Comments on: Your generation was more violent

By: gene berman

gene berman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:24:44 +0000

Actually, logarithmic, now that I look at it.

And, by the way, did you hear about the three constipated mathematicians?

The first worked it out with a pencil and paper.
The next used his slide rule.
And the last used logs.

By: gene berman

gene berman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:15:46 +0000

Agnostic:

In your very first comment, you used the term logistically. Logarithymically?

By: gc

gc — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:19:47 +0000

For those of you who doubt...

http://www.finalcall.com/national/incarceration03-06-2001.htm

Black incarceration rates tripled during Clinton era

WASHINGTON?Former President Bill Clinton left a legacy in the prison system during his eight years in office that was more punitive than both of his Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined, according to a new report from the Justice Policy Institute (JPI).

Furthermore, in the last two decades the rate of Black incarceration more than tripled, rising from 1,156 Blacks in jail per 100,000 Black citizens in 1980 when Mr. Reagan took office, to more than 3,620 per 100,000 Blacks in 1999, near the end of Mr. Clinton?s term, according to JPI?s report, "Too Little, Too Late: Clinton?s Prison Legacy."

After more than a decade in which the Black incarceration rate increased by an average of 138.4 per 100,000 per year, more than doubling the number of Blacks in federal custody between 1980 and 1992, the Black incarceration rate continued to increase by an average of 100.4 per 100,000 during the Clinton era, according to the report.

"President Clinton stole the show from the ?tough on crime? Republicans," said Vincent Schiraldi, JPI president on Feb. 19 when his group released its study to reporters. Mr. Clinton was "right to call for criminal justice reform in a recent Rolling Stone interview," Mr. Schiraldi continued, referring to an end-of-his-term interview with the magazine. "He was wrong to do so little about it while he was in office."

Ah, Clinton. Let's give it up for America's first black president!

By: gc

gc — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:50:41 +0000

no one really "knows" why the massive social transformation discernible in the 60s across advanced nations re: crime and anomie started or why it abated in the 90s.

In the American context, this is indeed a "puzzle" for sociologists. There are other puzzles which will no doubt stump these Modern Day Epicyclists for decades, including this one

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

and this one

One of the most disturbing, I think perhaps the most disturbing fact in our whole book is that black students coming from families earning over 70,000 are doing worse on their SATS, on average--it's always on average--than white students from families in the lowest income group. You want to cry hearing that figure. I mean, it's so terrible.

I don't have an explanation for it.

and this

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis?s hometown turned into America?s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city?s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it?s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don?t want to hear. It?s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades...

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts?s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (?He has a better imagination,? she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed?and deflated?to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a ?hard thing to say or write.? Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they?d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they?d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

In Europe, you'd have to go country-by-country, but it'd be stunning if the majority of it couldn't be attributed to a) restraints on police and b) more crime prone immigrants. Dysgenic effects might play a nontrivial role as well, as might the decline of ancient strictures re: religion, nationalism, civic duty, etc. It certainly *wasn't* an inescapable feature of modernity, because Singapore held the line pretty well.

While I certainly don't command enough (= any) German or Swedish to dig into the archives there for alternate explanations beyond Muslim immigration, in the American context there's a pretty obvious answer. Things started in the 50's, picked up speed in the 60's. By the early 90's enough had been imprisoned under 12 years of right-wing administrations (and thus Justice departments) that things started to tail off a bit, and neither Clinton nor Bush 2 was far to the left on criminal rights.

But just wait till this guy gets in power:

Thurgood Marshall did not argue Brown so that we would accept a country where too many African-American men end up in prison because we'd rather spend more to jail a 25-year-old than to educate a five-year-old.

...

Sometimes it takes a hurricane. And sometimes it takes a travesty of justice like the one we've seen in Jena, Louisiana.

There are some who will make Jena about the fight itself. And it's true that we have to do more as parents to instill in our children that violence is always wrong. It's wrong when it happens on the streets of Chicago and it's wrong when it happens at a schoolyard in Louisiana. Violence is not the answer. Non-violence was the soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and we have to do a better job of teaching our children that virtue.

But we also know that to truly understand Jena, you have to look at what happened both before and after that fight. You have to listen to the hateful slurs that flew through the halls of a school. You have to know the full measure of the damage done by that arson. You have to look at those nooses hanging on that schoolyard tree. And you have to understand how badly our system of justice failed those six boys in the days after that fight - the outrageous charges; the unreasonable and excessive sentences; the public defender who did not call a single witness.

