sailer and the like deny the obvious and overwhelming evidence which supports a correlation between abortion and lower crime rates because support of abortion is extremely taboo amongst mainstream conservatives.
Here is the beginning of an analysis of the demographics of abortion receivers:
http://feministx.blogspot.com/search?q=abortion
Femx,
The Levitt paper I cited refers to abortion as one of the four major factors in reducing crime rates.
"Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to
explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of
crack and legalized abortion.
Other factors often cited as important factors driving the decline do not appear to have played an important role: the strong economy, changing demographics, innovative policing strategies, gun laws and increased use of capital punishment. In stark contrast, the crime experience between 1973 and 1991 is not well explained by the factors identiĊ½ ed in this paper. The real puzzle in my opinion, therefore, is not why crime fell in the 1990s, but why it did not start falling sooner."
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf
"As for abortion, Steve Sailer and the like deny the obvious and overwhelming evidence which supports a correlation between abortion and lower crime rates because support of abortion is extremely taboo amongst mainstream conservatives."
Hell yeah! Let's abort all children of single moms, since they're most likely to become criminals. Kill em all!
"
Hell yeah! Let's abort all children of single moms, since they're most likely to become criminals. Kill em all!"
Not now. Now such a high percentage of children come from single mothers that their propensity towards crime will probably be rather diluted in the coming decades.
***Hell yeah! Let's abort all children of single moms, since they're most likely to become criminals. Kill em all!***
Mike,
A better option would be to make birth control shots a condition of welfare for single mums.
http://kidshealth.org/teen/sexual_health/contraception/contraception_depo.html
If you commit a felony, you should be sentenced to death. The current death penalty is highly inefficient.
Felons should be executed by firing squad. The trial should be quick and expedient, insanity pleads would be forcefully denied.
Would this act as a sufficient deterrent against crime?
I want to increase the graveyard population, not the prison population.
You kill, you die. You rob, you die. You smuggle drugs, you die. My plan is simple.
Families of the victim of a murderer should be granted the opportunity to conduct the execution themselves.
I like how China uses their death penalty.
If a felon does not wish to die, they will be granted the opportunity to participate in human eugenics trials.
Yet, to far-left liberals, each individual's constitution derives not from a hereditary predisposition, but rather a tabula rasa invariably sullied by the odious forces of classism and racism.
So where would racism come from? It has to start somewhere.
If the "original sin" doesn't come from a "hereditary predisposition" where could it come from?
"I like how China uses their death penalty."
I do too, I like how they kill corporate criminals. Bernie Madoff and Kenneth Lay would have been shot to death in China. I think we need a government willing to kill rogue businessmen who steal from their workers and stock holders.
@FemX
As forgiving as liberals are to criminals, they have a more accurate perspective on what causes crime because by blaming the environment they are at least blaming a force outside free will and personal responsibility. Indeed, testosterone levels, propensity for aggression, frontal lobe size and a number of other genetic factors heavily influence criminality, and those are not things a low IQ individual can take responsibility for and manage on their own.
Very few people are truly unable to control their actions. The only appropriate response once we identify such individuals is to lock them up for the good of society. But liberals argue instead that they can't be locked up because they aren't responsible for their actions. All of society suffers when this happens, but those on the bottom end of the curve suffer most due to proximity to vicious criminals, and confusion as to what the rules really are.
The vast majority of the lower half of the bell curve has enough self control to exist in society if the right conditions are met. Low IQ people function better with simple, black and white rules. Justice should be simple and swift, and the immediate consequences should be sufficient to act as deterrent to the specific crime. They won't see that doing wrong will eventually not be worth it, so the punishment for the initial crime is critical. They do even better still if they believe that they will also be judged immediately by a higher power, according to concrete rules of right and wrong.
Liberals think they are so clever for dismantling religion and turning everything into a nuance that they forget the impact on those at the left end of the bell curve. These poor saps end up in prison (and some innocent victim ends up raped or dead) because some snotty liberal wants to feel sophisticated.
