
26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014) - gwern
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/
======
splitrocket
Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations,
the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that
everyone else is exactly like us. Therefore, when we build systems and
institutions that attempt to alter behavior, we encode our own motivations and
desires as the impetus.

I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we
develop products. Our instincts about what other folks will pay
for/want/value/use are rarely totally accurate.

“I don’t want to go to jail, therefore, jail will be a globally effective
crime deterrent” is demonstrably false for this subset of the population.

From a purely behavioral science perspective, we know that humans deeply
discount uncertain future downsides compared to short term certain upsides.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I strongly suggest reading Mark
Kleinman, particularly his work on “swift, certain, fair” as an effective
means to address this population and challenge.

~~~
splitrocket
Let me put it this way: the current “standard” criminal justice system is
exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and
operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the
population that in fact commit crimes.

~~~
singlow
Tautology - People who are effectively deterred from committing crimes do not
commit crimes.

The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any
system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would
still apply.

Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does
not effectively deter.

~~~
splitrocket
Yes, true.

So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand
those who are currently not effectively deterred.

More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.

~~~
Anon1096
But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin
doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population
won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?

~~~
anigbrowl
That seems to start from the assumption that everyone would commit crime if
they could.

~~~
oddlyaromatic
They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller
then "everyone".

In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty.

> Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin
> to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?

This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute
sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different
approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.

------
exabrial
Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist', or it
turns into an ad hominem attack on the authors, or struck down in the media
for singling out some minority group. I love the wording as it has a focus on
the positive; summed up it basically says: we can't help those who we can't
identity.

~~~
gaius
I guess it’s easier in Sweden which is not especially diverse. Also it’s worth
noting that these are _convictions_ so will be missing any unreported
violence, or that police didn’t follow up on, or that got off on
technicalities

~~~
flexie
Sweden is as diverse as the US, or more so.

~~~
rayiner
Not even close. The vast majority of Sweden is ethnic Swedes. The big minority
group is ethnic Finns. 87% of the country is Lutheran (as of 2012). In the US,
probably no ethnic group (e.g. Irish or English) has more than 20%.

~~~
flexie
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level)

Check out the list based on Alesina’s analysis.

Or go to Sweden. In the younger population groups, muslims are now are huge
minority.

~~~
rayiner
That index lists Canada as more diverse than the US, which is definitely false
having been to both.

Online sources suggest about 30% of Stockholm is non-Swedish, and most of
those people are European. New York and Chicago are only about 30-35% European
descent, and that’s mixed between Irish, German, Swedish, English, etc.

~~~
flexie
English, German, Irish, swedish descent = Christian, white population, all
speaking English as a first language, all from similar cultures.

It’s way more diverse in Sweden. I lived in NYC, and have travelled a lot in
Sweden. Nowadays, large Swedish cities are much more diverse.

~~~
rayiner
Even if you lump all the european people together, the fact remains that
Stockholm is probably 80% European and New York City is less than 30%
European.

~~~
flexie
But NYC’ black or latino population is (mainly) Christian and mainly speaks
Englsh

------
beefman
A better title would be: 26% of violent crime convicts accountable for 63% of
violent crime convictions.

In terms of the entire population, probably:

* 96% never convicted

* 3% convicted once

* 1% convicted as many times as the justice system allows until well into middle age (average of five times)

An interesting question is: How many of the 3% are released and take up normal
life, and how many are not convicted again because their first offense was
severe enough to warrant a long sentence? Edit: Unfortunately, the paper can't
answer this question.

~~~
stordoff
That was my thought on reading the headline - it's somewhat skewed because
you'd expect a similarly small percentage of the population to be responsible
for _all_ violent crime convictions (as most people aren't violent offenders;
the study notes 3.9% had at least one violent conviction).

------
mc32
At least among the Swedish population, but Id guess likely to similar in other
places:

>The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of
persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of
violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent
criminality.

Very interesting, so if you get past your teens without criminality you seem
to not become a criminal.

~~~
dazc
'...so if you get past your teens without criminality you seem to not become a
criminal'

'Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man'

There is a lot of truth in this. When I think back to my childhood there were
always a few kids who were just bad.

They came from the same background, had the same advantages, and so on but
there was still something evil about them.

