So that’s the beginning to what has to be my favorite creepy convo I’ve seen posted to the Reddit CreepyPMs subreddit yet. I don’t want to SPOIL anything, but let’s just say that the pink lady in this conversation comes up with a rather unique way to send this dick-pic-posting male correspondent packing.
See here for the rest, and here for the Reddit thread. Oh, and don’t worry, you won’t have to look at his c*ck, or any other horrifying thing, and nothing else will be spoiled if you scroll down through all the pics. (You’ll get what I’m talking about in a second.)
Jurors don’t need to see the defendant. No reason for it.
But it was pretty unpopular when I first suggested it as a way to reduce sentencing disparity.
Well, if you stop and think about it, it’s a pretty foolish idea, isn’t it?
There are a million different ways that the defense and/or the prosecution can drop hints about demographics, if they think introducing that information will sway the jury. Back in the original discussion, you were talking about the sex of the defendants, which is especially hard to hide from the jury (because the testimony will have tend to have pronouns in it.)
Besides, there are some cases where the jury needs to see the defendant. What if the crime is on surveillance video, and one of the points under dispute is whether the defendant is the person on the tape?
The real solution to sentencing disparity is to train potential jurors to be less prejudiced. If we can do that, then that should solve a number of other social problems as well.
That has never, ever slowed Diogenes the Dim down. Never ever ever.
Stats!
First, the links saying the mentally ill are not more likely to be violent. That lead me down a rabbit hole of citations, including this one — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9596041
As that seems to say the same thing as the others, but in a less confusing manner, I’m just posting that one. All of them found a couple of things — mental illness and substance abuse does raise the risk of violence, mental illness alone does not (one said it did but not by a significant degree), people with mental illnesses are more likely to be violent in a domestic context than against strangers.
Next up, Nepenthe’s links.
Hurrah! Our stats savior has arrived!
I hope Diogenes’ next suggestion is for everyone to start using new gender-neutral, culturally-ambiguous names, never use pronouns, and cease to interact on a face-to-face basis. Much easier than dismantling institutional discrimination/unlearning bigotry.
Didn’t you hear? The Voynich manuscript has totally been solved by an Internet Genius™. Pretty sure he was a genius. He seemed to think so, anyway.
@LBT
Exceellleent. Time to hail Argenti as my new god 😀
@unimaginative
Well, he did pass the mensa test while black out drunk 😉
“This meta-analysis of studies done in the US after 1990 indicates that severely mentally ill people are about 4 times more likely to be violent than neurotypical people, with rates much higher among those who have been committed.”
http://journals.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=99084#Results
“Perpetration of violence and violent victimization are more common among persons with severe mental illness than in the general population (19,53,54,55). Studies analyzing the Epidemiologic Catchment Area data found that approximately 2% of persons without a mental disorder perpetrated violence in the past year, compared with 7% to 8% of persons with severe mental illness (53,54,55). For victimization, the disparity between the general population (3%) and persons with severe mental illness (25%) is even greater, as found in the NCVS (19).
Overall, our review does not support the stereotype that persons with severe mental illness are typically violent (7,8,9,10). This stereotype may persist, in part, because of researchers’ focus on inpatients. Although fewer than 17% of persons with severe mental illness in the United States are hospitalized (58), nearly half of the studies that investigate violence among persons with severe mental illness examined only inpatients (29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43). Among these, the largest and most well-cited studies focused on involuntarily committed inpatients. The Outpatient Commitment Study included only involuntarily committed inpatients. Two-fifths of the sample in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study had been involuntarily committed, a significant predictor of subsequent violence (45). Because commitment criteria include imminent dangerousness (to self or others) (44), findings derived from samples of involuntarily committed patients are generalizable only to the most acutely disturbed patients—those whose situations have required involvement of the courts.
How much violence in the United States is caused by persons with mental illness? One study found that overall, the attributable risk of mental illness to the perpetration of violence in the United States is approximately 2% (52); by comparison, two demographic variables—gender and age—are more powerful predictors of violence (52). Nearly 40% of arrests for serious violent crimes (murder, nonnegligent homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) are of males 24 years and younger (59).”
In short, severe mental illness is correlated with slighter higher rates of violence, but less so than being a young man.
The third one studied only inpatients but found similar — being young and male are significant predictors of violence, adding in mental illness barely changes that; looking at older groups and women, mental illness increases the rate of violence — no comparison made between the rates for mental illness in general and being young and male. Odd given — “This is consistent with research that has reliably established that the two most important risk factors for violence are being male and being young (23, 24).”
Oh and the only mention of substance abuse is — “Comorbid substance abuse, in particular, increases the risk of violent crime in those with severe mental illness (8, 11, 14). However, because substance abuse and severe mental illness are not independent of each other, we did not calculate the attributable risk separately for those with and without comorbidity because the focus of this study was the attributable risk of patients with severe mental illness, not of the psychosis itself.”
So no way to tell how much of the difference they found is attributable to something known to increase the risk of violence. Because that was relevant to how dangerous the mentally ill are as a whole (this is like saying that youth is an predictor of violence and ignoring that so is gender)
Last one in just a second!
Actually, they do. Since it’s him that’s on trial, it is only fair and fitting that he be there to show his face. Trials-in-absentia have a funny way of turning Kafkaesque, to boot.
If you want to eliminate sentencing disparities, first eliminate sexism, racism, homophobia, and all the other odious isms and phobias from the world. But since that battle has been going on awhile (and is being fought by better folk than thee), the practical thing to do is eliminate bias as much possible from the jury by way of proper selection. It’s that simple…and that difficult, apparently, for you to comprehend.