Like Katrina did with poverty, Jena exposed glaring inequities in our justice system that were around long before that schoolyard fight broke out. It reminds us of the fact that we have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, non-violent offenders for the better part of their lives - a decision that's made not by a judge in a courtroom, but by politicians in Washington. It reminds us that we have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from. It reminds us that we have a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting civil rights violations is trying to rollback affirmative action programs at our college and universities; a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting voting rights violations is to look for voting fraud in black and Latino communities where it doesn't exist.

...

It's not always easy to stand up and say this. I commend those of you here at Howard who have spoken out on Jena 6 or traveled to the rally in Louisiana. I commend those of you who've spoken out on the Genarlow Wilson case. I know it can be lonely protesting this kind of injustice. I know there's not a lot of glamour in it.

When I was a state Senator in Illinois, we had a death penalty system that had sent thirteen innocent people to death row. Thirteen innocent men - that we know of. I wanted to reform the system. And I was told by almost everyone that it wasn't possible. That I wouldn't be able to get police officers and civil rights advocates; Democrats and Republicans to all agree that we should videotape confessions to make sure they weren't coerced. Folks told me that there was too much political risk involved.

But I believed that it was too risky not to act. And after awhile people with opposing views came together and started listening. And we ended up reforming that death penalty system. And we did the same thing when I passed a law to expose racial profiling. So don't ever let anyone tell you that change isn't possible. Don't let them tell you that speaking out and standing up against injustice is too risky. What's too risky is keeping quiet. What's too risky is looking the other way.

I don't want to be standing here and talking about another Jena four years from now because we didn't have the courage to act today. I don't want this to be another issue that ends up being ignored once the cameras are turned off and the headlines disappear. It's time to seek a new dawn of justice in America.

From the day I take office as President, America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of ideologues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years, the Civil Rights Division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination, and hate crimes. And we'll have a Voting Rights Section that actually defends the right of every American to vote without deception or intimidation. When flyers are placed in our neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day, that won't only be an injustice, it will be a crime.

As President, I will also work every day to ensure that this country has a criminal justice system that inspires trust and confidence in every American, regardless of age, or race, or background. There's no reason that every single person accused of a crime shouldn't have a qualified public attorney to defend them. We'll recruit more public defenders to the profession by forgiving college and law school loans - and I will ask some of the brilliant minds here at Howard to take advantage of that offer. There's also no reason we can't pass a racial profiling law like I did in Illinois, or encourage state to reform the death penalty so that innocent people do not end up on death row.

I think it's time we also took a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first-time, non-violent drug users for decades. Someone once said that "...long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease." That someone was George W. Bush - six years ago. I don't say this very often, but I agree with the President. The difference is, he hasn't done anything about it. When I'm President, I will. We will review these sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive warehousing of non-violent offenders.

Lots to pick apart there, but you can start with Sailer's point re: drug cases -- someone caught with a bag of weed can't shoot it to Stop it from Snitchin':

When you hear somebody claim that the high rate of minorities in prison for drug possession proves the system is biased against them, just remember that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion:

"Finding a witness to testify is almost impossible, police said. So gang members are rarely charged with violent felonies. Without witnesses, police must rely on cases they can make themselves, usually for narcotics possession."

Physical evidence can't be intimidated, so a lot of the perpetrators of unsolved violent crimes are cooling their heels in prison on drug possession charges.

...and you can also read Heather MacDonald on racial profiling.

But of course this will all fall on deaf ears. No Republican has the cojones to bring up the fact that blacks and Hispanics commit crimes at higher rates -- e.g. that they comprise 89.4% (!!) of violent criminals in NYC as ID'd by the victim. So I await our new national anti-racial profiling laws. Podhoretz and the neocons will demagogue any rightist who speaks up, as they did on New Orleans. And the resulting Justice Department -- which will focus its attention on "hate crimes" and "civil rights violations" rather than, y'know, *actual* crimes -- is going to make life in the US verrrry interesting after Jan. 2009.

For those of y'all with Ph.D.'s and other fancy degrees, you might look into other options.

(PS: just try finding that previous pdf on the NYPD site...it took me a while to get it before hitting web.archive.org. The memory hole is very, very real.)

