Note that while the number of inmates plummets, the number of crimes committed is higher than ever. This is a failure of the police and the justice system and not a success story.
Nearly 95 percent of violent crimes and robberies committed in Sweden go unsolved, and an individual police officer solves an average of three crimes per year.
http://www.thelocal.se/20081103/15412
The article cited is from 2008 and so nearly five years outdated. The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1]. The biggest problem I see is that the the article glosses over the reasons for such a change. There are multiple reasons why crime statistics change, some merely methodological, but chief among them are two factors:
* Changes in criminal law, classifying new kinds of behavior as a crime or decriminalizing some behavior. (Hello Marihuana legalization!)
* Willingness to report a crime. What used to be a run in among adolescents is nowadays often reported as a violent crime. Any kind of rape or sexual molestation used to be such a stigma on the victim that they were (and still often are) not reported.
Same goes for the rate of solved crimes: A figure of "6%" just glosses over the details. It seems low, but what's more interesting is which crimes get solved. Bike theft has a notoriously low rate of solving the crime (1%) [2] and is very common in some regions, skewing statistics. Same for petty theft. Drug abuse is often reported as a crime. There's no chance to ever solving such crimes on a significant level. Also, how does "6%" compare to the years before? Better? Same? Less?
So be weary when reading and citing those articles. Usually, if only one figure gets cited, you're being mislead.
>The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1].
From your source: "Since 2003, the number of reported offences has increased by approximately 147,000 (+12%). Since 1975, the trend in the total number of reported offences has been characterised by a continuous increase."
That a 1% decrease in the statistics of a single year represent any significant change in the trend since 1975 remains to be seen. I'm very skeptical but I will be very happy if it turns out to be true.
Talking of political spin, you can usually tell when someone is trying to twist facts to make them seem more interesting. They combine things that don't really go together and put the worst one first e.g. "violent crimes and robberies".
You might think, no they're talking about "violent crimes" and "violent robberies" yet the police chief is quoted as saying: " When it comes to theft, there are no witnesses, and victims often don’t know when the crime occurred."
So unless these victims are so viciously beaten by muggers that they get amnesia it seems more likely to be non-violent thefts.
If the violent crimes are really that bad then why not present their stats alone?
In the US, theft and robbery are classified separately. One of the distinguishing characteristics is that robbery generally involves force or the threat of force to take something.
I find it amusing that you warn of the political spin, yet cite as facts and link to an article that cites a "study" done for a TV show with no specifics about methods used or classification criteria given.
Why should we assign any more trust to just those numbers?
I presented an english-language article talking about the topic.
What I care about here is that the law enforcement should get better IRL. I don't care at all if you "trust" anything here, faceless HN user vidarh.I simply presented a fact for you to use or ignore.
Sounds like Nottingham in the UK's bullshit crime statistics.
"Arrests fallen! Crime rates lower than ever!"
Actually people just do it vigilante style or don't bother reporting it because the police are fucking useless.
I mean I caught a person breaking into my car, had photos of the person doing it, the car was covered in finger prints, they arrived in another stolen car with plates that were photographed, left their tools in the car when disturbed and the police said they found "no evidence".
Was resolved for a small fee by a private "individual" who knew who they were.
To be fair, the supreme court have also taken on itself to change the sentencing. The lack of inmates could be because of a change in 2010. [Edit: the effects of which, are seen now]
Most inmates serving 10+ years in Swedish prisons are drug related cases.
In 2010, the Swedish supreme court decided to dramatically change the policy regarding punishment for drug trafficking.
What was previously a 14-year prison sentence suddenly became a 4 year crime. [Update: Prisoners sentenced in 2010 would previosly have been staying in prison for 10+ years but after the change they are now released in 2013 for good behaviour.]
I had a friend in Belgium who was raped in the street one evening by three young men. The police did not take much interest. There was no medical examination done. They said they would call her back to look at some pictures but they never did.
I've fought off muggers several times over the years. I've never bothered to call the police, especially as the actions taken in self-defence might themselves constitute a crime.
Despite all the hype in the cinema, my general impression is that policemen are basically bureaucrats carrying guns, not too different from teachers or bus drivers.
