US incarceration rates since Obama was elected?

Can someone point me to this data? From what I understand, US incarceration rates peaked in 2008, but I've also heard people say incarceration rates have sky-rocketed under Obama, which would contradict this.

 

Not a big fan of the current administration but I know that Obama commuted more prison sentences than any other president in the recent past. The reason the incarceration rates have sky-rocketed in the recent years is that the economy / unemployment rate / racial tensions have all taken a turn for the worse since 2008. I don't have a solid factual data, all I do is turn on the news and the facts are all there.

 

Jails and police are woes from Satan. This just seem to be one of Satan plan to bring a country into police state. Entering into police state mode is very bad. Jesus is coming back.

 

This one is interesting as the numbers are SO easily manipulated to say what you want.

OVERALL, the number of people in "custody" has continued to climb all along... the "grand total" of what is considered the "correctional population" of ADULTS has climbed... Why did I put "adults" in caps there for emphasis?

JUVENILE DETENTION has dropped massively since 2008, to all time lows. We're locking up and/or putting into "supervised living" far and far less minors.

Also having dropped and accounting for the majority of the decline is the number of people in JAIL. You have to understand the difference between Jail and Prison. Jail is supposed to be holding for people who have not gone to trial yet or been convicted. Prison is where convicts are sent. We are keeping less people in custody for less time -- mostly thanks to overcrowding resulting in a widening of what qualifies as an non-arrest offense and what qualifies for bail.

The number of people in PRISON continues to climb, but we're keeping less people in pre-trial custody, protective custody, and we're no longer throwing kids into juvenile detention as much for trivial offenses.

One thing to watch out for is charts -- gah, they can lie to you right to your face and you don't even see it. Take this one:
http://www.southernstudies.org/sites/default/files/images/USIncarcerationGrowth.png

See how they put prison on top so it looks like it's gone down? Notice how Jail has the same curve and juvie goes down? They're using the dip in the other two to try and trick people into thinking the top one also declined! If you moved prison to it's own chart or simply to the bottom, you'll get a whole different impression of the exact same data. (If I have time later I'll make one to show exactly that -- same data but flipped!)

It's card stacking -- a lie by omission or presenting the information in a manner that supports a conclusion rather than objectively. It's why I have a distrust of infographics, charts, and percentages over time that don't state the actual number of the pool at each point.

You can see this even in the simplest of subjects -- like market share. NOWHERE will you find bigger lies than what marketers use "share" to claim. Take a subject as web folks we should all know fairly well, browser share.

People draw the conclusion that since IE had 95% of the market in early 2004 that their current 15-50% share (depending on who's numbers, some like W3Counter are obviously skewed thanks to their audience) means there are less people using IE. People even use that share number to support that claim or to say things like "Opera maintained 3% share for most of its' existence failing to grow"

The problem is, nobody is asking "A percent of what?" -- when IE had it's peak of 95% share there were (using global villiage's numbers) 757 million Internet users. Today, with IE's (by statcounter) 24.5% you have to figure that's out of a current 3.27 BILLION users. I'm no mathemagician, but I'm pretty sure that 95% of 757 is 719.15, and that 24.5% of 3270 is 801.15 --- meaning that despite "losing" 70% share, they GAINED 81 million users, meaning they didn't lose shit.

When the pool size changes, the percentages become meaningless.

Which is something ELSE you have to account for on things like prison statistics -- sure we have more people incarcerated, but arent there more people overall? Are we counting this as a percentage of the population, or as the raw number of people? Sure, back in 1980 there were only half a million people in lockdown, but at that time there were only 227 million americans. Now in 2015 there are nearly 322 million americans -- a growth of 70%... while this doesn't explain the rapid incarceration growth of 500% over that same 35 years, it does mitigate it slightly.

But certainly the real cause of growth in locking folks up is the classic lie politicians tell all the time -- that creating a new law will reduce crime; an utter and complete impossibility since all new laws do is turn law abiding citizens into criminals. This is why generally speaking past the few common sense laws against theft, assault and murder every other law is more about letting a select few target, penalize and demonize groups they don't happen to like. See the endless pointless "blue laws" that take centuries to be repealed, or the noodle doodle stuff extremists on both sides of the argument want passed just for use as a weapon against everyone else... or even "panic" legislation where something horrible happens, and it becomes a way to promote socialism, fascism and to take away basic rights and liberties; see some of the noodle-doodle garbage post Pearl or post 9-11.

In any case, make sure you are looking at ALL the numbers, most of the time you try to look subjects like this up numbers will be included or omitted not as a promotion of fact, but as promotion of one agenda or another. There's a reason card stacking is one of the seven classic propaganda techniques.

 

Here's that redo using the concrete numbers from 2010 to 2013 -- numbers for 2014 and 2015 online seems to bounce all over the blasted place compared to the chart I linked to previously, but here are the most recent decade and some change using the same basic numbers, in four different orders.