“Results Bivariate analyses showed that the incidence of violence was higher for people with severe mental illness, but only significantly so for those with co-occurring substance abuse and/or dependence. Multivariate analyses revealed that severe mental illness alone did not predict future violence; it was associated instead with historical (past violence, juvenile detention, physical abuse, parental arrest record), clinical (substance abuse, perceived threats), dispositional (age, sex, income), and contextual (recent divorce, unemployment, victimization) factors. Most of these factors were endorsed more often by subjects with severe mental illness.
Conclusions Because severe mental illness did not independently predict future violent behavior, these findings challenge perceptions that mental illness is a leading cause of violence in the general population. Still, people with mental illness did report violence more often, largely because they showed other factors associated with violence. Consequently, understanding the link between violent acts and mental disorder requires consideration of its association with other variables such as substance abuse, environmental stressors, and history of violence.”
“All factors were statistically related to violence, with the exception of severe mental illness without substance abuse and/or dependence.”
“The predicted probability of violence for severe mental illness alone is approximately the same as for subjects with no severe mental illness. Individuals with severe mental illness and substance abuse and/or dependence posed a higher risk than individuals with either of these disorders alone. The highest risk was shown for dual-disordered subjects with a history of violence, who showed nearly 10 times higher risk of violence compared with subjects with severe mental illness only.”
“The current study aimed to clarify the link between mental disorder and violence, and the results provide empirical evidence that (1) severe mental illness is not a robust predictor of future violence; (2) people with co-occurring severe mental illness and substance abuse/dependence have a higher incidence of violence than people with substance abuse/dependence alone; (3) people with severe mental illness report histories and environmental stressors associated with elevated violence risk; and (4) severe mental illness alone is not an independent contributor to explaining variance in multivariate analyses of different types of violence. As severe mental illness itself was not shown to sequentially precede later violent acts, the findings challenge perceptions that severe mental illness is a foremost cause of violence in society at large. The data shows it is simplistic as well as inaccurate to say the cause of violence among mentally ill individuals is the mental illness itself; instead, the current study finds that mental illness is clearly relevant to violence risk but that its causal roles are complex, indirect, and embedded in a web of other (and arguably more) important individual and situational cofactors to consider.”
In other words, the mentally ill as a whole are no more violent than the general population. If they also abuse drugs, then they are. And when they have/are one of the other things/groups at risk for increased violence, that risk holds.
Summary — “All it says is that if you pluck a random neurotypical (or person with a minor mental illness) out of the population and a random person with a severe mental illness, that the neurotypical is less likely to have committed violence in their lives.”
No. If you pluck someone with mental illness and drug abuse, and someone with neither factor, who is also not a young man, then the latter is less likely to have committed a violent act. If you pluck someone with mental illness and no drug abuse, and a young man, then the latter is more likely to have committed a violent act.
As this came up in the context of gun ownership, it would suggest than young men, and mentally ill people who abuse drugs, should both be denied (or allowed) gun ownership under the same conditions as the rest of the population.
Thanks Argenti. I admit I was a little dubious about those stats, but stats really isn’t my strong suit. Now I have you!
@argenti
Thanks for the wonderful stat analysis :3
Yes, that’s the very Internet Genius’s blather I had in mind. 😀
LBT, not sure if the stories were mentioned in this thread, but do you have a link to the sponsorship stuff? I can’t promise anything atm as money is a little tight, but I’d like to see what the levels are & if I can work it into my budget
Argenti, it would be super if you could attribute the words you quote and distinguish them from your own analysis.
Why are you comparing the subgroup of mentally ill people to the subgroup of young men? The relevant populations when evaluating the claim “mentally ill people are no more likely than anyone else” to be violent are the subgroups {mentally ill people} and {all people who are not mentally ill}.
Basically, you’re doing this, which is no more endearing when progressives do it than when conservatives do it.
It would be super if you’d dial it back a notch or ten.
RE: Skye
LBT, not sure if the stories were mentioned in this thread, but do you have a link to the sponsorship stuff? I can’t promise anything atm as money is a little tight, but I’d like to see what the levels are & if I can work it into my budget
I sell my stuff for three cents a word, so pretty much all writeathon stories these days are $30 a pop. (The ones currently going are listed here.) However, I also have a couple old orphaned stories for $25 here.
(By the way, I’m actually working on getting a proper shop page going as we speak, so hopefully by this time tomorrow, I won’t have to keep doing this tin-cans-and-strings method of linking all my work for sale.)
You mean Nepenthe, hellkell? I’d second that.
Kitteh: yes.
It’s alright. My partner is forbidding me from coming here, since it always makes me ragey. Just remember, when the data says something you don’t like, ignore it!
Or you could stop saying awful shit about the mentally ill, under the guise of your mental illness. It’s happened before.
i really don’t get what nepenthe is arguing…
i assumed this conversation started from the fbi data list thing in florida?
and people with severe mental illnesses hving a slightly higher rate of committing violence (mostly violence against themselves) which can be overexaggerated to a bigger rate if you count people with sever mental ilnesses and drug/abuse problems (if i’m remembering right?) doesn’t really prove that you should discriminate against them… especially since argenti mentioned the rates being the same as or slightly lower than young men and no one’s trying to say “well put young men on the fbi list”
I’m just so confused. did i miss something?
Bye, Nepenthe. We’ll see you next time you feel like starting a fight with someone.
(BTW – “Severe” is not a very useful way of breaking down mental illness into different categories in terms of likelihood of violence. Severe depression and severe anti-social personality disorder are not at all the same things.)