That sounds kind of like the EU countries I've lived in / been to; unless the police is standing next to the crime happening nothing much happens. And that is not just (just, because it is of course) populist talk; it happens a lot. People point out the crime, have images, videos on their phones and the police makes a nice report; you'll never hear about it again.
I had it in Spain. I understand the vigilante crap even if you didn't get hurt; you feel so powerless sitting at the police giving them pics, fingerprints, number plate and make of the getaway car while they are just nodding writing all down and putting it in a drawer knowing they won't do anything.
Crime rates are lower than they've been in a long time. And the reason we know they are, is the crime survey. The crime survey telephones a bunch of random people and asks them if they've been a victim of crime in the past 12 months.
The number of people reporting they're a victim of crime has been dropping since the late 90s.
- Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations.
They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact control and to keep the powerful powerful.
Thats what happen when politics start to dictate priorities for the police.
A large group of the police force and prosecutor have been dedicated to hunt down file sharing. An other group is dedicated to maintain the national firewall. Others deal with hunting down all those 16 years old kids who "hacks" websites with DDOS.
This failure of the police and the justice system has very little to do with the police, and all to do with the current politics. Going for 5% to 10% solved cases in violent crimes and robberies would simply not be as political attractive as getting that 16 year old sentenced.
Politicians have always run the police - a police force is the government's visible threat of violence and method of control over the population. They're not there to protect you. They're there to protect the establishment.
> Research carried out by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (‘Cold Facts’) investigative news programme also revealed that violent crimes and robberies make up about 75 percent of all crimes reported in Sweden.
Solved in such statistics may not mean what many thinks it means. Crimes where the perpetrator is known, but there is not enough evidence to take him to court are also often counted as solved.
At least here in Norway (neighbor country to Sweden), of the solved cases, about half was reported by the police itself. That normally mean that the police caught one in the act, or was them self the victim of the crime (the defendant resisted arrest, attacked or threatened a police officer etc.).
So if you are a victim of a crime, and no police officer witnesses it, it isn't very likely that the perpetrator get punished.
Yeah I must admit the op article seems to be pure political spin. You can read in the official statistics that number of crimes have absolutely exploded in Sweden since 1975:
d-intl.com is run by a bunch of paranoid and outright crazy neo-fascist. It's extremely racist and have close ties to the Norwegian terrorist Ander Bering Breivik as well as to the violent English Defence League(EDL). It's not by any means a decent source for anything.
Just because crime is up doesnt mean crimes that you go for prison for are up. Especially since they have become way more lenient with the sentences the past years.
> the five countries with the highest prison population are the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India.
Blimey, who'd have thought the countries with some of the highest population will have the most inmates. Then it continues with the per capita numbers which are a much better comparison but conveniently leaves out the per capita number for Sweden which according to the numbers in the articles is around 50 -- and India is 30! Not a nice/relevant comparison.
Murders are down 50% from 1990s, and the number of victims of street violence is down 30% the last 5 years. But these numbers are not unique for Sweden. The one type of violence that is up is for organized crime. http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/antalet-mord-halverat-sedan... (list of references in swedish)
But yes, we have a very ineffective police force, everyone knows this. We have more police personnel then ever (huge increase the last years). But solved crimes are less, or the same.
Note also that we can't use self defense like in the US. It is impossible to get any kind of license for pepper spray, taser (cops not allowed either), guns, anything you can defend yourself with. Makes it easy to be a criminal in Sweden.
I think that's the same in a lot of EU countries. Too many people think those kind of drugs should be legalized anyway, so if the grow operation is not too large (10 instead of 1000 plants for instance), they won't do too much. Which I think is a good thing.
What sort of debt is that? It's well and good if it is something which has been approved by the lawmakers, courts and population, but I am skeptical of making offenders pay very large fines. In effect, it turns into a (potentially lifelong) punishment.
See e.g. the piratebay founders, none of which will ever be able to own property or any assets at all, seeing as even the interest payments on the damages they owe are more than the average salary. Sentencing someone to lifelong economic slavery is not a good thing in my book. It is a very, very harsh punishment. In effect, the piratebay founders have been sentenced to exile.
I was glad to see that the recent article kindly submitted here gives the inmate count for Sweden, and Sweden's population.
"According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million."
So I looked up my home state of Minnesota's inmate count and population for a rough comparison.
