Category: Law
American violence is higher than you think
From Christopher Glazek:
…the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.
Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole.
Here is one detail:
…the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Here is more, via Eli Dourado.
North Korea Fact of the Day
North Korea is the only country in the world where it is legal to use, sell, transport and cultivate marijuana.
How you know Singaporeans are really serious about microeconomics
If you have to pay a fine, say for incorrect behavior in public, the fine is defined as say “$250 plus GST,” where GST is a consumption tax similar to a VAT.
Think about it. Presumably you derive consumption pleasure from the fined activity. Paying the fine (stochastically) is, at the margin, equated with the return from other forms of consumption. The other forms of consumption are taxed and thus subject to GST. Therefore the fine-generating activity should be taxed too.
Do Not Mock the Freshmen
Here from a 1495 Leipzig University Statute is some good advice for the first day of classes:
Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen.
Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.
Hat tip: Jason Kuznicki.
Spying on your loved ones? (or what you don’t know can’t hurt you?)
National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.
The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.
Here is more.
*Ninety Percent of Everything*
The author is Rose George and the subtitle is Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. Here is one excerpt:
The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European..
And here is one other part:
EU-NAVFOR releases 80 percent of detained pirates because it can’t find willing courts.
Here is the book’s home page.
A Puzzle in Divorce Law
It’s easy to see why a divorce law might arise that allows men relatively easy divorce, as in the Old Testament which lets men divorce almost at will (as written, interpretations differ) but gives women no right to divorce at all. It is also easy to see why a society might adopt mutual consent under which both parties must agree in order to get a divorce or no-fault unilateral rules in which either party can get a divorce without the consent of the other. What is difficult to understand, however, is why a society would adopt divorce laws that make it difficult to get a divorce even when both parties want a divorce. Who benefits from such rules? And yet this was the common situation in England and the United States up until say the end of the 19th century. In England, for example, it took an Act of Parliament to get a divorce. One might argue that such rules benefit children but aside from the questionability of the premise this view would also have to answer how it is that children have political power?
Hat tip to Sasha Volokh for bringing the question to mind with an apropos quote on divorce from a 19th century British judge.
China’s experiment with cap and trade
Dirk Forrister and Paul Bledsoe report from the NYT:
China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has begun its effort in the southern city of Shenzhen, paving the way for a national Chinese market in a few years. Like Europe, which voted to extend and improve its emissions market, and Australia and New Zealand, Shenzhen chose a carbon market as the most efficient way to lower its greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Shenzhen program, the government will set limits on carbon dioxide discharges for 635 industrial companies and 197 public buildings that together account for about 40 percent of the city’s emissions. Polluters whose emissions fall below the limit can sell the difference in the form of pollution allowances to other polluters. These companies must decide whether it is cheaper to reduce emissions or pollute above their limit by buying allowances, whose price will be set by supply and demand. But the pressure will be on, because the limits will decrease over time. Six more regional pilot programs are planned over the next year.
This piece offers some further details, including this:
The caps require the emitters to collectively cut their carbon intensity by 6.7 per cent a year between this year and 2015.
After reading multiple sources, however, it seems that all these numbers involve fudges. And over the longer run the cap is defined relative to gdp:
Beijing has not agreed to binding caps on its emission volumes, but has set a target to cut emission intensity – carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 from the 2005 level.
Here is further analysis from The Economist, which reckons that actual binding carbon caps will take ten years to evolve. This will be one good way to study whether these regimes are time consistent, noting that Europe’s regime has been in place for about ten years and still doesn’t work.
The price of phone calls for inmates will decline
After a decade of lobbying by prisoner advocacy groups, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday voted to lower inmate phone call rates.
The action seeks to address the exorbitant rates for phone calls made by inmates in jails and prisons across the country. A 15-minute phone call can cost $17, more than 10 times the average per-minute rate for typical consumer plans.
The proposal approved Friday will reduce the cost of phone calls made by prison inmates to a cap of 25 cents a minute for a collect call and 21 cents a minute for a debit or prepaid call.
By the way:
Phone companies oppose the changes, arguing they would make an already-competitive market even tougher on their bottom lines.
The companies insist it simply costs more to provide inmate phone services, which require security features such as call screening, restricting phone numbers and blocking three-way calls.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank George McQuistion.
Is the Fourth Amendment Now Illegal?
In my view the fourth amendment is routinely being violated by the federal government. But is the fourth amendment, in particular the right to be secure in one’s papers, now illegal? Maybe. Violations of the fourth amendment by the federal government encourage the use of encryption but that avenue may now being blocked. Lavabit, the secure email service used by Edward Snowden, has suddenly and mysteriously closed with the creator leaving this message:
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
Other secure email providers have also shut down.
