Think about what you just wrote.
Have you ever considered the possibility that the reason we have such a high incarceration rate is because we’ve found out it works? Locking criminals up lowers the crime rate. We want lower crime rates so we lock criminals up.
We don’t see lowered sickness rates as a sign we should close hospitals. We don’t see lowered illiteracy rates as a sign we should close schools. Why should we close prisons because of lowered crime rates?
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it doesn’t take into account the proportionality of the punishment, and it strays into blaming the victim. You could make exactly the same statement about any crime, no matter how slight, and any punishment, no matter how severe.
Yes, it’s easy to not smoke pot. But look at the other stuff you mentioned. You have to make sure none of your friends smoke pot. You have to constantly be on guard that you don’t get dragged into draconian enforcement.
If we were to make the penalty for jaywalking be summary execution, you could point out how dumb people are to jaywalk. It’s not like it’s hard to walk to the corner and wait for the light to change. And, while you could argue that the dead jaywalkers were idiots, the real problem would be the extreme criminalization of a relatively minor offense.
There are always going to be people who don’t follow the rules. But the reason we have a high prison population compared to other places isn’t that we have more idiots who don’t follow the rules. It’s that we’ve implemented unreasonably strict penalties for those idiots.
You should re-read what he just wrote - he was saying that the large prison population doesn’t translate to less petty crime.
If you have cites saying that the US has lower rates of petty crime than similar countries with lower incarceration rates, then you might have a point.
Thats all true. But it still takes two. The criminal choosing to commit the crime and the law that makes it a crime.
We may not have more idiots (but sometimes I wonder:) ). But enforcement of the laws themselves, even if they are more strict, doesn’t really bother me. The social situations that are more likely to create people who become criminals does. But once you start “crimeing” so to speak, I’d rather you not be running around in my neighborhood.
Oh, BTW, avoiding pot heads and pot smoking (and other blatant drug users) has impacted my life something like 1 percent, so its not like its some horribly hard and complex task that has taken over my life.
A while ago I have read an interesting paper written by an American teaching law in Germany. It is not a direct answer to your question, but it discusses issues that seem relevant. At 36 pages it is not a quick read and parts of it are not really relevant to your question. Perhaps this abstract gives you a general idea:
Of course for your question the comparison to Germany is completely arbitrary, but I suspect that the conclusions would not be all that different for many other countries.
But if their crime is non-violent and isn’t a big property crime, and incarcerating them costs a lot of money, then wouldn’t you prefer for them to be running around in your neighbourhood not stealing from you or hurting you and not costing you more in tax?
I said before and I’ll say it again. I think the whole war on crime thing should be rethought because it does more harm than good. But I don’t feel much sympathy for folks that choose to break the law and then have to suffer the consequences. Particularly when its pretty well known what those consequences are. And for that matter, I suspect a good fraction of people in jail for drug offenses are not the types that would or will ONLY commit “harmless” drug crimes. For that matter, their very involvment in the drug industry means they are pumping money into a “system” that not rarely IMO does other criminal shit to innocent law abiding citizens as a matter of doing business.
grude’s phrasing could have been improved and I had to read his paragraph twice, but I think you’ve interpreted it backwards. He means, I think, that America does not have a particularly low rate of petty crime, despite the high incarceration.
Sorry. I have no stats on America’s relative crime rates, nor certainly would they would be with less incarceration. 
Unless you want every person ever convicted of any crime to get life in prison, most of them are going to get out eventually. And they’ll get out more likely to keep committing crime, just for having been in prison (compared to someone who had committed the same crime but had not been incarcerated).
Everyone who knows anything about this knows that increasingly harsh punishments for relatively minor crimes is exactly the wrong approach based on the outcomes. But America has this whole “bigger is better” mentality that outweighs all reason.
How many of these types of criminals do you think represents the prison population?
You can’t get the whole picture by just looking at the numbers, because most criminals start out small and being in prison makes them more likely to escalate into more serious crimes. They don’t call it criminal college for nothing.
True. Which shows me that people who are doing hard time for a large number of years likely had multiple chances.
It’s debatable how much of a chance many of them ever really had though. I think generally law-abiding people need to stop trying to put themselves in the shoes of criminals. They think, “Well gosh, the likelihood of long prison time would sure stop *me *from committing crime,” and extrapolate that to the people who actually are committing crime, and you can’t do it. The person thinking that already has something else stopping them from committing crime, obviously, and the criminal doesn’t. It seems like harsher punishment would work, but the facts say it doesn’t.
They got fuckin’ caught, then didn’t they?
Rule #2 of crime: Don’t get fuckin’ caught!
Spain doesn’t, at least in everyday speech. We distinguish between detenido, prisión and prisión preventiva:
detenido is when you’ve been taken in by the cops and are waiting for paperwork to be processed and for the judge to decide whether you will be released awaiting trial or go into prisión preventiva.
Prisión preventiva, you’re awaiting trial and, because you have been considered at risk (either of escape or of commiting further crimes) or because of the seriousness of the charges (violent crimes), you wait for it in prison. Any time you spend in preventiva will be considered already done; if you are declared innocent you’re supposed to get compensated for it.
Prisión is when you’ve already been declared guilty.
I think a big difference is that the US has an extremely adversarial system (he who has the best lawyer wins), perhaps countries with inquisitorial systems (the important point is to find out what happened and to avoid repetition) are less likely to go for the kill. In the US, a DA or judge with a high convinction record is more likely to get reelected: in most other countries, they’re not elected, their job does not require them to convict as many people as possible. The whole American system is geared towards imprisoning as many people as possible; it comes from trying to put control of the law in the hands of “the people” (by making judges and prosecutors elected) but, both by the adversarial nature of the legal system and by the adversarial nature of elections, it ends up being “he who jails most wins”.
I agree that the US justice system is very adversarial, but judges and DAs are not elected in all jurisdictions here. Supreme Court justices aren’t even elected (although the presidents who appoint them are, of course).
True, that yours aren’t elected at all levels.
But in most other countries, they’re not elected at any levels. They’re “civil service” type of jobs (in Spain the requirements involve having a law degree, passing an extremely difficult essay-based exam, passing an interview with people who have the job you’re trying to get, several years on-the-job training).
You’re right. My mistake.
The crime rate in the United States has been declining as the incarceration rate rose and I thought grude was commenting on that. But I see he apparently was not.
That said, my point stands. Regardless of whether grude is aware of it or not, the crime rate has been declining as the incarceration rate rose and that offers a possible explanation to the question he asked.
Not sure of the numbers, but a few of them certainly are there for drug use, which is what bill was talking about.