More than 1 in every 100 Americans now behind bars..

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marincounty

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2005
3,227
5
76
Those that want to blame crime on immigrants and illegal immigrants are mistaken.

Text
Immigration: No Correlation With Crime
Despite our melting-pot roots, Americans have often been quick to blame the influx of immigrants for rising crime rates. But new research released Monday shows that immigrants in California are, in fact, far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California's adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. Indeed, among men ages 18 to 40 ? the demographic most likely to be imprisoned ? those born in the U.S. were 10 times more likely than foreign-born men to be incarcerated.


The new report even bolsters claims by some academics that increased immigration makes the United States safer. A second study, released earlier this month by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, found that on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period. The PPIC even determined that on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities such as Los Angeles that took in a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower influx of illegals

They discovered what Sampson calls the "Latino Paradox" ? first-generation Mexican immigrants were 45% less likely to engage in violence than third-generation Americans. This pattern continued into the second generation, which was 22% less likely to be violent. Similar trends have been seen in New York and Miami, both of which have large immigrant enclaves. "Immigrant communities are often responsible for revitalizing the urban neighborhoods that they live in," Sampson says. The irony of people's popular misconceptions, he adds, is "that the longer one is exposed to American culture, the more likely you are to participate in violence."

 

jpeyton

Moderator in SFF, Notebooks, Pre-Built/Barebones
Moderator
Aug 23, 2003
25,375
142
116
Originally posted by: SinfulWeeper
There is something to be said about a good ol fashioned flogging. Reduce all current jail sentences 90% for class A felonies and below. Flog them to the point of losing conscience, and flog them more the next day. Repeat offenders get more floggings. Watch Americas crime rate drop to an all time low since the 50's.
In Saudi Arabia they whip people. In Singapore they cane people.

In America we give them 3 meals/day and a bed.
 

ConstipatedVigilante

Diamond Member
Feb 22, 2006
7,671
1
0
Half of the people in jail are drug users. It's retarded - imprison the dealers and fine the users if the govt is so hell-bent on drug prohibition.
 

philipuso

Member
Dec 19, 2002
54
0
0
Could it be population control??

Take a look at Chomsky's opinion from the book "Understanding Power".