If you commit a felony, you should be sentenced to death. The current death penalty is highly inefficient.
Plus we can all but eliminate the prospect of executing an innocent man via MRI-scan based lie detection. Take him straight from the scanner to the execution ground, end of story.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up Huckabee and Clemmons. Huckabee was known to be soft on crime and some questioned whether his softness emanated from his religious beliefs.
Arkansas borders seven states, including the hugely populous Texas. During his time in office, I have heard, Huckabee pardoned more convicts than did the seven bordering states combined.
Follow the money folks.
Billions of dollars are spent on incarceration. If you could possibly convince the populace that prison was either inappropriate, ineffective, of unjust, perhaps government would fund these leftist through their community based programs to monitor and treat criminals who are simply reacting to inequality and disparate impact.
Think of all that money in the hands of these Marxists!
@ FemX:
Liberals might blame "outside" forces but their blank slate ideology makes them completely wrong in prescribing "treatment". They think criminals will be cured with a little encouragement, which is possibly the most dangerous position to have. I'm not a fan of conservatives' insistence on Christian values, but the conservative position is pro-death penatly and most conservatives are harsh on crime (excluding Huckabee). I think punshing criminals squares well with Christian philosophy if one believes in absolute justice, which is a Christian principle.
As for abortion: Honestly, I think abortion is murder, so I'm not going to criticize someone for holding the same position even if it has negative practical repercussions. The eugenics abortion argument that contends the immorality of abortion is outweighed by the practical benefits of reduced dumb people fails due to a slippery slope argument. By that logic, we should start offing handicapped people, mentally ill people, and in 50 years, people who are only capable of meanial labor. in the end, I guess I still am pro-abortion, but I find it disgusting.
The compromise is sterilization, which to my knowledge, only conservative politicians have made mention of (for example, guy in new Zealand, guy in SC, guy in Alabama I think).
"I think punshing criminals squares well with Christian philosophy if one believes in absolute justice, which is a Christian principle."
"Absolute Justice" means what? The bible is clearly all about forgiving the sinner. Let he among us without sin... Father forgive them they know not what they do... But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.
Plenty of Christians go to prisons in effort to save and help educate prisoners. I'm guessing that the majority of efforts to rehabilitate prisoners comes from religious groups, not ivy type liberals.
You don't seem to want to accept the obvious fact that the vast majority of conservatives are also blank slatists. The only time they depart from blank slatism involves gender roles, not race. Conservatives are extreme blank slatists when it comes to intelligence, work ethic, moral character and race.
Liberals say it takes a village. Conservatives say it takes a family (empirically that is even less accurate than the liberal position). Science says genes decide what it takes.
There's no evidence that legalizing abortion reduced the crime rate.
In fact, the cohorts born after Roe actually had a HIGHER violent crime rate than the cohorts born just before it.
On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that the legalization of Abortion led to an explosion in the STD rate, and an explosion in Single Motherhood that coincided with a plummet in births to Married Mothers.
The real reason people like Feminist like Abortion is because it led to more people having casual sex, and therefore “throwing off the shackles of religious oppression“.
They don’t even believe their line of crap about it reducing crime.
Even if you are "genetically destined" to become a murderer, you alone are still responsible for your actions.
Same thing as if you were born with a pre-existing condition. Even though it's technically "not your fault", you are responsible for it.
People must be responsible for both their actions and non-actions.
Even if you are "genetically destined" to become a murderer, you alone are still responsible for your actions.
Same thing as if you were born with a pre-existing condition. Even though it's technically "not your fault", you are responsible for it.
People must be responsible for both their actions and non-actions.
I find this whole area quite difficult to understand.
I mean, let's say we accept that anyone is not responsible for their traits, no matter how essential those traits are to them as a person, so long as they aren't the ultimate end of the causal chain that caused them. This seems to be what a lot of people, most people, think is "fair". If this is the case, then we can't ever actually hold anyone responsible for anything or ever say that anyone ever deserves anything, since we're deterministic machines, whether or not the deterministic process that causes our actions is genetic or not.