"State corrections officials are quick to point out that Minnesota’s incarceration rate is the second lowest in the nation and to note how favorably Minnesota compares with our neighbor to the east. As of July 1, Minnesota had a prison population of 9,772 and a prison budget of $457 million a year. In contrast, Wisconsin has a prison population of about 23,000 and a prison budget of $1.2 billion."[1] Minnesota has a population of 5.379 million. In general, the state prison population in the United States is declining,[2] with Maine currently being the state with the lowest rate of incarceration, and Minnesota's recently fluctuating rate being the second-lowest. Some states have much higher rates of incarceration, so the overall United States rate is high.
As the article submitted here suggests, and as the articles I'm linking here suggest too, all over the world it can reduce incarceration rates to not punish minor drug offenses
with incarceration. A determinate sentencing system that emphasizes severity of crimes like Minnesota's[3] keeps first-time, nonviolent offenders out of prison and reserves prison for repeat offenders with known history of violent offenses.
How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.
> How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.
I'm genuinely curious, I'm honestly not trolling, is this state of affairs remarkable in the US these days? Is this really an accomplishment? Is it worse in general?
It's not remarkable in most small towns and rural areas. Big cities are more of a mixed bag - there is always "the bad part of town" with very high crime rates, but the middle-class suburbs (where a great many HN users live) usually have rates of violent crime comparable to western Europe. Naturally the prison population comes almost entirely from those bad neighborhoods, and so our insane incarceration rates are mostly invisible to the suburb dwellers.
Yeah! For instance, the homicide rate in Sweden is about 1 per 100k, whereas the rate in the USA is only 4.7 per 100k. (1.2 in the UK, 3.5 in Europe as a whole, 6.9 worldwide, 1.5 for Northern Europe, the subregion to which Sweden belongs.)
(Why look at homicide specifically? Because almost all cases get reported and the definition of homicide is fairly uncontroversial. With some other crimes -- rape is a particularly bad example -- definitions and reporting rates may vary wildly from country to country.)
Regrettably, how safe you feel is strongly influenced by what you see in the media, hear from your friends and family, etc., and unless you are exceptionally careful about your mental hygiene and pay a lot of attention to the relevant statistics the connection between how safe you feel and how safe you actually are is probably quite weak.
The problem is that looking at national numbers is not representative of most people's experience. For example, my "town" of 140,000 (Cary, NC) has only had one murder in the past five years and is currently listed as the safest city in the US with population between 100,000-500,000 (http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/29/3323828/cary-claims-l...). I personally mostly ignore the police but keep them in mind as a civic resource to leverage for answers about things I don't know how to find out any other way. In a small, safe city, calling the non-emergency line can be a useful source of information. Heck, the electric service powering my neighborhood is run by the neighboring town of Apex, and their off-hours emergency line redirects to the Apex police department, who presumably handle coordinating outage reports with the emergency techs and line workers. I'm not trying to claim things are Andy-Griffith-in-Mayberry, but it's certainly closer to that than the other extreme.
Besides actual skewing, you have localized situations where the relationship of the police to the citizens (and media) is personal, friendly, helpful, and generally constructive. For every "stop and frisk" type story there's a cop helping a stranded single mother change a tire, etc.
A lot of people will find this offensive, but it's mostly because of immigration. Sweden has a one of the most liberal immigration policies in Europe, with more and more immigrants coming in every year, and crime is increasing relatively fast. It's not just correlation: serious crime (violence, theft) is overrepresented in immigrant groups, especially African and Asian immigrants, who are also less likely to serve prison sentences. There are statistics available for all these claims but I'll probably just be labelled a racist and ignored so I won't bother finding them.
We in sweden also have Victim Cardigans. A type of clothing that is worn by those people who types "SD2014" in internet comment fields. This item allows the wearer to dodge discussions because the wearer is a victim of the "PK-maffia" a hypothesized shadow organization that enforces only politically correct viewpoints regarding immigration and disallows the wearer from expressing harsh "truths". In reality Sweden has a very open discussion climate and every viewpoint is accepted as valid, however stupid and/or inhumane. Problems regarding immigration are frequently discussed, however the majority opinion is that crime rates that seemingly correlate with immigration are better explained with class and economic/social situation than ethnicity. So those who have racist views are a minority (at the moment) and therefore, according to themselves, oppressed. But the color of the Victim Cardigan that berrypicker proudly wears, it's magnificent!