Typical behaviours included stuff like sadistic cruelty to animals, bullying ,
random violence and vandalism with no real logic or reason to why they would
act in such a manner?

It could be explained away by saying something would be going on behind the
scenes at home but (in these few cases) I really don't believe it.

Of course, from as far as I can remember, all these people went on to be
criminals of one sort or another in adulthood.

~~~
quasse
>They came from the same background, had the same advantages, and so on

Did they really though?

Thinking back to my childhood recently, I've come to almost exactly the
opposite conclusion. There were some kids who I thought were just naturally
shitty until I experienced enough of life to realize that they were the ones
getting beaten up by their angry or alcoholic parents or being emotionally
abused by a narcissistic family member.

These were all things that I saw the signs of going to their houses or at
sports games, etc. as a kid, but it was so far outside of my frame of
reference that I didn't understand the context for what was happening. That
angry arm grab and wrench just because dad didn't like the choice of font on a
book report? Not a sign of a healthy home life, especially if that was the way
he behaved with an "outside observer" in the house.

It's all still anecdotal of course, with my small sample size and situation,
but after going to a small school with the same ~25 kids (all from similar
middle class households) for 9 years I can say that later success in life was
strongly correlated to the ones that had supportive and non-traumatic home
lives.

~~~
dazc
I think you make a good point, a lot of kids do grow up in dysfunctional
households and this is bound to have an impact. I knew kids like this too.

In the cases I described before though, I honestly don't think this explains
it. If it does their parents were doing a good job of hiding it?

------
caseysoftware
Before anyone espouses their favorite theory, you should note this study
covers Sweden from 1973-2004 which is a very ethnically and relatively-
economically homogeneous country with a population of < 10M people.

~~~
splitrocket
What does ethnic homogeneity have to do with this?

~~~
Wohlf
Studies like these that take place in the USA are labeled racist because they
disproportionately include minorities.

~~~
splitrocket
Studies that don’t take into account socio-economics are, in fact, racist.

When you control for income and wealth, particularly intergeneraltional,
racial differences disappear.

~~~
BigBuzzKill
Accept that isn’t true. Racial differences rarely disappear even when you take
those factors into account.

There is evidence that economic inequality has little to no effect whatsoever
(1, 2).

There is also evidence that inequality is predictive for blacks but no whites
(3).

There is also data that does support your latter conclusion, but my point is
that this issue isn’t as clear cut as you’re framing it as.

(1) [https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-
abstract/70/4/1035/22326...](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-
abstract/70/4/1035/2232609?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

(2)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630)

(3)
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/abstract)

~~~
mempko
Until you can account for multi century generational subjugation its going to
be hard to say anything interesting.

------
LarryDarrell
Having lived poor places across the US for the last 15 years, I have come up
with two root causes for the violence I have seen.

1\. Drug prohibition related. 2\. Keeping it Real going wrong.

The Drug War and inter-generational poverty are two tough nuts to crack. The
American mythology of Bootstraps and Individualism that's so baked into our
culture gives us limited toolsets for dealing with these problems because they
helped create the problems in the first place.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Rugged Individualism" is a campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover from 1928.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20indiv...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20individualism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crugged%20individualism%3B%2Cc0)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rugged+individualism%22&l...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rugged+individualism%22&lr=lang_en&source=lnt&tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1900%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1934&tbm=bks)

See particularly:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=85cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22rugged+i...](https://books.google.com/books?id=85cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22rugged+individualism%22&dq=%22rugged+individualism%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjynrbTjZ3ZAhUW12MKHWa1DMkQ6AEIUDAK)

------
jakobegger
Maybe we should stop seeing people who are violent as people that we need to
punish and start seeing them as people who need help.

I'm not a specialist, but I'd think that giving someone a job, a place to
live, and a weekly therapy session would do a lot more to prevent future crime
than locking him up with a bunch of other violent offenders that have nothing
to do all day long.

Sometimes restricting someones freedom is necessary to protect others. But
right now we are doing it backward: we lock people up _after_ they committed a
crime, but there's very little that we can do to protect potential victims
before it is too late.

------
kelukelugames
>Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality
disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug-
related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use
disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3).

It sounds like we need to invest more in mental health.

