Prison in Context

Here's one reader's take on America's sky-high incarceration rate:

One thing to considered when considering this issue is that China has a much lower prisoner population because they summarily execute a lot of prisoners and what I would call unreliable record keeping of prisons as they are an autocratic regime. That isn't to say that the high prison population in the US is something to ignore, it's important to put everything into context.

Those are some decent points, but I'm not really sure that context changes the fact that we still have a frighteningly large proportion of people incarcerated here.

Comments

I found it quite interesting to read (in the NYT article about this) that the main reason we have more people in prison is that our sentences are longer. Our crime rate isn't that high, and if you count prison admissions in a given year, we're lower than a lot of countries. But people in the U.S. just get much tougher sentences. Obviously, some of those sentences are too tough. But in other cases, maybe they're appropriate. Murderers go free after just a few years in a lot of European countries.

Posted by too many steves | April 23, 2008 7:58 PM

As I posted in the other thread, one of the major reasons that crime rates in the U.S. declined throughout the 1990s was precisely because the prison population increased:

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

Posted by blah | April 23, 2008 8:06 PM

The relevant comparison would be to the imprisonment policies and incarceration rates of other democratic states, not to a police state.

Posted by UN Plaza | April 23, 2008 8:08 PM

Yes there are executions in China; when I last checked the US still has a death penalty also. Are there reliable numbers on the numbers of executions annually say in China?

Posted by della Rovere | April 23, 2008 8:11 PM

Theses on the Big House:
1. This underlines a sad bit of American exceptionalism--rooted in racism, covert class war, and lack of communal solidarity given the nature of our (immigrant, multicultural) society.
2. We're gonna have a hell of a time lowering these numbers, inasmuch as there are so many jails, and jailers, that they constitute their own pork-barrel self-justifying/perpetuating special interest.
3. As to points 1) and 2), we're going to have a hell of a time lowering these numbers so long as large numbers of people are persuaded that keeping large numbers of people in jail is suppressing the crime rate/making fewer of us victims of unsocialized beasts.
4. This also highlights the insanity of the drug war, of arresting 3/4 of a milllion people yearly on fairly penny-ante marijuana possession charges and pushing them in/through the system.
5. How insane is it that our prisons are so punitive and non-rehabilitative?
6. Maybe the sickest thing of all is that we are now warehousing huge numbers of horribly unserved, tortured and anguished mentally ill people, which should send even the post-postmodern of us diving for our dog-eared Foucault books and wondering how it is that we have regressed to pre-Enlightenment standards for dealing with this very nontrivial number of sick people.
7. This--all this--actually constitutes a top-ten festering failure of our society and threatens our national well-being.
8. What is to be done? One hardly knows where to start. Mental health? Drug laws? Harm reduction? We need to deal with all of it. Unfortunately, much like education reform, there is no moneyed constituency impelling change, and change comes in long, non-electorally-relevant increments.

Posted by elle loco | April 23, 2008 8:14 PM

China isn't executing hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Thousands perhaps but not anywhere near the numbers that would be necessary even begin to approach Americas various measures of rates of incarceration.

Americas prison population is so high because we love to lock people up. It's a choice. Freedom is messy, as someone said. Americans are not more criminal than other peoples in the first and second world as far as I have heard. Maybe we are better at catching and prosecuting them; For sure we are better at long sentences. We are undisputed leaders at criminalizing conduct, and again, proscribing long sentences.

We are still wedded to ideas of punishment as deterrent or punishment as reform. The numbers go up and up and up, and we still cling to those notions.

It needs to be said that we mainly lock up black people. This is the absolute key to it all.

Posted by rapier | April 23, 2008 8:16 PM

The reason we have such a high rate is that we have not just declared drugs illegal, but have a war on drugs that has resulted in such a large number of resources dedicated to locking up people.

Posted by Joe Strummer | April 23, 2008 8:19 PM

Amnesty International, the London human-rights group, supplies the most commonly cited numbers for the media’s reports on the death penalty. Amnesty compiles reports on executions from press accounts and official figures. Last year [2006], Amnesty counted 1,591 people executed in 25 countries, with nearly two-thirds of these executions, or 1,010, occurring in China. That’s down sharply from 2,148 and 1,770, respectively, in 2005 (a recent Associated Press article cited the higher, 2005 number for China). Based on Amnesty’s numbers, there were 76 executions per 100 million people in China last year, compared with 18 per 100 million in the U.S. (53 total, in 12 states).

