@matrix It's also been shown that high economic and social stratification in primates increases stress and aggression in the whole group, and humans are no exception. the American poor, for the most part, are not the poorest in the world by any stretch but the high income disparity with the people they interact with in their daily lives increases stress for everyone involved, it's simply not a healthy way for society to be organized.

@animeirl @matrix (and if they get arrested, its difficult for them or relatives to break out of the cycle)

@kallisti @matrix Yeah that is another big component of the problem. The american prison system is proven to make people even more likely to commit crimes than they were before, accomplishing the polar opposite of what a correctional institution should do. To make matters worse, the US imprisons more peope per capita than any society in human history. Even ignoring the ethical issues, prisons are basically criminal factories that turn people more violent and more criminal and then release them back into the streets with no support system

@animeirl @kallisti US imprisons more people per capita than any society in human history because it has more criminals per capita than any society in human history and has the resources to lock them up and in the past actively tried to do so.
The primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals away from society and by that stop them from causing more crime. Everything else is a bonus.

@matrix @kallisti

> US imprisons more people per capita than any society in human history because it has more criminals per capita than any society in human history

Not sure I buy this. If it is, it's because the US criminalizes too much dumb shit.

> The primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals away from society and by that stop them from causing more crime. Everything else is a bonus.

It's utter failing to do this, since most people get out of prison or jail eventually and in fact it's arguably impossible to do this due to the cost since to actually accomplish this goal you would just have to lock up most criminals forever which is prohibitively expensive and not something we could ever afford.

If this is the goal of the current system (and for the record, I do not think it is, it is instead merely punitive) it's a completely retarded, unworkable goal that needs to be scrapped.

@animeirl @kallisti
>US criminalizes too much dumb shit

While in some specific cases I would agree, the general answer is no.

>It's utterly failing to do this

Crime in the US has been dropping since the massive incarceration started.

@matrix @kallisti The current era os mass incarceration began in the early 70s. Crime peaked in the 80s and didn't really start to fall until the 90s so this is simply untrue.

@animeirl @kallisti
It began in the late 70s, but big policy changes like this take long time to go into effect. But before that you had attempt at rehabilitation, short sentencing and decreasing prison population while crime increasings.

Also I forgot to say that economic inequality since the 90s has only increased and also in 80s you had an economic boom.

@animeirl @matrix @kallisti Looks like a correlation, though yeah, a wee delayed

@applejack @matrix @kallisti Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume this is a causative association, why does the US have such a high crime rate compared to the rest of the world? Even if you only count whites, the US has an abnormally high prison population in the same league as authoritarian countries like Indonesia.

@animeirl @matrix @kallisti

Total: 639

White:
133 / (465 + 274 + 134 + 133 + 104 + 19 + 19) = 0.11
(100000 / (331893745 * 0.60)) * (2094000 * 0.11) = 115

115 isn't high. Also Indonesia is 93, idk what's up with that. Lower 1/3rd

(jail instead of jail+prison but whatever)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/816699/local-jail-inmates-in-the-united-states-by-race/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_some_dependent_territories_and_subnational_areas_by_incarceration_rate

@kallisti @matrix @animeirl If they get arrested they're probably arrestable types. When they're free they do more crimes

@animeirl If that was the case, you would see it across populations, locations and history and you would see increase in crime during economic recession and decrease during economic upturn, but you don't see it.
However, what you always see is increase in poverty due to increase in lawlessness.

You have a 2 people. Both make $80 a day. Both buy the same items daily. Person A pays $20, person B pays $30 for them. Person A has item/cash stolen every 720 days, person B does every 60 days. Everything else is the same. After 10 years, who is poorer?

@matrix do you see an increase in crime and social instability during times of economic inequality, thats often when civil wars happen

@animeirl again, you see crime and/or social instability which causes economic inequality which can compound into a civil war

@matrix We agree on the end result, but I think economic inequality is the cause, not the symptom

@animeirl Yes and I can't say it literally has 0 effect, but I think there are too many inconsistencies for it to be a primary cause.

@animeirl @matrix People don't do crime out of necessity unless they're like literally starving. In the US the poor are fatter and more idle than the non-poor. They're more anti-social because that's their nature

@animeirl @matrix violent crime and poverty are mainly linked to disparity and so if there's no disparity there's no crime, it's not just being poor it's being poor right next to people who are rich and being very pissed off about that. It's like the monkeys and the grapes and cucumbers, a monkey will accept a cucumber as payment for a task in a cage next to another monkey who's accepting a cucumber as payment for a task, but as soon as one monkey receives a grape the other monkey will no longer accept its cucumber as payment it will freak the fuck out and refuse, it'll throw the cucumber back, it'll say fuck you because it's not fair.

And the US has so many people in prison because they arrest people for drug crimes on an unprecedented scale although that's been kind of slowing down because the dumb fucks have realized that they were being retarded.