Hmm, crime is present in highly dense, poor areas, color me surprised. /sarc
Crime is increasing because the society can't integrate them fast enough. It's literally same deal before abortions were an option.
More people, less resource on a local level, leads to crime growing. This has nothing to do with the minorities, but how they are being handled.
Providing statistics does not make you a racist. Providing false claims such as "crime is increasing relatively fast" (reported crimes decreased by 1% in 2012 compared to the year before) while trying to attribute this to immigrant groups does.
As for statistics, people with little to no income are also "overrepresented" in crime. Who would have guessed.
You are being racist. What you're saying is that immigrants are somehow more inclined to commit crimes simply because they're immigrants. That _is_ a racist statement and you're also ignoring the real reason.
The reason crime is increasing is that Sweden has become a more unequal and segregated society. Immigrants have been hit harder by this development because of, for example, discrimination on the job market.
So basically you should stop complaining about the immigration policy and start demanding equality.
There's nothing offensive about it, this certainly is plausible and need not be due to any inherent racial differences. But you really should back up your claims with evidence rather than copping out as in your last sentence. If anything the omission of statistics makes it more likely someone will attack you rather than debate the facts.
Not imprisoning people for minor crime is sane as criminals incarcerated have a higher chance of relapsing into crime than those who recieved suspended sentences. The goal of the justice system should be to prevent crime, not to dish out revenge because it feels good.
That's just a reflection of how much the media has coloured your view on how much crime is prevalent. Says next to nothing about how safe you actually are, which is the only important statistic.
You should, how safe you feel is part of your quality of life. It's correct that it may not reflect objective statistics, and that it's influenced by media, but the fact remains.. how you feel affects your life.
For example the situation with healthcare. Your health insurance adds to your quality of life even when you are not using it.
This is truly bullshit. Violent crimes in Sweden is at an all-time low. The primary reason for some statistics to indicate raising crime-rates is that the tendency to report a crime has risen a lot lately (a very good thing). The fact that you're feeling this way is purely due to a shift in how Swedish media reports on crime (30 years ago an assault in a smaller Swedish city would not make the national news, now it's very much highlighted), which in this Internet era of connectivity makes you feel a lot more is happening in your near vicinity.
Have you considered the possibility that higher per capita numbers of jailed people may reflect police officers doing a better job? In China, it may be easier for example to bribe the police or the judge and avoid jail.
That's really not what's going on here. I mean, yes, the US probably has better police officers than China. But the real reason we have higher per capita numbers than anyone else (with the possible exception of North Korea) is not that we (and possibly North Korea) have the world's best police officers. It's that we quadrupled our prison population over the last thirty years (partly by increasing incarceration for drug crimes by 1200%) while the rest of the world ... didn't.
- If you exclude some sub-100K-population countries that probably have weird statistics, the country with the next highest incarceration rate is Cuba, with only 75% the incarceration rate of the US. That's the _next highest_.
- Russia has 67% of our incarceration rate. That's the highest large country other than the US.
- There are only 21 countries that have even half of our incarceration rate, and let's say they're not the ones I think of as having the highest standard of living in the world.
- Looking at the western nations that the US traditionally compares itself to (depending who you think that is), the highest are probably Spain, England and Wales at 20% of our incarceration rate. Germany is at 11%. France is at 14%.
- In North America, Canada is at 16% of our incarceration rate. Mexico is at 29%.
In other words, we could let out _three out of four prisoners in the United States_, and we would still be locking up more people than any of the nations we consider our peers in terms of wealth, democracy, civil rights, etc.
Given the billions of dollars involved and the millions of lives destroyed and the decades this has been going on, we must by now have some pretty good evidence that our extraordinary, unprecedented strategy is better than the alternative, right? We're applying four times the average dose -- there must be a measurable effect by now.
I find it shocking that any person living in US (not sure if you do) finds this shocking. Did you not notice; the drug "war", militarization of police, commercialization of prison system, stupendous expansion of seizure laws? Did you not think those have repercussions?
