In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
Crime statistics (e.g. homicides) are often quoted as 'n per 100,000 population'.
It's probably also easier for mental math, e.g. here's a city with 1 million population, that's 10 100Ks, so 1200 people in prison.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
I’ve never seen a period used like that in census data. It seems like a conscious choice because the period is confusing when used in the middle of a phrase. 12E1 makes more sense but is abnormal notation for many people.
> Trailing zeros in an integer may or may not be significant, depending on the measurement or reporting resolution.
120 is either two or three significant figures, and you can't know which without knowing how the number was arrived at.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
Lets see if cutting education has any impact over the next 20 years.
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
Most of them (probably all) have contracts that stipulate they get paid per bed they provide, whether or not it's occupied.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Quotes from the article:
> As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
> But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.May be the result of a rapidly declining birth rate.
Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
"World Ends, Women Most Affected."
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
It's no wonder we had so many teen pregnancies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.
If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.
Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...
Compare 1960 to 2020.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
That's a frequent racist dog-whistle to justify systemically unjust (read: racist) policing; I'm surprised to see it on HN.
gjdoslhx•3h ago