~~~
splitrocket
And perhaps divest ourselves of the idea that putting one time violent
offenders in a building full of other violent offenders will somehow reduce
the likelihood of future offense.

~~~
nofilter
Yea but we don't put them in a building full of other violent offenders to
rehabilitate them. We do that to get rid of them with zero care for whatever
they will do once they serve their sentence because, yet again, we can get rid
of them and whatever damage they do while they are outside of the prison is
considered unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Siderant: I find it funny how humans work. On a very personal level, we love
each other (you <> your parents or significant other), but the further the
connection goes to other people the less we care. Whereas if we cared about
everyone in a very loving way, we would probably not get rid of people we
don't like.

------
hn_throwaway_99
I think a the title, while absolutely true, is written in a way to highlight a
distribution that seems abnormal, but is pretty much what you would expect in
any similar distribution.

A very low number of people are ever convicted of a violent crime (they could
have also written "3.9% of population accountable for 100% of violent crime
convictions"). I think a better way of saying the same thing as the title is
"26% of violent criminals commit 63% of violent crimes."

------
pjc50
People interested in solutions should look to studies of different types of
interventions. My usual example is the extremely effective Violence Reduction
Unit:

[http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/](http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow-
murd...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow-murder-rate-
knife-gang-crime-police)

"The results were remarkable. Among the 200 gang members who became directly
involved with CIRV, violent offending fell by almost half, according to a 2011
study. Weapon possession was down 85%. Even among gang members who had not
attended a call-in, violence had fallen by almost a quarter."

------
stewbrew
1.) Violent crime is a rare event (in post-WW2 European societies), so the
proportion of offenders is rather small. 2.) One time offenders have a hard
time getting their feet on the ground after being released from prison.
Without appropriate support & back in their old networks, they often have few
alternatives than going down that road again. IMHO that's not exactly news. I
personally find it slightly surprising that only about one quarter of people
committing violent crimes become repeat offenders. This rate is actually lower
than what I would have estimated. I thought the number would be about one
half. Maybe we should reconsider the effectiveness of our penal system and
think of other ways to deal with violent crime that helps offenders not to
become repeat offenders.

~~~
BigBuzzKill
Maybe in Europe? Not in the USA it isn’t. We’ve seen drops in homicides and
the like in some cities (NYC), but disturbing trends in homicides places like
Baltimore and Chicago.

~~~
pjc50
Even in the US it's declining. It's just much higher.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/10/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2017/10/03/america-is-a-violent-country/?utm_term=.b5c9007eb741)

(I suspect from the places named that the more corrupt the police are the more
violence is present, but have no evidence for that).

~~~
BigBuzzKill
It has nothing to do with police corruption, and everything to do with the
pull back in policing due to anti-police media/BLM narrative. But don’t take
my word for it, just ask the people that live there and who are the victims of
such crime:

[https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-
residents...](https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents-
blame-record-high-murder-rate-on-lower-police-presence)

A particularly powerful quote from the article:

On whether the community wanted police to back off after the death of Freddie
Gray

“No. That represented our progressives, our activists, our liberal
journalists, our politicians, but it did not represent the overall community.
Because we know for a fact that around the time Freddie Gray was killed, we
start to see homicides increase. We had five homicides in that neighborhood
while we were protesting.”

I wonder if the media provocateurs and the liberal journalists will look into
this, or perhaps even consider the idea that their narrative has directly lead
to the deaths of minorities?

~~~
pjc50
I thought I'd researched Baltimore recently, and found my comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281512)

Higher death rate than a tanks-and-carbombs national emergency? Police
routinely planting toy guns on kids they've murderd? Something is deeply,
deeply wrong there and the rest of the US should stage an intervention.

------
blfr
Power law is everywhere in the world. It's gonna be 1% of scientists producing
vast majority of worthwhile discoveries, 1% of founders building the biggest
companies, and 1% of those companies owning most of their markets...

We may like equality but Nature likes the power law.

------
crististm
Apparently these results confirm Price' square root law. A small fraction of
the population does most things, regardless of the subject in question.

Search youtube for Jordan Peterson on this topic.

~~~
blfr
"Jordan Peterson on creative productivity and the One Percent" perhaps?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPlMU4KiGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPlMU4KiGI)

------
yasp
They didn't analyze IQ?