By: Blode

Blode — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:45:38 +0000

The interest thing about the decline in crime circa 1930 is that there are at least two different candidates for a causative change, and they are both Federal laws: the 21st Amendment and the 1924 immigration law. I suspect they were both important.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the 1924 immigration law was racist (even though it didn't mention race) and anti-semitic (even though its effects never differed between Jews and gentiles), as well as pre-figuring the current immigration debate (though the 1924 law did not regulate immigration from Mexico or Central America at all).

Okay, sarcasm completed.

By: Mencius

Mencius — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:50:07 +0000

Quoting Carlyle on such matters is like quoting Will Wilkinson.

Every time Carlyle swabbed the wax out of his ears, he discarded more neurons than are in Will Wilkinson's skull.

Does astronomy qualify as science? How about evolutionary psychology? And can you give some examples of some especially egregious finessing around intuition along with some phronetic stuff that interests you?

Predictions are tested and disproven in both astronomy and ev. psych. all the time, largely because improving experimental apparatus generates a steady stream of new results.

Really the classic case of antiphronesis has to be the way McNamara tried to fight the Vietnam War with game theory...

By: TGGP

TGGP — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:11:04 +0000

TGGP, the answer is no. We can't determine causality.
The answer to what? Also, we can never be absolutely 100% certain of anything, even in physics. Yet you yourself persist in discussing causality!

History is a branch of literature, not a field of science
Fiction is literature. I'm seconding Jason on Harry Potter.

Libra:
What the "social scientist" does is create equations, models, charts etc with these figures in trying to divine cause and effect
Much of mathematical modeling tends to be theoretical. The shift from modeling toward more empiricism and "natural experiments" in economics is discussed/criticized here.

For instance, if you read crime reports from the 1920's and notice that a lot of murders occurred between gangs of bootleggers, that might indicate that prohibition was a cause of the increase in crime.
You might also want to examine whether crime dropped after prohibition, whether these same gangs had been fighting to a similar extent before prohibition, what effect the variance in prohibition enforcement had on different areas, whether the effect of prohibition was constant or varied over time, how previously dry counties compared to formerly wet counties and numerous other questions that social scientists examine.

Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses here (and in other posts) how science isn't enough and doesn't give procedures for, say, generating hypotheses (which may be overrated). And there can of course be questions as to what factors should be controlled for. That's not a reason to throw up your hands and say "Why bother getting out of my arm-chair!"

Carlyle
Quoting Carlyle on such matters is like quoting Will Wilkinson. Economics is dismal, cold and hurtyful, retreat to airy-fairy blathering! On the plus-side, your inclination toward intuition means you might be a "sun person" free from the false consciousness of patriarchal western linear "science".

Does astronomy qualify as science? How about evolutionary psychology? And can you give some examples of some especially egregious finessing around intuition along with some phronetic stuff that interests you?

By: Mencius

Mencius — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:42:53 +0000

This is similar to recent suggestions by Jim Manzi in National Review that behavior genetics is not science because we can't yet fully demonstrate causation at the the molecular level.

It's pointless to throw around the word science without defining it properly. My definition is that science is a rigorous process by which objective procedures can confirm statements about the real world.

Such procedures can certainly tell us that there is some correlation between trait X and behavior Y. In order to exclude the possibility that some confounding variable is producing this pattern - the famed "chopsticks gene," for example - we often have to think intuitively and subjectively.

Thus, in order to obtain a meaningful result, we have both a scientific process, and one that is essentially literary and aesthetic. Lose either and the result has no validity.

At least as I can tell from the work that is high-profile and/or well-connected enough to reach the Gray Lady these days, it seems very easy for "social scientists" to finesse around the intuitive side of the problem, and emphasize the numbers, models, etc. Moreover, I usually find that the intuitive, phronetic side is the interesting one.

Thus my distaste for numbers in the study of society. Carlyle, as usual, expresses it more eloquently.

By: warp drive

warp drive — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:59:14 +0000

“The Irish today are peaceful…”
Somehow I doubt the WASPs of 19th century Boston cowered behind their brownstones for fear of rape and murder by Irish. The Irish had an extremely low rape rate, according to research by Hasia Diner, “Erin’s Daughters in America”. The Irish of that day would rather drink and fight than do sex of any kind. Cut down on embarrassment in the confessional.
The European immigrant group with the highest rape rate were the Slavs. Some Italians of course were doing cosa nostra, but it was members only for the most part. That’s why it was “nostra.”
Irish crime was predominantly drunkeness and gang fights. They also caused cholera epidemics in the first half of the 19th century, due to the crowded, unsanitary conditions. Boston had been one of the healthiest places in the world before that, so the natives had reason to dislike the new immigrants. However, the Irish were not given to vicious murder/rape/robbery on non-co-ethnics. They didn’t even do that stuff too much to each other, except in the “sectarian violence” in Ireland.
It just seems like the current crime rate in the urban areas will not change because the people committing most of them will not change. Seems like we’re stuck with them forever.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:09:11 +0000

Whatever "sociology" may be, it is certainly not an experimental discipline in which hypotheses can be rigorously confirmed or refuted.

