Sensationalist, but not too far off the mark.
While I’m not buying **New Deal Democrat’s ** assertion that it is only the incarceration rate that it is lowering the crime rate, this assertion is far far worse.
The idea that higher incarceration rates couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a lesser crime rate is just plain silly.
It’s called prevention. A little thing called recidivism.
The abrupt fall of the Soviet Union was bad for the Russians. I have read that during the 1990s the standard of living of 80 percent of the Russian population declined, often to subsistence levels.
Russian would be better off if Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts at gradual reform had succeeded. Those efforts would have had a better chance if Ronald Reagan had not provoked an arms race with the Soviets. That arms race doubled the national debt in the United States, but it was more damaging to the Soviet Union.
On several occasions in this thread I have acknowledged that the decline in the youth population was also a factor.
A factor in the rising crime rate in the UK is the rising black population.
The only thing that reliably reduces recidivism is age. This is an argument in favor of longer prison sentences.
This is the best explanation of the end of the New Deal coalition I have read. Thomas Edsall expanded his ideas into a book.
The Atlantic May 1991
When the official subject is presidential politics, taxes, welfare, crime, rights, or values the real subject is Race…
In particular, busing, affirmative action, and much of the rights revolution in behalf of criminal defendants, prisoners, homosexuals, welfare recipients, and a host of other previously marginalized groups have, for many voters, converted the government from ally to adversary…
George Herbert Walker Bush. Conservative populism has permitted the Republican Party to replace in the minds of many voters the idea of an “establishment” ruled by business interests with a hated new liberal establishment, adversarial to the common man: an elite–of judges, bureaucrats, newspaper editors, ACLU lawyers, academics, Democratic politicians, civil-rights and feminist leaders–determined to enact racially and socially redistributive policies demanding the largest sacrifices from the white working and lower-middle classes…
The contact between whites and the black underclass has routinely violated every standard necessary for the breakdown of racial stereotypes. Most white contact with the underclass is through personal experience of crime and urban squalor, through such experience related by friends and family, or through the daily reports about crime, drugs, and violence which appear on television and in newspapers…
“The stereotype is not a stereotype anymore,” says Kenneth S. Tollett, a black professor of education at Howard University. “The behavior pattern in the underclass is not stereotypical in the pejorative sense, but it is a statement of fact. A stereotype is an overgeneralization, ‘This is the way people are,’ and then we say all are like that. The behavior of black males in the underclass is now beginning to look like the black stereotype. The statements we have called stereotypes in the past have become true.”…
The sea change in American presidential politics–the replacement of a liberal majority with a conservative majority–involved the conversion of a relatively small proportion of voters: the roughly five to ten percent of the electorate, made up primarily of white working-class voters, empowered to give majority status to either political party.
My apologies if I missed such a statement.
*Remember, if you use environment to explain the crime problem in Russia, then you have to use it everywhere. If not environment, then what? Why isn’t Russia as stable and prosperous as China? Why are you much more likely to be robbed, raped, or murdered in Moscow than you are in Shanghai? *
A minor factor at best. There aren’t enough black people in Britain to have such a large effect.
The explosion in crime in the UK is almost entirely a function of the social decay in the white working / welfare classes. Theodore Dalrymple is probably the foremost examiner of this phenomenon: Life at the Bottom - Wikipedia
We’ve established that the classic American dodge, “blame it all on black people,” doesn’t work in a global context. It’s a very persistent local phenomenon here in the States. It may be getting worse, as a greater and and greater proportion of the black American population are born in poverty to never married mothers.
Would you feel better getting beaten and mugged by black American thugs on the DC subway, or Slavic Russian thugs on the Moscow subway?
Is it really because Slavs are an inferior race, the way that Hitler and a number of other Teutonic supremacists have claimed over the years? Or maybe, things are more complicated than simple metrics like “race”.
Predominantly black countries nearly always have higher murder rates than countries that are predominately white or Oriental.
In the United States blacks have a murder rate that is over seven times the white rate.
There’s still that little factor of the biggest white country in the world having an astronomically high murder rate for an industrialized country.
Is Russia the outlier, or is this typical of what Europeans are capable of when they don’t have Western Europe’s historical advantages?
In 2011 the murder rate in Russia per 100,000 was 12. That is high for a Caucasian country, but most black or Hispanic countries have higher rates.
I do not know what the murder rate in Russia was under Communism, but I have read accounts by visitors to the Soviet Union that described a country that was fairly safe from crime.
Hitler, and Nazi Germany were European. The terrifying thing is the evil potential that lurks everywhere, in every single person and population, just waiting for the right time. It is for fear of this evil that we must fight bigotry and oppression.
What works in Norway is unlikely to work as well in the U.S. because of the different racial compositions of the populations. Also, in Norway there is more of a safety net.
Your wiki cite isn’t accurate. Russia’s murder rate is higher.
You have not demonstrated your bigoted, racist, hateful assertions.
I have documented that blacks have a significantly higher crime rate than whites and that the overall crime rate has declined declined by one third since 1980 when the prison population tripled.
It is also worthy of note that in 1960, which is to say before the civil rights laws were signed during the 1960s, the overall crime rate was lower than it has been since, although the murder rate was slightly higher.
A major reason for the decline in the prestige of the government since 1964 is that most of the white majority stopped seeing the government as a organization that advanced their interests. Instead they saw the government as an organization that advanced the interests of blacks at their expense.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_ajc-portrait_of_the_poor.htm
By all means, keep pushing the racial angle. Make it easy for concerns about the unlimited immigration of marginally literate poor people, violent crime, the proliferation of never married mothers, and the resulting social decay, to be dismissed as simple racism.
Keep at it, and one day very soon, the US establishment will repeal civil rights laws and bring back Jim Crow. Then all will be well.
I see little chance for repealing the civil rights legislation. I do not advocate that it be repealed. What I do advocate is that it be narrowly interpreted. The burden of proof should be on those who claim that they have been discriminated against because of race.
Public schools are frequently accused of discriminating against black students because they are more likely to be disciplined. They are also more likely to be discipline problems.