My gut feeling is that in London there is broadly the same amount of crime going on here now than there was ten years ago. I have no idea whether that is correct or not; as is usually in these cases, my gut feeling probably reflects my own personal beliefs more than reality.
I've witnessed Wilmington, DE and Philadelphia grow from *relatively safe* to crime-infested cities that really aren't suitable to raise families in.
It sounds frightening, but how much confidence do you have in the figures you've seen?
If more crime is actually happening in these places, do you think this is the result of an upsurge in evil? I wonder what you might think a sudden glut of evil on one place might indicate. The fact is that crime rates are always going up and down: they can't do anything else, except stay exactly the same, and that probably doesn't happen very often.
If crime rates soared internationally, that might indicate something quite strange, but I'd imagine that these things average out: as crime in Philly rises, you could point to another world city that has a crime rate that is falling by a similar rate.
Personally I don't believe in evil, and instead ascribe people's actions to socio-economic factors, and the influence of their experiences. This is because I don't believe in free will.
However, I think this might be straying off topic a little. To bring it back on topic, you seem to be suggesting that America has more people in gaol because it has a population that is, on average, more evil than the population of Japan. the assumption being, I suppose, that imprisonment figures give a fairly transparent "evil" index. That's fair enough, but it does lead to some slightly embarassing conclusions: - chiefly, I suppose, that black Americans are 8.2 times more evil than white Americans.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-01.htm
Cheerio
[edited to add a bit of clarity to final sentence]
This message has been edited by Tusko, 13-Apr-2006 11:34 AM