So you're left with a bullet biting situation where people are either responsible for everything or responsible for nothing. Both of which are alien to human senses of justice.
Many extreme Liberals obviously accept that no-one is responsible for anything ever (or else, only White people or the Rich are, for some reason) while many hyper-Conservatives accept that everyone should be held responsible for all of their personal traits, which gives no space for charity (even though Conservatives are the most charitable groups when they don't have the government involved, since they don't trust the government to give it to the people they think need it).
The only way to resolve this is to accept human norms of justice and responsibility as just evolving because they meet the selective needs of the community they are part of (whether on an individual or group basis) with no real rationalist logic behind them. But Liberals will never accept this, because they believe they are rationalist (more so than Conservatives, their enemy) and ultimately believe that there is some rationalist way in which they can find out and "prove" the "truth" of justice and be "objectively right" about matters of justice. And also because group norms are, when you get down to it, group norms and so are occasionally oppressive to minorities in the group (which they hate the idea of ever happening).
You don't seem to want to accept the obvious fact that the vast majority of conservatives are also blank slatists. The only time they depart from blank slatism involves gender roles, not race. Conservatives are extreme blank slatists when it comes to intelligence, work ethic, moral character and race.
If true, then the vast majority of conservatives have accepted a liberal premise. And the conservatives wonder why they never seem to win...
ONESTDV said:
The eugenics abortion argument ... fails due to a slippery slope argument. By that logic, we should start offing handicapped people, mentally ill people, and in 50 years, people who are only capable of meanial labor. Killing a fetus only leads to a slippery slope if you consider them equal to the unproductive people that are already born. I'd guess that most people don't consider fetuses to be fully human and for that reason alone they're OK with abortion.
Consequently, they'd never turn on handicapped or low-IQ people. It would take a different rationale altogether plus a far more aggressive desire to pare down the human race, bordering on the pathological.
One reason to opt for more abortion is that we can't get rid of the bad (or dumb) apples once they're born - except through costly incarceration. And that's usually after 18 years of welfare.
But, again, I'd much prefer a concerted effort to encourage sterilization.
The downside is that it would lead to less condom use and more STD. But, that kind of shortsightedness and stupidity would decrease by the next generation with fewer idiots pissing into our gene-pool.
-Killer Bee
FeministX:
You are partly right about conservatives not believing in evolution and human genetics. Well-educated conservatives do believe in evolution(except Auster)and also understand genetics enough to appreciate the fact that genes interact with the environment and operate to set limits on various capacities, such as music ability.
Criminality is a complex trait affected by a gene complex that operates on a variety of brain subsystems. That the serotonin and dopamine receptors play a role is true, as is the condition and size of the prefrontal lobes. IQ and impulsivity are critically important and racial differences in all of these factors create incarceration data that produce liberal reactions to "free" offenders. You see these liberals as insightful and wise in blaming the environment but you are wrong in emphasizing environment. After all, Jews and various Asians have begun life in America in poverty and never resorted to epidemic crime. Poverty alone does not explain such dysfunction of families among blacks.
The idea of gene/environment interaction means that even blacks, loaded with testosterone and low IQ's, need not become criminals if the environment is-get this- restrictive! By that I mean old fashioned discipline. Blacks of my era went through school without fights and chaos(usually) because they had parents who supported the schools and PUNISHED their offspring. In general, blacks with military families and real fathers have far fewer problems. Religion helps them , as well. Discipline is utterly absent in ghettoes today. Liberal values won, freeing blacks to express genetic tendencies because families fell apart and freedom reigned. Civil rights were generally good things, but the loss of adult authority was a much bigger catastrophe for blacks than for whites.
"It shows a five-fold increase since 1980. The US population sure didn't grow that much.
