The Curious Case of the Fall in Crime.

[NineBerry]

Contrary to your theory, it turns out incarceration rates in Germany have risen rapidly during the period of falling crime. On the following graph the vertical axis is per 100,000 population:


from http://champpenal.revues.org/7508

In other words, Germany now has about the same 1% of population incarcerated as the U.S. It's just that in Germany, they incarcerate them in insane asylums, instead of in honest prisons.

Wrong. The Y axis is absolute numbers, not per 100,000 population.

[laklak]

So only about 100 people were placed in preventative detention in all of Germany in all 2005? That sounds a bit, well, unlikely.

[NineBerry]

Not unlikely at all. German law requires a lot of a court to allow it to issue a preventive detention. German Wikipedia gives a total of 524 people subjected to preventive detention in 2010 (that's not detentions issued that year but people actually being in prison because of preventive detention). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicherungsverwahrung

[Warren Dew]

From the accompanying text:

Caused by an extensive use of non-criminal commitments but also by very strict social control of all people with psychiatric disorders or just deviant lifestyles, the inpatient population had grown to reach the level of more than 340,000 in 1939.

[NineBerry]

That's inpatient population, not hospital orders. Under nazi rule a lot of people were in asylums without a criminal court issuing a hospital order. Again German Wikipedia gives a total number of about 10,000 people being in asylums because of hospital orders in all of Germany in 2011. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%9Fre ... #Statistik

[NineBerry]

Maybe to highlight how the numbers may be related to different cultures in dealing with crime:

In all of 2011, all police officers over all of Germany have only fired 85 gun shots in the context of criminal activity. 49 warning shots and 36 targeting shots. That's only 85 in the whole nation over a whole year.

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/p ... 32037.html

[MiM]

Warren, you fail to reference your graph for Germany

There's a link right underneath the graph. Feel free to read it and revise your post accordingly.

I looked at the graph on your blog, and not in this thread, so that's why I didn't find a link.

Anyway, with the additional comments of NineBerry it is quite clear that it is you who need to read the text and revise your theory accordingly. The WHO statistics I pointed you to can also help you interpret the data correctly.

[Pappa]

Yep. It's down to easier detection/prevention. Only the truly desperate or stupid try and hold up a bank these days. The clever crims moved into cyberspace a few years back. The Keystroke Kops have yet to catch up.

That doesn't explain why sex crimes are down though, since most of those are committed in private circumstances by people known to the victim rather than by strangers in CCTV-rich high streets.

It's possible that people are just becoming less violent.

Why not? Presumably people are as likely to avoid sex crimes too if they know there is a higher risk of being arrested and sent to prison than there used to be.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

http://www.statisticbrain.com/gun-owner ... ographics/

[Blind groper]

Interesting statistics, Gawd.

You will get an argument from Seth, who firmly believes gun ownership is increasing, and that increase is the cause of any drop in crime.

[Seth]

Interesting statistics, Gawd.

You will get an argument from Seth, who firmly believes gun ownership is increasing, and that increase is the cause of any drop in crime.

Not "the," just "a" cause.

And yes, it beggars the imagination to think that the millions upon millions of guns being sold each year in the US are all going to fewer and fewer people. As I've said before, there are very valid concerns about the accuracy of gun polls, the major one being that people are naturally reluctant to tell somebody on the phone whether or not they own a gun, for any of a number of very good and rational reasons.

I have NEVER told such a pollster the truth. Not ever, nor will I ever do so because whether I own a gun, or how many of them I own is nobody's fucking business but my own.

We can look at an indirect indicator as well, which is the enormous surge of memberships in the NRA that happened after Obama's first and second elections. It strains credulity to claim that none of those new members actually went out and bought guns, which can be empirically supported merely by going to a gun show or gun shop and asking the owner how many people he sees looking to buy their first gun. It's a significant number. In my case, 100 percent of gun store owners and gun show sellers I've asked the question of say that their first-timer sales are up 40 percent or more. And that's my entirely non-scientific poll result.

[Audley Strange]

Nope not guns. Mobile phones. Is that just too obvious?

[Seth]

Nope not guns. Mobile phones. Is that just too obvious?

I'd say guns AND mobile phones.

[Tyrannical]

Having a big prison population also helps reduce crime, though I think the current population is far too small. When it's safe to walk at night alone in Detroit, then I'd say the prison population is just right.

[Pappa]

Having a big prison population also helps reduce crime, though I think the current population is far too small. When it's safe to walk at night alone in Detroit, then I'd say the prison population is just right.

That may not be true. It's possible that a large prison population might lead to an increase in crime. A large prison population could act as a better crime school than a small population. If that were the case, when criminals leave prison they'd be better at being criminals and possibly commit more crime.