> It wouldn't work in US, or South Africa or El Salvador because of what level of violence is deemed acceptable in those countries.
The US prison system and the harsh police also contribute to violence, people are more violent because you are violent with them, it works as a feedback loop.
> The US prison system and the harsh police also contribute to violence, people are more violent because you are violent with them, it works as a feedback loop.
chicken and egg problem. I don't think US society was ever "not violent". It isn't more violent today than it was in the 80's at least.
I'm not sure this hypothesis holds up. For instance consider places like Singapore. It is relentlessly brutal against criminals. Even relatively petty crime like vandalism is subject to corporal punishment - caning. Yet there is no feedback loop - the country has practically no crime, and I think this is in large part thanks to the people and culture of the area.
Or consider Japan. They have a 99% conviction rate, and a big part of that is because it's an open secret that police will torture confessions out of people they arrest. But once again a different people with a different culture and we see an incredibly low crime rate.
For this matter we can perhaps even look at the US! Violent crime rates have been plummeting since the early 90s even though that has been paired with a sharp increase in the public perception of police violence. If there was a feedback loop then we would expect it to have been going sharply in the other direction!
Police in Japan deliberately ignore many crimes, to make the numbers look good.
Also, torturing people into confessions is a great idea, until you nab the wrong person. But it sure drives the conviction statistics up!
This isn't a question of culture, this is simply a case of the police fudging the numbers to make themselves look good. The Soviet Union also had "zero crime", and a 99% conviction rate, but unlike Japan, nobody took those bullshit claims seriously.
The 99% obviously means that (at best!) that they don't bring cases they may lose to trial, and isn't really an achievement.
But GGP realusername's claim was that brutal policing drives crime. Places which have brutal policing and genuinely low crime are some evidence against this, even if you don't wish to emulate the brutality.
(Whether the USSR had low levels of street crime I actually don't know -- is this known? But few deny that Japan and Singapore are pretty damn safe.)
I was not stating it was a good thing. It means that Japan is treating people they suspect of crimes absolutely awfully. The hypothesis I was responding to is that harsh treatment of suspects is reciprocated with harsh treatment towards police from future suspects. I'm not sure this is substantiated.
So does China! 99.93% conviction rate last year. That's 3 nines! Stellar, those police get it right basically all the time! [1] Hong Kong OTOH is between 53.9% and 79% [2]. Sad.
The US prison system and the harsh police also contribute to violence, people are more violent because you are violent with them, it works as a feedback loop.