Recently I asked for suggestions to add to the Bill of Rights. One of mine was:
Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to encrypt their documents and effects. (Modern supplement to the fourth amendment.)
I guess that amendment isn’t going to pass. I should not be surprised. In 2003 I said the cyber-libertarians were naive to dream of a new world of privacy and liberty built on the foundations of the internet and public key cryptography. Sadly, I got that one right.
Hat tip: Lynne Kiesling.
Addendum: Here is a longer account of what may be going on with Lavabit. Key graph:
There are already two theories as to what a FISA order against Lavabit may have looked like. First, FISA could have ordered Lavabit to insert spyware or build a back door for the N.S.A., as American and Canadian courts reportedly did to the encrypted e-mail service Hushmail, in 2007. Second, FISA could have ordered Lavabit to permit the N.S.A. to intercept users’ passwords. But the truth may never come out.
The stimulus that is Russian
A business owner in Russia has a better chance of ending up in the penal colony system once known as the gulag than a common burglar does.
More than 110,000 people are serving time for what Russia calls “economic crimes,” out of a population of about three million self-employed people and owners of small and medium-size businesses. An additional 2,500 are in jails awaiting trial for this class of crimes that includes fraud, but can also include embezzlement, counterfeiting and tax evasion.
But with the Russian economy languishing, President Vladimir V. Putin has devised a plan for turning things around: offer amnesty to some of the imprisoned business people.
And this:
In 2010, the police investigated a total of 276,435 “economic crimes,” according to the Russian prosecutor general’s office, whose statistics show burglary and robbery are prosecuted less than economic crimes.
…Russia’s infamous penal colonies, rural camps swirled in barbed wire, appear today much as they did when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in the 1960s. But at least one of every 10 prisoners today is a white-collar convict.
And why are so many businessmen in prison?
…in Russia, the police benefit from arrests. They profit by soliciting a bribe from a rival to remove competition, by taking money from the family for release, or by selling seized goods. Promotion depends on an informal quota of arrests. Police officers who seize businesses became common enough to have earned the nickname “werewolves in epaulets.”
There is more here, interesting throughout.
Is the main effect of the minimum wage on job growth?
In their new paper, Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West report:
The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will attenuate the measured effects of the minimum wage on employment if the true effect is in fact on the rate of job growth. Using a long state-year panel on the population of private-sector employers in the United States, we find that the minimum wage reduces net job growth, primarily through its effect on job creation by expanding establishments.
In a slightly different terminology, the effect of the minimum wage may well be attenuated in the short run, but over longer time horizons there is a “great reset” against low-skilled labor.
The demand for NSA data
“It’s a very common complaint about N.S.A.,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a former senior intelligence official at the White House and at the office of the director of national intelligence. “They collect all this information, but it’s difficult for the other agencies to get access to what they want.”
“The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them.”
Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency’s surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say.
Here is more, scary throughout.
Assorted links
1. Jenny Hatch, the subject of the Down Syndrome legal case previously covered on MR, celebrates, as she receives partial liberty.
2. Syria bans croissants for being deemed colonial.
3. Placebo buttons (I liked this one).
4. Are we seeing “Peak Cable”? And the Chinese government will be limiting TV singing contests.
5. NSF puts its political science grant cycle on hold.
6. Ashok Rao summarizes a 1991 Summers piece on financial regulation and monetary policy.
How dangerous are cell phones when driving?
Maybe not as much as you think. Here is the abstract from a new paper (AEA gate) by Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram S. Pathania:
We investigate the causal link between driver cell phone use and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment induced by the 9pm price discontinuity that characterizes a majority of recent cellular plans. We first document a 7.2 percent jump in driver call likelihood at the 9pm threshold. Using a prior period as a comparison, we next document no corresponding change in the relative crash rate. Our estimates imply an upper bound in the crash risk odds ratio of 3.0, which rejects the 4.3 asserted by Redelmeier and Tibshirani (1997). Additional panel analyses of cell phone ownership and cellular bans confirm our result.
Here is another way to put the puzzle:
Cell phone ownership (i.e., cellular subscribers/population) has grown sharply since 1988, average use per subscriber has risen from 140 to 740 minutes a month since 1993, and surveys indicate that as many as 81 percent of cellular owners use their phones while driving—yet aggregate crash rates have fallen substantially over this period.
I don’t want you to start or continue this practice, as numerous other studies do find significant risk. Still, maybe this matter is not quite as settled as many people think.
Here is a non-gated version of the paper (pdf), and the official ungated version is here.