The same goes for "social science," and any other corruption of history - which is and always will be a literary form, and nothing more or less.

But you said history is also "only" literary and aesthetic. (lol btw)

A lot of contemporary social science isn't very good social science, but it's simply false and ridiculous to assert that society inherently can't be (and isn't ever) studied using the scientific method.

'Rigor' (a slippery euphemism for full or "satisfactory" understanding) is not a prerequisite, or even a necessary outcome of the scientific method. Hypotheses can certainly be confirmed or disconfirmed in a manner sufficient for the operation of paradigmatic science*.

Physics is not the only possible or acceptable science.

And anyway if you believe science is only science when its strongly deterministic, sit back and wait. When we start linking social behavior to its molecular roots, social science will leave its delayed infancy.

* This is similar to recent suggestions by Jim Manzi in National Review that behavior genetics is not science because we can't yet fully demonstrate causation at the the molecular level.

Slate's Daniel Engber dubbed this branch of (always transparently ideological) self-refuting armchair nihilism "radical skepticism".

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:07:50 +0000

History is a branch of literature, not a field of science.

Remember when Harry Potter assassinated Hitler and thus saved the dinosaurs?

Yeah, I'm a historian!

By: Libra

Libra — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:01:53 +0000

One more note -

A lot of what we perceive as decline in the U.S. is the dramatically increased crime rate in the major northern cities. One theory I’ve heard promoted is that this was less the result of a breakdown in governance, and more the result of the great migration of poor, African-American sharecroppers from the south to the north. The southern cities ( Atlanta, Savannah, St. Louis, New Orleans ) always had a very high homicide rate ( as high as Cleveland or Baltimore has today). And that was under the ultimate, law and order, Jim Crow regime. As the African-American lower class moved from the southern cities to the northern cities, the crime came with them. The decline in crime rate in some American cities during the 1990′s ( such as New York and Boston), can be attributed to dramatically rising real estate prices that pushed the lower classes into ring cities such as Newark.

By: Libra

Libra — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:44:53 +0000

Mencius -

It seems likely to me that a significant portion of the reported increase in violence is due to increased reporting. Britain in 1900 was before the day of telephones in every home, pay phones on every street corner, and 911. My roommate works in social service, and works a child service department hotline and notes that people call up about all kinds of random crap. A fair amount is made up - a woman trying to get her boyfriend in trouble for instance. And given the civil service state's pension for paperwork, it all gets filed.

I also recall reading ( I wish I could find the source) that in the 1800's New York it was far more common for murder to go unreported. Bodies would end up in the river and no one would notice. This was a time when the city was filled with gangs. Now the Irish are peaceful and even Southie in Boston is gentrifying. Read Angela's Ashes or All Soul's should disabuse yourself of the notion that the past 30 years has been all decline.

As for the recent drop in crime, Peter Moskos (an example of a sociologist doing things the right way) spent a year in the Baltimore police department and reported that there was very little fudging of statistics. I do think that better trauma care has played a significant role in lowering the murder rate. I remember coming across a Boston Globe article a few years ago that said that the rate of knife wounds and gun shot wounds was the same over the past few decades, but that the survival rate had gone significantly up.

By: Libra

Libra — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:20:19 +0000

TGGP – statistics that are a straight recording of what people observed are useful in giving history a dimension of quantity. Those are the kind of number Mencius cites. It’s the historical record of how many murders the police observed.

What the “social scientist” does is create equations, models, charts etc with these figures in trying to divine cause and effect. The process is complete numerology. There are always far, far more variables than available data. Furthermore, the process of selecting and weighting the variables introduces innumerable fudge factors. The result thus becomes extremely susceptible to the biases of the academic.

There is no easy way to determine cause and effect. You have to read the history. For instance, if you read crime reports from the 1920′s and notice that a lot of murders occurred between gangs of bootleggers, that might indicate that prohibition was a cause of the increase in crime.

