Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.

For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.

I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?

The feds used to allow you to appeal your sentence forever. I mean if there are problems with a sentence, the government should want to fix it, right?

But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short.

So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer.

The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do.

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Sort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.

> it's just exercising freedom in a way that the system and its adherents don't like.

Yes, that is what the law is, by definition. A reduction in freedom. Most times, for very good reason.

It's still crime if it's moral! I think it's really important to not conflate the law with morality.

Or being disliked by a DoJ who can pressure a judge (who's other legal experience is being a career prosecutor for the feds as well) to not allow many forms of defense, while expending millions upon millions of their own money and "expert witnesses" to tell lies that you can't afford to defend against, and if you will only sign on the dotted line you will only get 3 years instead of a gazillion.

This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?

Likewise a lot of crime isn’t “crime” at all. Kill someone by putting lead in their lungs by means of a firearm and we call it murder and you go to prison. Do it by dumping lead into the air from your factory smokestack and we call it business and you get rich.

I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.

isn't the point that 100 is roughly the average? or 100 at the year they made the test, anyway.

Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).

Isn't it always 100, by definition?

resilience is talked about in the wiki article.

there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.

but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.

put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.

IQ is positively correlated with impulse control.

Example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?

For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.

That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.

Besides several studies have found the general correlation.

>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.

Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.

Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.

My initial instinct would be that the higher IQ someone is, the better they are able to do most things including control their impulses.

Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”

You're putting too much meaning into that data.

Look at the low numbers in Africa. Is it because they elevate their criminals out of poverty? Maybe their police have good relationships with the community? Maybe they're good at re-habilitating convicted criminals in prison? Or maybe it's counseling to heal generational trauma?

Nope. Strong deterrent of immediate mob justice: https://www.dw.com/en/mob-justice-in-africa-why-people-take-...

Obviously, stoning all the criminals isn't the solution, but having society rigidly define acceptable bounds of behavior that get you removed from that society if crossed (temporarily or permanently), isn't unreasonable.

To understand that high number in the US, I think you would have to look at who is in prison, and what they did, to understand. Good luck. They collect the data in a way so you can't do a multivariate analysis, because that would be unethical!

The weapons offenses are by a longshot "felon in possession of a firearm." That one is crazy to me. You're going to send people out into the free world, where guns are legal, and owning a gun is legal, and they are supposedly off the books, and then just tempt them with owning something to defend themselves that everyone around them already has but then lock them away for a decade for doing so? Obviously most of the drug ones are just as absurd -- you're locking up drug dealer A who is immediately replaced with drug dealer B with absolutely no change to drug operations or consumption but at great expense to yourself. Thankfully we've pretty much stopped putting drug users in federal prison.

You could probably wipe out over half the federal prisons without any real change to greater society.

The assertion was that prison populations commit less crime and are higher-IQ than CEOs.

Drug crimes are still crimes, irrespective of public opinion.

>Consider who is doing the "establishing" and what criminality they ignore because those doing it do not even go to prison or jail 99% of time.

Ah yes, I'm sure it's just a conspiracy to keep brilliant people in prison, and let stupid CEOs off the hook.

Look, a quick jaunt through my comment history will show you I'm no corporate bootlicker but this is ridiculous.

"For the little stealing, they give you prison, soon or late. For the big stealing, they names you emperor, and puts you in the hall of fame when you croaks. If there's one thing I've learned from from twenty years on the Pullman cars listening to the white quality talk, it's dat same fact."

From "The Emperor Jones", quoted from memory.

Maybe he realized screaming at cars was more productive than being an actuary so someone who inherited their way through Yale and Blackrock could make the world a worse place.

"Some people are just losers. Accept that"

At least you outed yourself in your original post

You can just run bwbasic today (or blassic) and clone the Basic Computer Games from

https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg

https://github.com/John-Titor/bwbasic