But Amnesty says its numbers are major undercounts. The China figures “are only the tip of the iceberg,” an April report said. “Credible sources suggest that between 7,500 to 8,000 people were executed in 2006. The official statistics remain a state secret, making monitoring and analysis problematic.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/how-many-people-does-china-execute-148/

Posted by blah | April 23, 2008 8:22 PM

This is a bit like the argument that we shouldn't worry about our government's policy of torture because, hey, at least we aren't as bad as the Taliban!

Posted by ML | April 23, 2008 8:22 PM

The figures I've heard heard say that China executes about 5,000 people per year. That's a way higher rate than we execute people. Still, if that's anywhere near accurate, then it still wouldn't account for the difference in prison population.

However, there is also some debate about political prisoners and other unofficial prisoners who are not put through the regular justice system in China. Dictatorships and especially communist regimes have extra-judicial punishments, killings, and imprisonments. So as was said above it's kind of pointless to compare the U.S. with a dictatorship, on several different levels.

Posted by Colatina | April 23, 2008 8:26 PM

Durant, a heroin addict, confessed to killing Durrell, a divorced mother of two, and then eating some of her remains, soon after his arrest three years ago.

He will be tried by a panel of three judges at a courthouse in Alicante, southeast Spain, and faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

20 years for killing and eating someone...? eh... I don't about that.

As I understand it prison sentences are very light in Spain. I don't know why - maybe it's a reaction to the excesses of the Franco régime - I don't know.

Posted by jmo | April 23, 2008 8:27 PM

I think it's neat how even the comments that get copied into their own posts have typos.

I basically agree with everything elle loco said.

Posted by Neil the Ethical Werewolf | April 23, 2008 8:28 PM

Let's look at first world countries with good record-keeping:

The imprisonment rate in Japan is about 1/12th of the American rate per capita. That's a big difference!

However, the Asian-American imprisonment rate in America is between 1/9th and 1/10th of the overall American imprisonment rate. The difference between 1/12th and 1/9th is of interest, but it's hardly a huge difference.

The bottom line is that most "naturally occurring" social science statistics in areas like crime are driven by "selection" factors, not by "treatment" factors. You have to do a lot of work to come up with something approaching apples to apples comparisons of populations before you can begin to talk intelligently about the differences in effect of the treatment factors.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 23, 2008 8:33 PM

By the way, I would not recommend falling into the hands of the Japanese criminal justice system. If you are given the choice of being framed and arrested for a serious crime in Japan or America, I'd take my chances on American public defenders, sad as that sounds.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 23, 2008 8:38 PM

Boy, some of Matt's commenters are pretty innumerate. And those are the ones he tends to highlight and agree with!

Look, according to the best available data, China's imprisonment rate is something like 85% lower than that of America's---EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT LOWER!!

Now China does indeed also have LOTS of criminal executions, but by "lots" I mean that they apparently execute something like 0.3% of their imprisoned criminals each year. Gee---I guess that must be what explains the national "imprisonment gap"!

Maybe poor Matt should have taken a basic statistics course at Harvard...or even just a basic arithmetic course!

Posted by RKU | April 23, 2008 8:55 PM

For now a full-text PDF is available of the Annual Review of Sociology's look over the past decade (pre-2005, that is, given that's the article's publication) of research on the relationship between race & violent crime:

MACROSTRUCTURAL ANALYSES OF RACE, ETHNICITY, AND VIOLENT CRIME
Recent Lessons and New Directions for Research

Ruth D. Peterson and Lauren J. Krivo
Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

Overall, the studies reviewed above [i.e., the history of U.S. violent crime studies correlated with race / ethnicity and concentrating on the decade 1995 - 2005] yield one clear conclusion: Structural disadvantage is a major contributor to violence for all racial/ethnic groups studied. Important questions remain: How does structural disadvantage operate to produce violence within and across racial and ethnic groups? Do differences in structures (and intervening processes) explain racial and ethnic differences in violence? Research is only beginning to provide answers to these questions, as is especially evident with respect to how structural disadvantage operates. Cultural codes of the street that support violence do appear to result from structural deprivation, but this conclusion derives from just a few studies (Anderson 1994, 1999; Fagan & Wilkinson 1998; Matsueda et al. 2004; Sampson & Bartusch 1998). In addition, only Matsueda and colleagues’ (2004) preliminary research provides direct evidence regarding the connection of these neighborhood codes to violence. Findings are also sparse on the role of social disorganization in group differences in levels of violence. Indeed, only two Chicago studies directly tackle these issues, and they reveal inconsistent (Morenoff et al. 2001) or no (Sampson et al. 2005) effects of collective efficacy on the patterns of violence examined. Other potential mediating mechanisms linking race/ethnicity, social structure, and violence have not yet been identified or examined.