In Britain, about 10-15 years ago, they changed all the emergency services sirens to the same sound as the police have always used. You used to be able to tell the difference between an ambulance, a fire engine and a police car from the sound, now you can't. Also, these days a typical emergency medical response consists of 2 vehicles, a mobile ER doctor followed up by an ambulance.
So my point is that in a densely populated area, like London, it now sounds like the police are all over the place all the time. Actually it's usually a medical response to an elderly person having a fall or heart problems or such like but, because they all sound like police, people assume the worst.
If I were a politician and I wanted to introduce a rational and humane policy for treating the problem of criminality, like they have in Norway, the first thing I would do is change the sirens for all new fire and ambulance vehicle purchases so you can tell the difference from police. Then seed the media with the idea that there are less police sirens than there used to be. People would think crime had dropped precipitously and your policy would feel like it was a success as well as actually being a success.
Readit News
Note that while the number of inmates plummets, the number of crimes committed is higher than ever. This is a failure of the police and the justice system and not a success story.
Nearly 95 percent of violent crimes and robberies committed in Sweden go unsolved, and an individual police officer solves an average of three crimes per year. http://www.thelocal.se/20081103/15412
The article cited is from 2008 and so nearly five years outdated. The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1]. The biggest problem I see is that the the article glosses over the reasons for such a change. There are multiple reasons why crime statistics change, some merely methodological, but chief among them are two factors:
* Changes in criminal law, classifying new kinds of behavior as a crime or decriminalizing some behavior. (Hello Marihuana legalization!)
* Willingness to report a crime. What used to be a run in among adolescents is nowadays often reported as a violent crime. Any kind of rape or sexual molestation used to be such a stigma on the victim that they were (and still often are) not reported.
Same goes for the rate of solved crimes: A figure of "6%" just glosses over the details. It seems low, but what's more interesting is which crimes get solved. Bike theft has a notoriously low rate of solving the crime (1%) [2] and is very common in some regions, skewing statistics. Same for petty theft. Drug abuse is often reported as a crime. There's no chance to ever solving such crimes on a significant level. Also, how does "6%" compare to the years before? Better? Same? Less?
So be weary when reading and citing those articles. Usually, if only one figure gets cited, you're being mislead.
[1] http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statisti... [2] http://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statisti...
>The rise has stalled and the trend has been reversing with a slight decline of 1% in 2012 [1].
From your source: "Since 2003, the number of reported offences has increased by approximately 147,000 (+12%). Since 1975, the trend in the total number of reported offences has been characterised by a continuous increase."
That a 1% decrease in the statistics of a single year represent any significant change in the trend since 1975 remains to be seen. I'm very skeptical but I will be very happy if it turns out to be true.
is it legal in Sweden?
You might think, no they're talking about "violent crimes" and "violent robberies" yet the police chief is quoted as saying: " When it comes to theft, there are no witnesses, and victims often don’t know when the crime occurred."
So unless these victims are so viciously beaten by muggers that they get amnesia it seems more likely to be non-violent thefts.
If the violent crimes are really that bad then why not present their stats alone?
Why should we assign any more trust to just those numbers?
What I care about here is that the law enforcement should get better IRL. I don't care at all if you "trust" anything here, faceless HN user vidarh.I simply presented a fact for you to use or ignore.
There's quite a few recent articles about the abysmal Police work in Sweden, however they are in Swedish. Public service radio, just to pick one: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artik...
I'm sure you know how to use google to find more of the same. Have fun and please share the truth if you find it out there.
"Arrests fallen! Crime rates lower than ever!"
Actually people just do it vigilante style or don't bother reporting it because the police are fucking useless.
I mean I caught a person breaking into my car, had photos of the person doing it, the car was covered in finger prints, they arrived in another stolen car with plates that were photographed, left their tools in the car when disturbed and the police said they found "no evidence".
Was resolved for a small fee by a private "individual" who knew who they were.
Most inmates serving 10+ years in Swedish prisons are drug related cases.
In 2010, the Swedish supreme court decided to dramatically change the policy regarding punishment for drug trafficking. What was previously a 14-year prison sentence suddenly became a 4 year crime. [Update: Prisoners sentenced in 2010 would previosly have been staying in prison for 10+ years but after the change they are now released in 2013 for good behaviour.]
http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev...
