Prisoner Strikes

[Dill]

(08-22-2018, 07:28 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: You live in the UK or France or Germany, and you might not ever need to own a car or drive. Between public transportation, walking, and cabs, you're pretty set. That alone eliminates a lot of the people in jail for driving without a license, driving with expired tags, DUIs, hit-and-runs, excessive speeding, unpaid parking tickets, etc. Meanwhile outside of a very few specific locations, a car is vital in the US. Even for teenagers. (US has 910 vehicles per 1,000 people... France 578, Germany 572, UK 519... numbers don't include motorcycles.)

Then you figure the age there is lower for drinking, so remove a decent amount of people in the US busted for underage drinking or possession by a minor.... there is no heroine epidemic over there. There was no meth problem there either. They don't seem to have massive amounts of drugs being smuggled in from China and Mexico/Central America. (Arresting people for weed sure doesn't help.)

Do UK/France/Germany have their version of the Mexican Cartels or African American gang violence? I legitimately have no idea.

Either way, there's a lot of things that add up that I just don't think those other countries have to deal with or worry about.

You make an interesting argument about the ratio of auto ownership. But having myself owned and driven cars in both in the UK and Germany, I am skeptical that fewer drivers = lower crime and prison population.  I don't think many teenagers in the US go to prison for underage drinking.
Interesting that we make a big deal about drinking but give most anyone a license to drive, while in Europe drinking is no big deal, but a driver's license requires some serious driver training. In Germany the minimum age for driving is 18, you have to take a first aid course and spend 1500 bucks on a driving school, including 14 hrs in the classroom (according to my recent info).

There is a drug problem in Europe, but less than the US, and nothing really like the US gang problem.

This turns us back to other factors, like the omnipresence of guns in the US and similar cultural factors. None of the Western European countries naturalized millions of black former slaves within their borders back in the 19th century, mostly in states where their former owners still controlled the government and spent generations denying them equality. A lot of inequity in laws and incareration rates are related to that legacy.

You make an interesting point about the US proximity to Mexico--the only place in the world where a first and third world country share a border. Can't say that is not unrelated to crime.