Here are a few more thoughts on mass incarceration, policing, and crime, in both the American and global context.
I haven’t heard the following argument but conservatives might make it in defense of mass incarceration: America has more prisoners because America has more crime. This argument would say, in effect, that we aren’t more punitive than a country like Canada—rather, we just have more criminals and thus more people in jail.
And the argument isn’t totally crazy. America does have much higher rates of one type of crime—homicide. Our national homicide rate is anywhere from two to eight times that of other, similar wealthy democracies. So, all things equal, we should be expected to have more people in prison for murder than these other countries. And we do.
The problem is that this hardly explains the disparities in prison rates. The incarceration rate in America, as of 2020 according to World Prison Brief, was more than six times as much as Canada, though our homicide rate is about twice as high. Do we have more violent crime, specifically homicide, than similar countries? Yes. Does this explain the disparity between America and other similar countries? No. Because we also have a far more punitive criminal justice system, with much harsher initial punishments, mandatory sentencing, three strikes provisions, and extreme drug laws that are enforced with severity in poor and especially urban areas.
If Canada were to unfortunately experience the American homicide rate it would have more prisoners than it currently does but it would not remotely approach the American incarceration rate. This is in part because as political scientist Marie Gottschalk documents, long prison sentences compound on one another. Unlike almost every other country on earth, America has many prisoners serving life sentences and many others serving multi-decade ones. These people remain in the prison population for extended periods of time, whereas criminals in other countries, even serious ones, rarely serve sentences of more than ten or fifteen years. This makes it difficult for the prison population to shrink since so many prisoners are in there for life. Even the recent (possibly temporary) covid-related drop only took a 14% bite out of our prison population.
The American system of punishment used to resemble that of other wealthy democracies. In the old American prison system, before the massive expansion brought on by the war on crime and the war on drugs, we were more like Europe. An example of this was the so-called Dime and a Half sentence, in which those sentenced to “life in prison” usually only served 10 and a half years before being released. Not anymore. Life without the possibility of parole, as well as other multi-decade sentences, are common here.
On another note, why do the poor, in some cases, commit more crimes? As Geo Maher notes in his new work, inner cities, which have high rates of property and violent crime, are characterized by “systematic neglect and active looting, a lack of social welfare programs, and unequal access to education and opportunities.” They have also experienced substantial deindustrialization in recent decades, with good manufacturing work replaced by minimum wage service work. We can connect this to the more recent deindustrialization of rust belt and small town white America which has seen its own growing problem—deaths of despair due to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. So part of the explanation, for both inner city crime and rural deaths of despair, is that people in both groups experience such hopelessness and desperation that they cannot access or imagine accessing the aspirational middle class life that defines the mainstream American Dream. They are thus more likely to spurn it through the turn to crime or abandon it through the turn to drugs and suicide. (There is much to say here— this paragraph really merits its own blog post).
The question remains—How do we get to the virtuous feedback loop of so many other countries, with both low violent crime rates and low incarceration rates? In the most general sense, our system of policing and incarceration does not work. It has failed to create a society that is safe by the standards of the wealthy democracies of the world while at the same time creating the authoritarian stain of mass incarceration. The answer to this question will look very different than the practices that have defined America for the past half century.