I've fought off muggers several times over the years. I've never bothered to call the police, especially as the actions taken in self-defence might themselves constitute a crime.
Despite all the hype in the cinema, my general impression is that policemen are basically bureaucrats carrying guns, not too different from teachers or bus drivers.
I had it in Spain. I understand the vigilante crap even if you didn't get hurt; you feel so powerless sitting at the police giving them pics, fingerprints, number plate and make of the getaway car while they are just nodding writing all down and putting it in a drawer knowing they won't do anything.
The number of people reporting they're a victim of crime has been dropping since the late 90s.
[0]http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/
- Do you for speeding.
- Protect the establishment.
- Threaten violence.
- Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations.
They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact control and to keep the powerful powerful.
A large group of the police force and prosecutor have been dedicated to hunt down file sharing. An other group is dedicated to maintain the national firewall. Others deal with hunting down all those 16 years old kids who "hacks" websites with DDOS.
This failure of the police and the justice system has very little to do with the police, and all to do with the current politics. Going for 5% to 10% solved cases in violent crimes and robberies would simply not be as political attractive as getting that 16 year old sentenced.
The corruption of said politics however is a different matter.
Those numbers are bullshit. If we look at Brå's statistics (http://www.bra.se/download/18.22a7170813a0d141d21800063138/1...) we see that:
At least here in Norway (neighbor country to Sweden), of the solved cases, about half was reported by the police itself. That normally mean that the police caught one in the act, or was them self the victim of the crime (the defendant resisted arrest, attacked or threatened a police officer etc.).
So if you are a victim of a crime, and no police officer witnesses it, it isn't very likely that the perpetrator get punished.
http://www.d-intl.com/2013/11/08/dramatisk-okning-av-valdsbr...
It seems to me they should in fact rapidly increase the numbe of prisons, if they want to protect people.
Blimey, who'd have thought the countries with some of the highest population will have the most inmates. Then it continues with the per capita numbers which are a much better comparison but conveniently leaves out the per capita number for Sweden which according to the numbers in the articles is around 50 -- and India is 30! Not a nice/relevant comparison.
According to Wikipedia, apparently based on the same list just at a different rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat... India is fact one of the lowest per capita.
But yes, we have a very ineffective police force, everyone knows this. We have more police personnel then ever (huge increase the last years). But solved crimes are less, or the same.
Note also that we can't use self defense like in the US. It is impossible to get any kind of license for pepper spray, taser (cops not allowed either), guns, anything you can defend yourself with. Makes it easy to be a criminal in Sweden.
But apparently not easy enough for to actually encourage people to commit crimes.
A friend got caught in his apartment with a grow op, drying cannabis, illegal mushrooms, other drugs and he ended up serving no time at all.
His time will be financial, he will have to pay off his debt to society literally instead of being incarcerated.
See e.g. the piratebay founders, none of which will ever be able to own property or any assets at all, seeing as even the interest payments on the damages they owe are more than the average salary. Sentencing someone to lifelong economic slavery is not a good thing in my book. It is a very, very harsh punishment. In effect, the piratebay founders have been sentenced to exile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUvsrcxKmI
"According to official data, the Swedish prison population has dropped by nearly a sixth since it peaked at 5,722 in 2004. In 2012, there were 4,852 people in prison in Sweden, out of a population of 9.5 million."
So I looked up my home state of Minnesota's inmate count and population for a rough comparison.
"State corrections officials are quick to point out that Minnesota’s incarceration rate is the second lowest in the nation and to note how favorably Minnesota compares with our neighbor to the east. As of July 1, Minnesota had a prison population of 9,772 and a prison budget of $457 million a year. In contrast, Wisconsin has a prison population of about 23,000 and a prison budget of $1.2 billion."[1] Minnesota has a population of 5.379 million. In general, the state prison population in the United States is declining,[2] with Maine currently being the state with the lowest rate of incarceration, and Minnesota's recently fluctuating rate being the second-lowest. Some states have much higher rates of incarceration, so the overall United States rate is high.
As the article submitted here suggests, and as the articles I'm linking here suggest too, all over the world it can reduce incarceration rates to not punish minor drug offenses with incarceration. A determinate sentencing system that emphasizes severity of crimes like Minnesota's[3] keeps first-time, nonviolent offenders out of prison and reserves prison for repeat offenders with known history of violent offenses.