------
gallerdude
An interesting 20/80 rule going on here. The good news is if we can fix
whatever issues affect this 1%, we solve 63% of violent crimes. Or maybe I'm
naive.

~~~
gowld
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix)

The challenge is to fix that 1%, without terrorizing the N% who look vaguely
similar.

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah. Looking at the data, we could prevent 90% of violent crimes by locking
up all men. Somehow, I don't think most people here would go for that.

~~~
blfr
That's because it's half of the population. Also, the stronger and more
aggressive half which presents a very serious practical obstacle: who would
lock them up?

~~~
weberc2
Also the minor ethical quandary of incarcerating 3.5 billion innocent people.
:)

------
montrose
Interesting how similar the distribution of criminality is to the distribution
of wealth, in which the top 1% own a bit over half.

[https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds-
ri...](https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds-richest-
wealth-credit-suisse)

~~~
dredmorbius
Zipf Function / Power Distribution.

 _Exceedingly_ common in population distributions.

------
infinity0
Ofc smarter criminals don't primarily do violent crime, yet sometimes do the
greater damage to society.

------
rectang
I'd love to hear whether 1% account for all white collar crime.

But Willie Horton terrifies people in a way that Bernie Madoff does not, so I
expect that "tough on crime" will continue to exclude white collar crime.

 _

~~~
DanBC
Not sure why you got downvoted. You make an interesting point.

How would you measure? Dollar value? Number of crimes? Number of victims of
crime?

~~~
rectang
Mmm, I'd say number of crimes. The recidivism rate would would be very
interesting to study because it is so typical for white collar criminals to
receive absurdly light sentences.

There's a sentiment here in this discussion that we should lock violent
criminals away with extreme prejudice, even at the cost of false positives.
(Which is the at odds with the idea of having criminal conviction require
proof "beyond a reasonable doubt".) I wonder if people are similarly
enthusiastic about such harsh treatment of white-collar criminals.

------
RickJWag
Amazing. This deserves serious political discussion, it seems to hold
potential for massive increases in quality of life.

------
scythe
The ORs for various factors are all lower than the OR for Y chromosomes. I
take this to mean we don't really have a good model of what causes persistent
criminality, but we do have good evidence that it exists. A frustrating
situation.

~~~
trophycase
Testosterone

~~~
gowld
It's always interesting to see that there's a segment of the public discourse
that consistently hammers on "melanin" as a predictor of crime, but ignores
"testosterone"....

------
WoodenChair
IMHO the title should include "In Sweden..."

------
mempko
in other words, 99% of people are mostly peaceful.

~~~
opwieurposiu
99% of swedes from <2004 aka 99% of white people

------
ggg9990
The utilitarian approach would be to identify the worst n% of the population
and pre-emptively kill or imprison them. There would be mistakes for sure
though.

~~~
jl6
Better choose your utility metric carefully, because I’ll bet 90% of the
world’s population aren’t necessary to achieving most people’s ideas of goals.

------
tehwebguy
Now do one for financial crimes

------
sercand
So %1 becomes new kind of Pareto rule. The %1 owns half of the world's wealth
and this.

~~~
Fnoord
Well, I was thinking of all these people who are getting away with their
crimes. I mean, "smart" criminals don't get caught, right? Specifically, I was
thinking about the very rich who are offshoring their money to tax havens (see
Panama Papers) but of course, they are not criminals. After all, they're not
convicted, and innocent until proven guilty, and hey its tax avoidance not tax
evasion.

Which is a double standard; if I'd steal an iPhone from the tax avoiding Apple
then that's theft. Heck they even mention that the price includes all kind of
levies such as environmental and taxes. Yet when they steal from my government
(who represent me) then that's totally fine? Or, if someone would operate a
client computer from a country where piracy is illegal, but the server would
be hosted in a country where piracy is legal, then suddenly the whole act is
illegal even though the computer who executes the commands is allowed to.

I don't have the numbers, so I'm very curious what's more damaging: tax
avoidance or piracy. I've even seen criminal acts like mass selling pirated
DVDs being also tax _evasion_. Yet all the crap within the Panama Papers is
not? How that does rhyme?

Furthermore it doesn't appear like anyone in power cares enough about tax
avoidance in order for it to be solved (we, as in civilians of governments
from all over the world, are missing out on a massive amount of tax dollars).

------
zerostar07
indeed, it would be horrible if it were more evenly distributed