Foreign-born population, 1980 = 14 million (39% from Europe)
Foreign-born population, 2010 = 38 million (<13% from Europe)
A threefold increase overall, however the Latino-born population increased from 4 million in 1980 to 18.5 million in 2010, nearly five-fold."
You're comparing apples to oranges. The graph shows total incarcerations, not broken down by race. Therefore the proper comparison is to total population.
You're also making the assumption that Latino/non-white populations are more prone to crime. This is correct, but you have to show the EXTENT to which this is reflected in the incarceration rate.
Also, the Latino population is younger, with large numbers of children not yet in their crime-prone years.
Finally, the threefold increase in the foreign-born population is STILL far less than the five-fold increase in the incarceration rate.
Anonymous-a most unfortunate name!-
makes several important points: liberals are generally blank slaters whose sense of justice is weakened by their need to vindicate "victims." Victims must be minorities with proper qualifications to trigger their revulsion. If minorities commit crimes, it is always less serious no matter how heinous. This is a meme of stupifying power fitting perfectly with their social justice ethos.
To free blacks from almost any causal link that implies responsibility, liberals must be blank slaters. This logical requirement handicaps them from the start because genetics is a mushrooming science of great power that threatens their paradigm. Apologists like Richard Nisbett or Jared Diamond are intensely busy these days attempting to prevent the sinking of the "blank slate" ship of liberalism. This is a task of obfuscation that will simply postpone the inevitable victory of genetics and HBD.
Determinism is treated in my Apes or Angels? book with more care than usual because I wanted to make a case for "free will" amidst a human biology that is Darwinian and materialistic. I hope you who care about these kinds of issues will read the book. I think I make a good case for human nature being both free and determined simultaneously. Hey, knowing the author gives me the inside track.
FemX says:
Conservatives don't believe any person has a near immutable genetic propensity for crime and low future time orientation. Many don't even believe in evolution. They think that Christian values or some bullshit will cure the ciminal underclass.
As forgiving as liberals are to criminals, they have a more accurate perspective on what causes crime because by blaming the environment they are at least blaming a force outside free will and personal responsibility.
As you explicitly admit above, both liberals and conservatives blame the environment. Conservatives blame both the decline in public morality and the decreased effectiveness (i.e. less certain and severe punishment) of the criminal justice system for the gigantic spike in crime in the 1960s --- a spike which has still not gone away. Liberals blame economic inequality or something very like it, usually.
The liberal explanation is obviously wrong since inequality has been gradually increasing since the seventies; whereas, the crime rate exploded in the sixties, stayed high for a while, and then started to decline in the 90s. The conservative explanation for the decline fits well: the increase in prison population means punishment was increasing. The earlier explosion is harder for them --- sentencing did get somewhat lighter in the sixties. Probably, though, it was the decreasing ability of police to deal out street justice which caused the big run-up, and this is hard to measure quantitatively. Short time horizon people almost certainly respond more to the prospect of officer Kelly beating the crap out of them right away than to the prospect of maybe going to jail for a little while some unknown number of months in the future.
The Levitt paper on abortion has been pretty convincingly debunked by Ted Joyce, by the way.
Levitt's reply to Joyce is better still:
link
The debate did not end in 2003. Joyce has published more stuff since.
http://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/faculty/profiles/joyce.html
Oh, and Levitt and Donahue did not deal with all of Joyce's objections even in that response.
Crime Rates and Increase in Prison Population? What baloney.
An estimated 28.8 million violent and property crimes were committed last year, compared to 44 million in 1973 when the FBI first released its annual crime survey.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95580&page=1
For the first time in nearly 40 years, the number of state prisoners in the United States has declined. As of January 2010, there were 1,404,053* persons under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities, 4,777* fewer than on December 31, 2008.
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=57653
@ Cornelius Troost
Look at Asians in Australia. They commit more crimes there than blacks...please.
Also, Russia is ranked 5th highest crime rate in the world. I know that country isn't stupid.
"Asians" in Australia and Britain is a code word for "Muslims".
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