Regarding how well differences in structural disadvantage explain group differences in violence, the most rigorous studies taking into account structural similarity between groups across local communities show that (a) the effects of disadvantage and other structural conditions are invariant and (b) levels of violence are similar within structurally similar contexts.

Unfortunately, there are just two such studies, they address violence only for black and white communities, and they still point to overwhelming differences in the distributions of structural disadvantage by race (Krivo & Peterson 1996, McNulty 2001). Thus, the state of knowledge needs substantial improvement...

...First, communities that are structurally similar in levels of poverty, employment, and residential stability may be dissimilar in important spatial, political, and other social dynamics that have implications for crime...

...The second insight emanates from the fact that differences across racially and ethnically distinct communities are often so large that they cannot be described as even apparently similar. These inequities are deeply embedded in histories of privilege and oppression and are major sources of the creation and recreation of differential violence that must themselves be directly articulated and explored...

...Spatial location relative to more or less powerful and more or less disadvantaged communities is critical to the dynamics that underlie and reproduce violent crime. Several observed patterns are relevant. Disadvantaged neighborhoods may be near other disadvantaged areas. This has been so true for African Americans that we sometimes find large black belts with high deprivation. In addition, affluent minority neighborhoods may be situated close to areas of high disadvantage. Affluent communities of color in this situation may be subject to some of the same spillover and boundary effects observed among clusters of disadvantage. Another distinct spatial pattern is the one so widely observed for middle-class whites: advantaged localities surrounded by similarly advantaged neighborhoods...

...Future research should explore how these varying patterns of spatial isolation add to the ramifications of disadvantage/ advantage for violent crime. When disadvantage surrounds disadvantage, are communities vulnerable to higher levels of offending and victimization because of spillover effects and more expansive problems of social control? Are there greater concentrations of idle persons gathering during times and in places conducive to crime and violence because of unemployment and underemployment? Do clusters of disadvantaged neighborhoods bring local gangs into contact, leading to reciprocal acts of violence across adjacent neighborhoods (Morenoff et al. 2001, Cohen & Tita 1999)?...

...Neighborhoods that have strong political and economic connections to city government officials, businesses, developers, and other important local leaders have a greater capacity to maintain or attract residential, commercial, and local institutional entities that provide resources and make investments that contribute to the viability and stability of areas. Such investments may differentiate racial and ethnic communities that are apparently similar in disadvantage, and could be a large part of what separates the most privileged communities (commonly white) from the most disadvantaged areas (commonly nonwhite)...

...In addition, scholars should consider the relevance of criminal justice for explaining the race-crime relationship. Indeed, the organization and practices of the criminal justice system have implications for the positioning of groups in U.S. society. First, criminal justice policies regarding which behaviors to criminalize, laws to enforce, and punishments to attach to criminal behaviors may affect racial and ethnic groups differentially. Notably, drug enforcement activities often target minority rather than white areas, distinguishing these groups and setting the stage for more or less violence, as some dangerous individuals will be taken out of communities while other persons will rely on force in their transactions to control markets and avoid detection. Second, neighborhoods of different colors have varying relations with and views of criminal justice organizations (Bobo & Johnson 2004). Criminal justice agencies also have differential experiences with and perceptions of areas with varying racial/ethnic compositions. Because such views may determine residents’ willingness to call for formal intervention and agencies’ deployment of criminal justice resources to communities, they have implications for the degree to which crime and violence are held in check...

http://tinyurl.com/676ncq

I am not personally interested in another go-roundson this blog about race & crime, so this will do it for me. But I thought that some may be argued to see a decent review of actual recent social science on the topic.

I wish I could quote more from it, but it's such a comprehensive review that anyone who's interested can read through the whole article fairly quickly.

Posted by El Cid | April 23, 2008 9:21 PM

Murderers go free after just a few years in a lot of European countries.

When people talk about the disparities in sentence length, I don't think they are talking about the most serious offences. In any event, Canada - for instance - despite its bleeding heart reputation, has a mandatory *life* sentence for any murder (the only issue is the parole eligibility, which ranges from 10 to 25 years (and a minimum of 25 years for 1st degree murder) - although few lifers ever even apply for, let alone receive, parole).

Instead, I think they are referring to the 18 year sentence some first time offender in Alabama got for selling an ounce of pot to an undercover officer, or the 40 year sentence to some guy for growing his own pot in his backyard in Oklahoma.