The first one is identical to their chart, but I switched out the colour scheme to be more thematically neutral using the CrCgY formula to determine the same luma for all three numbers. Differing luma can cause the eye to focus differently on the information, often making things you want to "look bigger" feel bigger to the user. It's like audio-bandwidth compression that they use in commercials to make something SEEM louder when if you took a DB meter it's the same? (that thing that blows you out of the room when a commercial comes on?). That's one of the FIRST things to look for is the luminance/reflectivity of the colours used; it can often skew how the eye sees the information... hence why on this flattened out version of the curve vs. their covering many more years, that decline doesn't seem as massive.

Which is why when on the second chart we move the people in prison - aka convicts -- to the bottom, that curve flattens out even more. It also makes the blue section seem far more stable since the curve at the top "feels" similar to the bottom.

When we move jail to the bottom so juvie doesn't get in the way, and it's leading slope becomes more pronounced, and it's decline flattens out.

You move the smallest to the middle, it's differences in values feels more pronounced, as does the curve/separation between the larger two values. This can often be used to make something trivial seem more important, or to further enhance a trend that actually isn't there.

GENERALLY it's considered "best practice" amongst marketing types to always put the values largest to smallest, as it exagerates the total curve and growth/shrinkages of values inside that graph more. If you see them out of order it is typically done to change the meaning on purpose. In any way of looking at it though, the moment you see a "share" graph where more than one value is stacked atop another, you can pretty much guarantee that the people who made it are trying to influence your conclusions not to match the truth, but to match their agenda.

... and any way you look at it, from 2008 to 2015 even with the wildly varying 2014/2015 numbers depending on the source (good rule of thumb on any statistics is to never count the current year/reporting period) We're still nowhere near as low as the pre 2004 numbers even with the slight drop that's happened since that 2008 peak.

But what's the CAUSE of that drop? Can you really blame ANY of this on the chief executive who does't make laws and has little if any influence upon town and state police or town/county level judiciary?

Obama has been a really good figurehead -- people get to blame all sorts of crazy nonsensical stuff he has little if any control over on him; just like every president before him. The only thing that changes is who's doing the finger pointing and over what!

Hence the old joke "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal".

That 2008 peak caused a great burden upon the nation's prisons and worse, normal holding facilities. Many prisons that normally only housed convicts were forced into taking on the people waiting on trial, serving as jails. This overtaxing of the system forced lawmakers and regulators nationwide to loosen the rules until new facilities can be built.

What any of that has to do with Obama? Your guess is as good as mine. I consider him inept, and there's more than enough LEGITIMATE things he can be blamed for -- there's no reason to go making false associations and basically make shit up to blame on him.

Excuse me while I make a simile. No, that's not a misspelling, I don't mean a smiley. Guarantee even with this warning some dipshit later on in this thread will whine about it being off-topic.

It's like in HTML with the "anti table" mania that went on a few years ago. There are legitimate reasons not to use tables for layout such as it being non-semantic gibberish that gives screen readers (aka software that reads the page aloud to you) and/or braille readers fits. They are harder to make responsive or to adjust to fluid data -- and as always if you are choosing your tags based on their appearance and not their meaning, you're choosing all the wrong tags for all the wrong reasons.

So where did this "render time" bullshit come from? When a 386/40 running windows 3.1 and IE 4 can handle a table JUST FINE, complaining about how long it takes for tables to render in an age where even handheld phones are pushing past the 1ghz mark is 100% grade A farm fresh manure.

... and it's nonsensical lies like that people basically pulled out of their ass that led to "Don't use tables for layout" being magically transformed into "never use tables" -- just like how people misinterpret "Don't use B or I when emphasis would be a more accurate meaning" gets magically transformed into "Don't ever use B and I"; here's a tip, you're not emphasizing a book title or proper name.

There are legitimate reasons for both, you don't need to make shit up to support it! That's why both are examples of what happens when you card stack, you do it wrong and you end up undermining the actual message or discrediting it when/if you are caught. SOME consider the trick not to get caught or to form cognitive bias, which is when you start treading into what Goebbels called "The big lie" -- a flat out lie repeated so many times by so many "popular" people, it becomes accepted as truth no matter how noodle-doodle it is. This can lead to entire social movements at both extremes of the spectrum; from National Socialists to Anti-Vaxxers, from the KKK to fans of the food babe, from extremist liberal Democrats to extremist conservative Republicans, from Catholicism to Modern Art, from Fascists to hippies...

It's all symptoms of confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and the manipulation of the masses with well documented mind manipulation techniques ranging from propaganda to outright ritualistic indoctrination.

... and if you start looking for it, taking the time to learn to recognize the 7 core propaganda techniques of:

Bandwagon
Card Stacking
Glittering Generalities
Name Calling
Plain Folks
Testimonial
Transfer

It can end up like Roddy Piper just beat your ass in a street fight and forces you to put on the magic sunglasses.

https://thewolfmancometh.files.word...y-live-billboards-messages-john-carpenter.jpg