Crime Control and "Superfluous" People

The other thing the Clinton "New" Democrats and Gingrich Republi­cans both want is to build up crime control-and there's a very simple rea­son for that: you've got a big superfluous population you aren't letting survive in your system, what are you going to do with them? Answer: you lock them up. So in Reagan America, the jail population in the U.S. more than tripled-tripled-and it's been going up very fast ever since.31 In the mid-1980s, the United States passed its main competitors in per capita prison population: South Africa and Russia (though now that Russia's learned our values, they've caught up with us again). So by this point, well over a million and a half people are in prison in the United States-it's by far the highest per capita prison population of the Western countries-and it's going to go way up now, because the 1994 Crime Bill was extremely harsh.32 Furthermore, the prisons in the United States are so inhuman by this point that they are being condemned by international human rights or­ganizations as literally imposing torture.33 And these people all want to in­crease that-they're statist reactionaries, remember: what they really want is a very powerful and violent state, contrary to what they might say.
Also, if you just look at the composition of the prison population, you'll find that the crime-control policy that's been developed is very finely honed to target select populations. So for example, what's called the "War on Drugs," which has very little to do with stopping the flow of drugs, has a lot to do with controlling the inner-city populations, and poor people in gen­eral. In fact, by now over half the prisoners in federal prisons are there on drug charges-and it's largely for possession offenses, meaning victimless crimes, about a third just for marijuana.34 Moreover, the "Drug War" spe­cifically has been targeted on the black and Hispanic populations-that's one of its most striking features. So for instance, the drug of choice in the ghetto happens to be crack cocaine, and you get huge mandatory sentences for it; the drug of choice in the white suburbs, like where I live, happens to be powder cocaine, and you don't get anywhere near the same penalties for it. In fact, the sentence ratio for those drugs in the federal courts is 100 to 1.35 Okay?
And really there's nothing particularly new about this kind of technique of population control. So if you look at the history of marijuana prohibi­tions in the United States, you'll find that they began with legislation in the southwestern states which was aimed at Mexican immigrants who were coming in, who happened to use marijuana. Now, nobody had any reason to believe that marijuana was dangerous or anything like that-and obvi­ously it doesn't even come close to alcohol, let alone tobacco, in its negative consequences. But these laws were set up to try to control a population they were worried about.36 In fact, if you look closely, even Prohibition had an element of this-it was part of an effort to control groups like Irish immi­grants and so on. I mean, the Prohibition laws [which were part of the U.S. Constitution from 1919 to 1933] were intended to close down the saloons in New York City, not to stop the drinking in upper New York State. In Westchester County and places like that, everybody just continued on drinking exactly as before-but you didn't want these immigrants to have saloons where they could get together and become dangerous in the urban centers, and so on.37
Well, what's been going on with drugs in recent years is kind of an ana­log of that, but in the United States today it also happens to be race-related,
for a number of reasons, so therefore it's in large part aimed against black and Latino males. I mean, this is mainly a war against the superfluous pop­ulation, which is the poor working class-but the race/class correlation is close enough in the inner cities that when you go after the poor working class, you're mostly going after blacks. So you get these astonishing racial disparities in crime statistics, all across the board.38 And the point is, the urban poor are kind of a useless population from the perspective of power, they don't really contribute to profit-making, so as a result you want to get rid of them-and the criminal justice system is one of the best ways of doing it.
So take a significant question you never hear asked despite this supposed "Drug War" which has been going on for years and years: how many bankers and chemical corporation executives are in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses? Well, there was recently an O.E.C.D. [Or­ganization for Economic Cooperation and Development] study of the in­ternational drug racket, and they estimated that about a half-trillion dollars of drug money gets laundered internationally every year-more than half of it through American banks. I mean, everybody talks about Colombia as the center of drug-money laundering, but they're a small player: they have about $10 billion going through, U.S. banks have about $260 billion.39 Okay, that's serious crime-it's not like robbing a grocery store. So Ameri­can bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None. But if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail.
And actually, it would be pretty easy to trace drug-money laundering if you were serious about it-because the Federal Reserve requires that banks give notification of all cash deposits made of over $10,000, which means that if enough effort were put into monitoring them, you could see where all the money's flowing. Well, the Republicans deregulated in the 1980s-so now they don't check. In fact, when George Bush was running the "Drug War" under Reagan, he actually canceled the one federal program for this which did exist, a project called "Operation Greenback." It was a pretty tiny thing anyway, and the whole Reagan/Bush program was basically de­signed to let this go on-but as Reagan's "Drug Czar," Bush nevertheless canceled it.40
Or why not ask another question-how many U.S. chemical corpora­tion executives are in jail? Well, in the 1980s, the C.I.A. was asked to do a study on chemical exports to Latin America, and what they estimated was that more than 90 percent of them are not being used for industrial produc­tion at all-and if you look at the kinds of chemicals they are, it's obvious that what they're really being used for is drug production.41 Okay, how many chemical corporation executives are in jail in the United States? Again, none-because social policy is not directed against the rich, it's di­rected against the poor.
Actually, recently there've been some very interesting studies of urban police behavior done at George Washington University, by a rather well-known criminologist named William Chambliss. For the last couple years he's been running projects in cooperation with the Washington D.C. police, in which he has law students and sociology students ride with the police in their patrol cars to take transcripts of what happens. I mean, you've got to read this stuff: it is all targeted against the black and Hispanic populations, almost entirely. And they are not treated like a criminal population, be­cause criminals have Constitutional rights-they're treated like a popula­tion under military occupation. So the effective laws are, the police go to somebody's house, they smash in the door, they beat the people up, they grab some kid they want, and they throw him in jail. And the police aren't doing it because they're all bad people, you know-that's what they're being told to do.42
Well, part of the Contract With America was to increase all of this. They weren't satisfied with the 1994 Crime Bill-and the reason is, the original 1994 Crime Bill still allowed for things like Pell Grants for people in prison [i.e. college subsidies available to capable, low-income students), which are a very small expense. See, most of the people who are in jail have never completed high school, and Pell Grants help give them some degree of edu­cation. Alright, there are many studies of this, and it's turned out that the effect of Pell Grants is to cut back on recidivism, to cut back violence. But for people like the Gingrich Republicans, that doesn't make any sense­--they want people in jail, and they want violence, so they're going to cut out small expenses like that so that we can have even more people thrown into jail.43
Also, all of this "crime control" spending is another huge taxpayer stim­ulus to the economy-mainly to parts of the construction industry, and to lawyers, and other professionals. Well, that's another very useful way to force the public to keep paying off the rich-and by now "crime control" spending is approaching the Pentagon budget in scale; it's still not quite as favored as the Pentagon, because the spending's not as sharply skewed to­wards the wealthy, but nevertheless it's useful.44 And as the society keeps taking on more and more Third World-type characteristics, we should cer­tainly expect that the repression will continue-and that it will continue to be funded and extended, through the Contract With America or whatever other technique they can come up with.
 

soonerproud

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2007
1,874
0
0
philipuso

It is no big conspiracy of the Government to control population. In fact the US Government wants the population to rise to help support the huge national debt we have and to help prop up social security and medicare.

The biggest reason we are first in the world in incarcerations is we mainly use jail, probation and fines for punishment of all crimes. We consider ourselves too civilized to use methods the rest of the world uses that have proven more effective, like caning. Since corporal punishment (Not capitol punishment, I meant corporal.) is frowned upon by our citizens, it leaves very few options for dealing with minor crimes like drug possession. Another problem we have is people think every minor social ill has to be a crime. This is why I said earlier that we all are criminals but just have not got caught. We need to quit amking every problem a crime and learn to find other ways of dealing with these social ills.

Ending the wasteful War on Drugs would be a good start and pardoning all the nonviolent drug offenders is the right thing to do.
 

ric1287

Diamond Member
Nov 29, 2005
4,845
0
0
Originally posted by: jpeyton
Originally posted by: SinfulWeeper
There is something to be said about a good ol fashioned flogging. Reduce all current jail sentences 90% for class A felonies and below. Flog them to the point of losing conscience, and flog them more the next day. Repeat offenders get more floggings. Watch Americas crime rate drop to an all time low since the 50's.
In Saudi Arabia they whip people. In Singapore they cane people.