How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.
[1] http://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2013/08/how-minnesot...
[2] http://www.startribune.com/local/216949031.html
[3] http://mn.gov/sentencing-guidelines/images/2013%2520Guidelin...
I'm genuinely curious, I'm honestly not trolling, is this state of affairs remarkable in the US these days? Is this really an accomplishment? Is it worse in general?
We barely jail anyone for crimes, it's always fines and community bullshit service when it should be prison.
(Why look at homicide specifically? Because almost all cases get reported and the definition of homicide is fairly uncontroversial. With some other crimes -- rape is a particularly bad example -- definitions and reporting rates may vary wildly from country to country.)
Regrettably, how safe you feel is strongly influenced by what you see in the media, hear from your friends and family, etc., and unless you are exceptionally careful about your mental hygiene and pay a lot of attention to the relevant statistics the connection between how safe you feel and how safe you actually are is probably quite weak.
Besides actual skewing, you have localized situations where the relationship of the police to the citizens (and media) is personal, friendly, helpful, and generally constructive. For every "stop and frisk" type story there's a cop helping a stranded single mother change a tire, etc.
Crime is increasing because the society can't integrate them fast enough. It's literally same deal before abortions were an option. More people, less resource on a local level, leads to crime growing. This has nothing to do with the minorities, but how they are being handled.
As for statistics, people with little to no income are also "overrepresented" in crime. Who would have guessed.
The reason crime is increasing is that Sweden has become a more unequal and segregated society. Immigrants have been hit harder by this development because of, for example, discrimination on the job market.
So basically you should stop complaining about the immigration policy and start demanding equality.
Who the hell cares how safe you FEEL?
That's just a reflection of how much the media has coloured your view on how much crime is prevalent. Says next to nothing about how safe you actually are, which is the only important statistic.
Right-wing populist anti-immigrant political parties.
You should, how safe you feel is part of your quality of life. It's correct that it may not reflect objective statistics, and that it's influenced by media, but the fact remains.. how you feel affects your life.
For example the situation with healthcare. Your health insurance adds to your quality of life even when you are not using it.
This seems shocking to say the least.(at least to me)
Yet the US is supposed to be less of a 'policed state' than China.
I mean, look at the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
- If you exclude some sub-100K-population countries that probably have weird statistics, the country with the next highest incarceration rate is Cuba, with only 75% the incarceration rate of the US. That's the _next highest_.
- Russia has 67% of our incarceration rate. That's the highest large country other than the US.
- There are only 21 countries that have even half of our incarceration rate, and let's say they're not the ones I think of as having the highest standard of living in the world.
- Looking at the western nations that the US traditionally compares itself to (depending who you think that is), the highest are probably Spain, England and Wales at 20% of our incarceration rate. Germany is at 11%. France is at 14%.
- In North America, Canada is at 16% of our incarceration rate. Mexico is at 29%.
In other words, we could let out _three out of four prisoners in the United States_, and we would still be locking up more people than any of the nations we consider our peers in terms of wealth, democracy, civil rights, etc.
Given the billions of dollars involved and the millions of lives destroyed and the decades this has been going on, we must by now have some pretty good evidence that our extraordinary, unprecedented strategy is better than the alternative, right? We're applying four times the average dose -- there must be a measurable effect by now.
Right?
In Britain, about 10-15 years ago, they changed all the emergency services sirens to the same sound as the police have always used. You used to be able to tell the difference between an ambulance, a fire engine and a police car from the sound, now you can't. Also, these days a typical emergency medical response consists of 2 vehicles, a mobile ER doctor followed up by an ambulance.
So my point is that in a densely populated area, like London, it now sounds like the police are all over the place all the time. Actually it's usually a medical response to an elderly person having a fall or heart problems or such like but, because they all sound like police, people assume the worst.
If I were a politician and I wanted to introduce a rational and humane policy for treating the problem of criminality, like they have in Norway, the first thing I would do is change the sirens for all new fire and ambulance vehicle purchases so you can tell the difference from police. Then seed the media with the idea that there are less police sirens than there used to be. People would think crime had dropped precipitously and your policy would feel like it was a success as well as actually being a success.