We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
I was at work the other day and we were talking about my mouse problem in my basement. My coworker asked how many mouse traps I had.
I said 74.
74?! That's way to many mouse traps. No one would ever need that many mouse traps.
But sir, I haven't told you how many mice I have.
The number of incarcerated individuals is not a relevant statistic if you're also not including the number of criminals there are.
Are they working?
If your 74 traps solve your problem and in a month you have no more mice, then congratulations.
But it sounds like rather than buying more and more mouse traps, you should find and fix the underlying cause.
But why is criminality higher in the US?
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Iceland is one of the most peaceful countries in the world (murder rate 0.54), 36 incarcerations per 100k, police don't carry guns, and it's not known for its widespread mass surveillance system.
Portugal is one of the most peaceful in the world (murder rate 0.7), 118 incarcerations per 100k, and doesn't have license plate readers or mass surveillance.
USA murder rate is 6.3, 541 incarcerations per 100k, extremely high recidivism, and an amazing array of surveillance systems.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. Guess they should have bought Flock cameras instead?
Sorry, I mean high black population, not low. For low, examples like you gave are easy to find.
> Can you name such a place with low crime, low incarceration rate, low surveillance, and importantly, low black population?
Andorra and Finland both meet your four criteria.
He meant to say high black population
Ghana has a murder rate of 1.84 and incarceration rate of 133 per 100k. It didn't get this stable by buying Flock cameras. They have nowhere near the surveillance of the U.S. And they have far fewer murders, far less violent crime, and far fewer incarcerations. If only the prosecutors had more evidence then it could be more like the U.S.!?
Woodmore, Maryland is 82% black. Chance of being a victim of a violent crime is 1 in 904. That's three times safer than the national average. It's an extremely safe community with an overwhelming majority of residents being black.
OK to Ghana.
Woodmore is a gated community so obviously it has an unrepresentative population.
I would think hard on Ghana. It has no shortage of black people living in poverty. Yet it's extremely safe compared to the US as a whole. You're far less likely to be the victim of a violent crime walking down a street in Ghana surrounded by impoverished black people than you are in many streets in the U.S. Not all of Africa is like that. Many countries are more dangerous than the U.S. But Ghana shows pretty clearly that it's not a racial or even strictly a poverty issue. And that increasing our incarceration rate is quite possibly the opposite of what needs to be done. We need to consider other solutions.
It feels good and easy to say lock the bad people up. But the numbers don't show that as a solution if the real issue you're trying to solve is decrease violent crime.
Also Sierra Leone in Africa with a homicide rate a third that of the USofA.
Both Ghana and Sierra Leone are gated communities, just as the USofA, the UK, and Australia are.
I'd suggest that Woodmore fails to meet you particular bias, hence you rule it out.
Woodmore likely meets your four intended criteria depending upon the level of internal surveillance .. I suspect it's not surveillance that prevents Woodmore occupants from killing each other.
Gated communities don't count because residents have to be wealthy enough to buy their way in, so they're populated by a non-violent-criminally-biased sample of the general population. Some countries might count as gated communities if they're heavily populated by 1st generation immigrants who had to be wealthy to get in, otherwise no, they're just full of whatever random people were born there or moved there without any selection pressure against crime.
Respond to him, not me. It's culture related if you ask me, not race.