Posted by McKingford | April 23, 2008 10:04 PM

Murderers go free after just a few years in a lot of European countries.

I don't think this is true, but even so: Every European country has a much lower murder rate than the U.S., so whatever they're doing must be working better than what we're doing.

Posted by Alan in SF | April 23, 2008 10:10 PM

Elle Loco is right that it will be difficult to dismantle the prison industrial system. Part of the reason for that is that although imprisoning a lot of people with harsh sentences to some extent lowers the crime rate (although, as I've pointed out elsewhere, it's a poor way to go about it), once you have embarked on a punitive-over-rehabilitative incarceration regime, you better *keep* those people locked up a long time, because their recidivism rate is going to be very very high. Indeed, the US system has almost entirely foregone rehabilitation; and with the virtual elimination of parole, you have eliminated a necessary transition assistance to people who - precisely because of their long sentences - are particularly maladapted to the society they re-enter upon completion of their sentences.

Posted by McKingford | April 23, 2008 10:13 PM

Dictatorships and especially communist regimes have extra-judicial punishments, killings, and imprisonments.

I once worked with a fellow from the Eastern Bloc. He told me that in his native country, any sentence over 10-15 years was essentially a death sentence. Violent offenders had a tendency to meet with unfortunate "accidents" well before their release dates. Our prison guards are probably pushing less convicts down the stairs.

Posted by matt foley | April 23, 2008 10:18 PM

Our prison guards are probably pushing less convicts down the stairs.

I've heard the exact same stories here.

Posted by Ed Marshall | April 23, 2008 10:22 PM

This point may have been made already, but China has more forms of incarceration than just 'prison'. Some people are 'hospitalized'.

Posted by Jon H | April 23, 2008 11:52 PM

Well if Maricopa County (Phoenix) Sheriff Joe Arpaio (for example) indiscriminately rounded up a neighborhood full of white people to catch illegal Canadian immigrants, there would be riots. Similarly, if laws were such that a quarter of white men ended up doing prison time, people would think there's something the heck wrong with the laws.

These policies, and others, are tolerated --indeed widely popular-- only insofar as they don't usually happen to white people.

Posted by Aatos | April 24, 2008 12:27 AM

I can only echo the sentiments of those who have come before me and made the obvious point here: the War on Black Men (aka, the War on Drugs) is the culprit here. Denying that is akin to denying that the sun sets in the West, or that George Bush is a pathological liar.

Posted by Jonesy | April 24, 2008 1:26 AM

There is one reason and one reason only for the large numbers of prisoners: money.

Money for prisons. Money for correctional staff salaries.

There is a "law enforcement complex" in this country just like there is a "military-industrial complex" in this country.

Here's an example. I was located at Oxford FCI, a medium level institution. Within a year or so at the time, my level would be such that I would be sent to a low security institution. Instead, they cooked up a reason to send me to Leavenworth Penitentiary, a maximum security facility. Why? Because they were trying to flood the penitentiaries with inmates to overcrowd them so they could go to Congress and demand billions more for building five new penitentiaries.

They also recalibrated the level system so that everybody in the system got boosted to a higher level. This also had the effect of overcrowding the facilities and reducing the number of inmates being released early for good behavior.

It's about MONEY, folks. Period. It has nothing whatsoever to do with crime, punishment or anything else but money and careers.

THAT is the nature of the state.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 24, 2008 4:41 AM

Richard: Amen, yet again. You said what I was trying to say but with far more candor, cogency and sardonic wit than I am able to muster. Thank you.

Posted by Jonesy | April 24, 2008 4:53 AM

About China:

Same old, same old: those trying to put the US in a light even worse than it already is in, are minimizing China's human rights abuses and forgetting that it's a totalitarian police state, those trying to 'defend' the US are playing down the injustice and racism of the US penal system and go around shouting from the rooftops "we're better than China, hooray".

This pattern applies to many such discussions (Cuba and health-care, Iran and democracy, you name it) and it never, ever leads to an interesting argument, because it's always just playing gotcha. Christ, I remember having exactly the same type of arguments with my friends in high-school, so unless the median age of commenters here is 16, I say it's time to move on.

Posted by novakant | April 24, 2008 5:57 AM

Maybe I missed it, but I was expecting someone to retort that given China's totalitarian system, all 1.X billion of them are prisoners. At least, you would have heard that in the good old days, before Our Nation's Conservatives learned to luuuuuuv thems some Chinese money and cheap wages.

Posted by El Cid | April 24, 2008 7:46 AM

"Christ, I remember having exactly the same type of arguments with my friends in high-school, so unless the median age of commenters here is 16, I say it's time to move on.

