> I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch.
> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few.
And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while.
The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say crime is out of control, and say the police and prosecutors are not putting enough people away. Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration, and much nicer prisons, yet less crime. In fact, people don't even lock their bicycles up in Norway outside of Oslo. If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it. Americans just double down on what has failed them over the past half century.
> USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world
A fifth of our prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. We also have more pretrial detention and longer sentencing than the rest of the world.
I can't find good data for arrest (versus incarceration) rates. But I'd suspect we're closer to the median in frequency of arrest. In other words, our problem isn't arresting too many people; it's holding them in jail for too long. (Also arresting people for non-violent drug possession, which is stupid.)
> Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
True, more incarceration doesn't seem to fix anything. However less incarceration also does not fix anything (see downtown San Francisco).
> Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration
Finland and Norway are effectively monocultures. They don't have the same social issues we do. Look at any 1st world monoculture and you see the same low incarceration rate. Japan, Korea, Iceland, etc.
You can't just abdicate the monopoly on violence because you feel you've done enough policing this year, any more than you can stop pumping water when you feel like people have used enough, or stop processing sewage and collecting trash when you feel like people have produced enough waste. That doesn't preclude working on root causes of crime or water conservation or reducing waste. But government has to deal with the population-level behavior that it actually has - all of it, not the amount it wishes it had - or we are fundamentally not living in civilization anymore. Water stops coming out of the taps, trash piles up in the streets, and people do crimes with impunity. The Northern European societies people lionize in these types of discussions are certainly not like that.
Behavior of small populations dont translate well into bigger one. Heck, even just to different society.
Swiss have direct vote on literally anything they gather 100k signatures for, ie joining Nato, EU, banning mosques, you name it. Yet the country runs like literal swiss watch. Give same freedom to British population and immediately you have brexit.
America is made up of 5+ full fledged nations of people inside it with different ethnic, cultural, and genetic backgrounds. Why do you expect them to be anything like the Finns or Norwegians?
> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while.
The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say crime is out of control, and say the police and prosecutors are not putting enough people away. Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration, and much nicer prisons, yet less crime. In fact, people don't even lock their bicycles up in Norway outside of Oslo. If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it. Americans just double down on what has failed them over the past half century.