> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime,
In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.
I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.
Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.
In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison population and include just the white population (~60%), the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it being the main factor.
I don't have the impression the other factors you mention are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort of thing seems innate to the human condition.
So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US isn't the only country with a history of that sort of thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in the US, but it's not unique to the US.
Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other reason than to capture people so they could rip out their hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a complex interaction between various factors.
Well, I don't think the tough on crime rhetoric is totally unique to the US either. I hear them coming from other countries too. Eg. when I was paying attention to Javier Milei's presidential bid in Argentina, it's largely the same talking points about crime, could have been lifted word for word from American internet comments.
From what I understand I think northern europe in particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison being about reform of criminals, and less towards vindictive punishment.
PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by Spaniards.
The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill this guy, I only fenced his watch".
What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.
So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean. But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.
Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_. No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of jails for different offenders. Mental health resources and job training.
Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service are great too.
I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%. There is a lot of over-charging going on too.
Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
Sorry, not buying it. There's no way 20% of convictions are wrong. Even 1% is honestly pushing it, especially these days. Extrapolation from convictions overturned via the DNA evidence also results in about 0.5-1%.
I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.
And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".
And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.
And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong.
Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this.
When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's very very hard to overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it at every turn.
>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty.
So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"
1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?
Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial
At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.
So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.
> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.
My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.
> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.
I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.
And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.
> (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
I’d argue that if a criminal is dead, they can’t commit future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when there is a more efficient option?
I think your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1]. This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not even counting the people that have been leveraged into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because the system is so weighted against them.
The main reason is that we refuse to spend money to address the root causes of crime. We won't fix urban poverty or the failing urban education system so most people choose to live in car-dependent suburban hellholes that make our youth uniquely miserable. Some of them shoot up schools, leading to zero tolerance policies and to moral panic campaigns to ban some inanimate object as the culprit that is supposedly corrupting kids.
If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better life that doesn't involve playing professional sports, we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that only we have or the school shootings that we've only had for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.
In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.
I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.
Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.