Posted by novakant | April 24, 2008 5:57 AM "

It is hard for me to see exactly how in a discussion of the glaring difference in penal rates between the US and every other country in the world one avoids the type of discussion you abhor. I think your reduction of the two sides has food for thought. But where do YOU take this discussion other than judiciously dismissing both sides?

Posted by della Rovere | April 24, 2008 8:50 AM

The Boston Review's got you covered:

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

and...

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison - Glen Loury

Posted by eriks | April 24, 2008 8:50 AM

"Murderers go free after just a few years in a lot of European countries."

"I don't think this is true, but even so: Every European country has a much lower murder rate than the U.S., so whatever they're doing must be working better than what we're doing."

These comments indicate a difference in the U.S. attitude in recent years - our judicial system seems increasingly focussed on revenge rather than results. Even if reasonable sentences result in less crime and less violence, as it ssems to do in Europe, we still want the satisfaction of imposing harsh punishments that make us feel good and supposedly give "closure" to crime victims (although in the case of drugs, there often are no victims).

Our attitude toward the death penalty is almost entirely based on this emotional feeling since there is no rational benefit to be derived from the death penalty that I can see. It doesn't deter murder, it's costly, and it harms our international image and our ability to cooperate internationally on criminal matters.

Posted by Virginia | April 24, 2008 9:28 AM

The USA has lots of laws available to break. We have lots of police (in the "good" areas) to enforce all those laws. We have a gigantic and relatively efficient criminal justice system to quickly process law breakers. We put people in jail when they are mentally ill or violate any of our many drug laws.

So, it is an efficient system whereby government officials make lots of actions illegal and other government officials arrest, prosecute and then guard you. . . Who says government does not work?

Posted by Wisconsin Reader | April 24, 2008 10:22 AM

After a few experiences with America's civil justice system, I'm just amazed that so few Americans kill each other or themselves. If my experiences are typical- and my lawyers assure me they are- a full half of our people live with no protection of law. Forget that will, trust, or guardianship you drew up- when you can't enforce it with your strong right arm, it becomes toilet paper.

In spite of that, almost all of us live almost all our lives in peace with almost all of our neighbors. (I'm excepting here the pathological criminals who run the society and spend most of their lives striving to get more.)

The so-called 'criminal justice system' is exactly what it appears to be- a way to keep black people from voting, a patronage system and money machine, and the enforcer for drug industry profits, dedicated to keeping the cheapest and safest analgesics and anti-depressants off the market.

Yesterday in Seattle police 'task forces' raided marijuana grow-ops, part of the complex process by which the Mexican mafia expands its holdings in the west every year.

Believe it, the next time some terrorist strikes, we'll hear the same old story of warnings ignored, but hey, at least we're safe from some fifth column of pot-smoking peaceniks. The military-industrial complex has never lost sight of who the real enemies are.

Posted by serial catowner | April 24, 2008 10:39 AM

Our attitude toward the death penalty is almost entirely based on this emotional feeling since there is no rational benefit to be derived from the death penalty that I can see. It doesn't deter murder, it's costly, and it harms our international image and our ability to cooperate internationally on criminal matters.

The evidence on the deterrent effect of the death penalty is mixed, and deterrence is only one justification anyway. Other justifications include incapacitation and retribution. Polls indicate that the death penalty has significant popular support in other countries, as well as the U.S. In countries where the death penalty has been abolished, that policy was more a matter of the will of political elites than the will of the people. And many people who oppose the death penalty in the abstract may feel differently when confronted with specific and particularly heinous crimes, such as the rape and brutal murder of a child. Many people believe that as a matter of justice the perpetrators of such terrible crimes deserve to lose their own lives. Dismissing that view as "emotional feeling" is unlikely to be persuasive to them. All beliefs about morality and justice could be characterized as "emotional feelings," but that doesn't mean they are somehow invalid or unjustified.

Posted by Mixner | April 24, 2008 2:23 PM

Search on iTunes for Glenn Loury's 2007 Tanner lecture "Ghettos, prisons and racial backlash". It's a very moving discussion of the issues of incarceration and race in America. Really, Matt, I thought you would have got how big a problem this is already.

Posted by Jonny G | April 24, 2008 3:28 PM

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the cost factor. last time I checked (30 years ago), it cost as much to keep someone in the state pen as it would to send him to Harvard. Maybe there has been better cost control for cons. But it must cost over $30,000 a year to incarcerate someone. You do the math.

Posted by Dick Mulliken | April 24, 2008 9:18 PM