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Incarceration Nation
Friday, February 29th, 2008It’s a staggering figure that by far and away leads the world, both in the total number and in the percentage of the population in prison. This is what 40 years of “getting tough on crime” and increasingly harsh drug laws gets you.
And while there’s certainly some truth to the theory that throwing lots of people in jail is in part responsible for the drop in violent crime over the last 15 years, the story’s a bit more complicated than that. As the Washington Post explains, a state like Florida, which has been giddily locking people up for two decades, has experienced only a slight drop in crime over that period. New York, on the other hand, has experienced a substantial drop in crime since the early 1990s, but the state’s prison population is the lowest its been in 15 years.
Strangely enough, the Post story says (correctly, I think) that we’re finally starting to see reform in sentencing law, as well as some consternation from elected officials about our shamefully high incarceration levels. But not because our political leaders are suddenly concerned about civil rights or the humanity of keeping one percent of the country in lockup. It’s more because supporting a prison system that’s bursting at the seams has become a drain on state budgets.
It’s interesting that years, if not decades, of rational arguments lose out to the all mighty dollar.
I’ve noticed a few stations running “The State of Our Prisons”-ish reports recently, and they seem to universally be on the side of “there is a major problem with the # of people we lock up.”
They don’t really provide any solutions, as usual, but the scenarios they paint that really stand out to me are the ones where ridiculously minor offenders (pot possession/dealing) are sent to prison, where they (sometimes as a survival measure) gain lots of contacts with considerably worse offenders, and therefore graduate to their level, and become real threats.
I don’t think justice-system-wide reforms are going to work, because all you need is one murder that occurs because (or more likely, even just tangentially related to) of that reform and everyone will be right back on the “tough on crime” bandwagon. We do need to be “tough on crime” with the people who commit murders. What we need to do is separate pathetically non-threatening people from the definition of “crime” that we need to be “tough” on.
The fact that I can say “criminal activity” and think of murder — and others think of someone smoking pot in their basement — is a pretty silly situation to be in.
Wait a sec. That can’t be right. They must have counted wrong. This is the Land of Liberty.
Steve Levitt in Freakonomics spends many pages on the drop in crime.
Does anyone know of trustworthy statistics on the crime rate of illegal immigrants? Are they over or under represented in the prison population? It’s a touchy subject (akin to discussing race and incarceration); one extreme wants to believe everyone who comes here is hard-working and honest, and the other extreme wants to believe they come here just to suck from our welfare state. But I’m curious if part of the difference between Florida and New York, for example, could be explained by the differences in their immigrant population. Or, what % of those incarcerated are there for “political” reasons (aka, drug war), as opposed to actual rights violations (aka, crimes), and how the political vs crime percentages break down by population type.
execute the murderers and rapists,legalize vice(prostitution,drugs,gambling)…………cut the prison size to under a million…….problem solved
What is likely to happen is the lesser offenders will have to wear some sort of devices to indicate their crimes, kind of like having a nation full of Scarlet Letters. It is what sex criminals are getting tagged with. Soon, it will be the pot smokers. Then, who knows…
Frank I believe there was just a report out recently on that. I believe it found that immigrants have a much lower crime rate than citizens. I can’t remember precisely, but if you google it you should be able to find the articles about it since it was within the past week or so.
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This is what happens when a society becomes hysterical over crime. I can only see the incarceration rate continuing to climb. After all, can you imagine any politician saying that we need to get softer on crime? There is definitely a criminal element to any free society that needs to be separated from the rest of us, but I can’t imagine that 1 out of every 99 people in this country are truly “criminal”.
By the way… studies have shown that inmates who have access to some sort of training while incarcerated are about 50%-70% less likely to re-offend. Maybe we should throw a little money that direction. But again… no politician will ever get anywhere advocating for that constituency.
Edmund, Frank said Illegal immigrants, not immigrants.
Apart from drug “crimes”, a lot are in prison for parole violation – i.e., for doing things that are perfectly legal for everyone else, like not reporting to a parole officer or going to a bar.
There are only 27 countries in the world?
List many such comparisons, it’s skewed to only those countries that report statistics, and the statistics are taken at face value.
E.g., Cuba and North Korea are essentially nationwide-prisons, yet they’re not listed at 99%, nor is every Islamic country subject to Sharia Law listed at 50% (that representing the female population).
And then there are all those countries in which prisons are eschewed in favor of good old-fashioned beatings, amputations and genocide. (Prisons, after all, take money to build, and what self-respecting tyrant wants to bleed his Swiss accounts for that sort of thing?)
Simplistic charts like this one are generally compiled and promoted with only one thing in mind: Bashing the U.S.
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A more useful comparison would break down the US individual states by crime sector. E.g., are you more likely to spend time in jail for “possession” in which states? Or boinking your girlfriend while a high-school student?
It’d need graphics, too, so Mississippi, et al, would be black zones of hell, while, say, Alaska might be a reasonable light blue.
I infer that most are quick to dismiss this statistic as some kind of societal disfunction, but it could be also considered a sign of its well-being.
Despite our rountine grumblings, the U.S. is still the most free in the world. People here are given greater liberty than those in any other country; maybe some have trouble handling it. The tyranny of mustard, as Radley is wont to say….
Actually it’s what you get when criminals break the laws established by society. I’d like to see the breakdown by country…Imagining that the very socialist countries have “no crime” and no ability to track the whereabouts of certain of their citizens who perhaps met some misfortune. 1% of the population is not a huge number considering the number of crimes we have on the books.
> the U.S. is still the most free in the world….
No it’s not. The average Filipino has to deal with considerably less bullshit on a day-to-day basis than an American. (Marcos did that country a big, fat favor by draining the treasury to bare rocks; the succeeding government thus didn’t have the cash for funding all those sorts of programs government love to creat to get in peoples’ hair.)
> Actually it’s what you get when criminals break the laws established by society…
Ambiguous-Collective Logical Fallacy* — “Society” is not a volitional entity (and “laws” are not ethical pronouncements).
* http://tinyurl.com/28cbw