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America’s incarceration rate is in decline

(www.theatlantic.com)
239 points paulpauper | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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strict9 ◴[25 Jun 25 17:54 UTC] No.44380047[source]▶
>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.

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.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[25 Jun 25 22:14 UTC] No.44382284[source]▶
It's lead.

Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].

Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.

We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...

[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932

[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...

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Nopoint2 ◴[26 Jun 25 03:33 UTC] No.44383962[source]▶
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365162
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1. Nopoint2 ◴[26 Jun 25 04:04 UTC] No.44384092[source]▶
Let's add an example to illustrate the difference:

Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.

When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.

But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.

Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.

This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.