By: Mencius

Mencius — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:35:48 +0000

TGGP, the answer is no. We can’t determine causality.

The historian has only one tool: his pen. Or keyboard, as it were. His job is to explain what happened, using words. And numbers, graphs, pretty pictures, and even video, if it helps. History is a branch of literature, not a field of science. Don’t be stuck in that 20th-century box.

By “the former follows the latter,” all I mean is that the First World is slowly turning into the Third. No – this is not a testable hypothesis.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:45:51 +0000

Historians, however, study them using appropriate tools, and social scientists with inappropriate ones.
Historians are technically considered social scientists, and a number of them use the same tools as economists. The ones who don't are less likely to explain the causality behind a drop in crime. I'd like to know what those "appropriate tools" are.

These propositions are interpretations, not "theories."
You are using a very non-standard definition for "theory". Theory is unavoidable. Everyone views the world through a frame of theory, consciously or unconsciously. The most common kinds are "naive" or "folk" theories.

There is simply no way to verify whether they are true or false. To put it another way, there is no objective procedure which can test whether my interpretations are right or wrong. The judgment is as inescapably aesthetic as deciding whether a movie is good or bad.
There is no fact of the matter whether a movie is good or bad. There is a fact of the matter of whether an event occurs, and there is nothing theoretically stopping us from carrying out social science experiments on people. The question is can we discern causality? On that matter see Judea Pearl.

That's quite a timespan to construct a line segment over!
More data pretty much always beats better algorithms, as they say. I think he put in as much as he could, and that was as far back as records went.

And the near endpoint is chosen very interestingly, as well
My guess is that Pinker chose the endpoint, because one of the things he discussed is that crime rose in the 60s so the point right before it illustrated how far it had fallen.

but it is well over 24 in many of England's erstwhile domains
Was it above that when England was at 24? Also, Robert Lindsay has been discussing the subject here and in the comments to that post.

And the former seems to track the latter
Does it? Explain.

Henry Canaday:
The revolution in the criminal justice system per Warren Court decisions in the mid-1960s undoubtedly had something to do with the post- 1960s rise in crime, but how much is still in question. Basically, it cut the conviction rate per crime dramatically.
Freakonomics discusses this and also the backlash which reduced crime. I also found Bruce Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" interesting on the topic.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:07:34 +0000

One place where there is evidence that people themselves have gotten less criminal over time (as opposed to better at enforcement) is Japan. Old Japanese men, on their criminal downswing, are still more likely to commit murder than the men currently at their reproductive peak. (the peak age for murder in America is 19, but Japanese men over 70 are more likely to commit murder than those under 20)
Japan's homicide rate dropped 70% in the last 50 years, and the nation now has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. A decline of this magnitude has been documented in few other contemporary social settings. One key feature of the fall is young Japanese males, who now commit one tenth as many homicides as their counterparts did in 1955. At present, Japan's homicide rate is higher among men in their 50s than among males aged 20 to 24.
(Although if we count suicide as a form of murder, you'd actually be less likely to die of "lethal violence" if you were born and raised in Russia or South Africa instead of Japan)

By: Henry Canaday

Henry Canaday — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:22:48 +0000

"...people who broke small laws tended to be the same people who broke big laws, and putting them away lowered the amount of big crimes..."

That is one reason cops in DC like tough gun laws. They can tail a known perp, dangerous but difficult to convict of his deadly crimes, find a legaly valid excuse to frisk him, get him with a gun, and have him off the streets for a few years in an easy case.

The revolution in the criminal justice system per Warren Court decisions in the mid-1960s undoubtedly had something to do with the post- 1960s rise in crime, but how much is still in question. Basically, it cut the conviction rate per crime dramatically. Then, over the past 30 years, we have steadily raised the sentence-per- conviction rate, increasing the incarceration rate per capita dramatically.

So we have re-established a rough equilibrium, but only by jailing many more people much longer and by being clever about bagging them on relatively small charges.

By: BGC

BGC — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:12:49 +0000

The following is an example of the use of social statistics which I personally find very convincing, indeed mind-changing - from Engram (at BackTalk) in a series of analyses looking at the relation between murder and capital punishment:

http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/search/label/Capital%20Punishment

By: ziel

ziel — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:27:39 +0000

Luke – looking at the graph, I assumed the reason was Prohibition – particularly given the sharp drop circa 1934.