In America we give them 3 meals/day and a bed.

and scream abuse whenever someone is tazed (sp)......so what's your point
 

Pliablemoose

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
25,195
0
56
Originally posted by: ric1287
Originally posted by: jpeyton
Originally posted by: SinfulWeeper
There is something to be said about a good ol fashioned flogging. Reduce all current jail sentences 90% for class A felonies and below. Flog them to the point of losing conscience, and flog them more the next day. Repeat offenders get more floggings. Watch Americas crime rate drop to an all time low since the 50's.
In Saudi Arabia they whip people. In Singapore they cane people.

In America we give them 3 meals/day and a bed.

and scream abuse whenever someone is tazed (sp)......so what's your point

A fucking men...

 

Noobtastic

Banned
Jul 9, 2005
3,721
0
0
Originally posted by: her209
1 in 36 Hispanic in jail
1 in 15 African-American in jail

and they say there's no connection with illegal immigration.

these people are impoverished, concentrated, and uneducated.

crime is naturally more prevalent in that kind of environment. to say different is ludicrous.
 

Nitemare

Lifer
Feb 8, 2001
35,466
3
76
release those convicted on pot possession, send the other drug addicts to rehab or a halfway house.

Execute those convicted of murder where DNA evidence does not clear them

problem solved
 

MotionMan

Lifer
Jan 11, 2006
17,312
12
81
Originally posted by: BooGiMaN
im surprised there isnt a reality show based on convict vs. convict ala 'the running man' movie

Don't worry - it's not far off:

Ever watch shows about prison, like Lockdown? they like to show prison riots because they get the ratings.

MotionMan
 

MotionMan

Lifer
Jan 11, 2006
17,312
12
81
Originally posted by: soonerproud
Originally posted by: SpunkyJones
I read it as 99% of the people in the country are not breaking the law.

No, just 99% of Americans are smart enough not to get caught.

We all have broken a law that could land us in jail at one time or another.

Speak for yourself.

I cannot think of a law that I have broken as an adult that carries a jail sentence.

MotionMan
 

MotionMan

Lifer
Jan 11, 2006
17,312
12
81
Originally posted by: Pliablemoose
Sooo..

With those stats, some of you all should have family members in prison, anyone wanna fess up?

I can think of two that should be in prison but a) they have not been busted for anything serious, YET and b) they are related by adoption ;)

MotionMan
 

jpeyton

Moderator in SFF, Notebooks, Pre-Built/Barebones
Moderator
Aug 23, 2003
25,375
142
116
Originally posted by: Nitemare
release those convicted on pot possession, send the other drug addicts to rehab or a halfway house.

Execute those convicted of murder where DNA evidence does not clear them

problem solved
The number of people on death row is an extremely small percentage of the prison population.

And clearing room doesn't solve overcrowding. It just lowers the number of convicts we release early. The jails will still be full no matter what.
 

m1ldslide1

Platinum Member
Feb 20, 2006
2,321
0
0
Originally posted by: philipuso
Could it be population control??

Take a look at Chomsky's opinion from the book "Understanding Power".

Thanks for posting that philipuso. I think that it's quite clear that politicians seek more prisons and tougher punishments rather than addressing root causes. Some people feel the root causes revolve around immigration, others poverty, others race. Like Vic pointed out earlier, what is a politician really going to do within this system? And I don't believe there are many of them who are morally torn over the dilemma. They're generally happy to continue with the precedents identified by Chomsky and Zinn and a host of others who are willing to think outside the establishment propaganda.
 

m1ldslide1

Platinum Member
Feb 20, 2006
2,321
0
0
Originally posted by: marincounty
Those that want to blame crime on immigrants and illegal immigrants are mistaken.

Text
Immigration: No Correlation With Crime
Despite our melting-pot roots, Americans have often been quick to blame the influx of immigrants for rising crime rates. But new research released Monday shows that immigrants in California are, in fact, far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California's adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. Indeed, among men ages 18 to 40 ? the demographic most likely to be imprisoned ? those born in the U.S. were 10 times more likely than foreign-born men to be incarcerated.


The new report even bolsters claims by some academics that increased immigration makes the United States safer. A second study, released earlier this month by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, found that on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period. The PPIC even determined that on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities such as Los Angeles that took in a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower influx of illegals

They discovered what Sampson calls the "Latino Paradox" ? first-generation Mexican immigrants were 45% less likely to engage in violence than third-generation Americans. This pattern continued into the second generation, which was 22% less likely to be violent. Similar trends have been seen in New York and Miami, both of which have large immigrant enclaves. "Immigrant communities are often responsible for revitalizing the urban neighborhoods that they live in," Sampson says. The irony of people's popular misconceptions, he adds, is "that the longer one is exposed to American culture, the more likely you are to participate in violence."


Nice work there too. I don't hear anybody else trying to blame the Mexicans in this thread. If only this effect could spread beyond ATOT.