Inmate Count in US Dwarfs Other Nations’
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes - from writing bad checks to using drugs - that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges - many of whom are elected, another American anomaly - yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”
Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.
But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.
Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”
“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”
The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.
“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”
French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.
“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy - just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”
© 2008 The New York Times
Not to worry, really your incarceration rate is low. As long as your rightwingnuts continue to proclaim that countries like Cuba and China are prisons for their entire populations…
Good article. What a harsh country we live in. One thing not mentioned -
Our main approach to mental and emotional illness among the poor and working class is prison. Some self-treat for depression and anxiety with street drugs, which can get them tangled with the law.
The attitudes of extreme individualism and “self-reliance” make mental illness the problem of the sick person. There is little safety net and it is often too complicated for those who are not well to begin with.
These illnesses can make it hard to keep a job and to maintain family relationships and friendships, starting a downward spiral of isolation and increasing the chances the person will commit crimes to get money. Mental illness is not treated among the poor until they commit a crime. Then they go to jail.
BTW - I think marijuana use is less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol and should be legal. That would free police (many of whom use it) from spending valuable time on this non-issue and keep users and dealers out of the prisons.
I wonder how full the Halliburton camps will be in the near future…
I wonder why they left out one of the biggest reasons our prison population has exploded - prisons for profit. Outsourced prisons assume a need for prisoners. I wonder if Mukasey owns stock in a prison for profit operation? It would seem probably so.
Ah, yes, and the entire administration and many of their strident supporters probably own stock in Haliburton or more precisely, KBR.
There is no mention in this article of how the process of privatization of the penitentiary/jail/criminal justice system is affecting the rate of incarceration as well as the length of prison terms. We need both, longitudinal and comparative studies of the effects of privatization.
I guess that the ’specialists’ here and abroad do not know what democracy is or the difference between a true democratic republic and a plutocracy or a corporatocracy.
Some may say that if we allow people to do drugs without locking them up, they’ll ruin their lives with drugs. Well I say it’s better to ruin their lives with prison. Unless they are rich, right wing radio commentators, then it’s okay.
Some people say drugs aren’t harmful, but look what happened to one high-profile drug user: He lost his hearing. And this is a person who works on the radio, where hearing is crucial.
Some say that drug addicts need treatment. What they need is to just suck it up and stop. Like Rush Limbaugh. Now he only uses legal prescription drugs, just like Elvis.
So, you should either stop doing drugs or become a wealthy Republican supporter or find a friendly physician or go to jail.
And when the American fascists invade and occupy other countries they build more prisons.
Nothing has been right in this country for a while now. These statistics say 2 things-either Americans are just more “criminally inclined,” or people are being jailed unfairly.
Since we’re currently functioning under the politically conservative “prison for profit” system brought to us by our friends from the GOP, I’m going to go with “unfair.”
Nothing matters to republicans but money.
They will destroy our country, and our military for war profits.
They will abandon people on home-soil, to save a buck.
They will destroy our economy, for bigger and better corporate and industry profits. I have never seen a more money hungry bunch in my life.
They’d actually scare you. Everything has been sacrificed to the dollar-bill; including what’s left of their political ideology.
What’s ironic is the devaluation of the dollar-bill. Handwritings’s on the wall. They’re going to lose it all-for money. But when you’re that greedy-what can I say?
‘Hocus Pocus’ just like magic, Bush is starting a ‘drawdown’ of American prisons by patriotizing the inmates with American Flag pins and sending them off with guns to Iraq - for a lifetime. What will the in-Correction Corporation of America do to Stoploss?
Ah, remember the ole 5 years to life for sales of marijuana I can see some corporate executive totally up the money he could make on one kid making a stupid mistake. All for the betterment of society…
America has become a backwater despotry.
I recently became aware of a man who is in prison for pouring concrete driveways without a contractor’s license.
We have tolerated “business” people protecting themselves from competition in a very repressive way.
That aside, we probably have a large prison population in part also due to more decades of TV shows and movies showing “ideas” for crimes than have yet played in many other nations. We may have all watched everything from Perry Mason to The Sopranos a little too much and too long.
You can bet that anyone living in any country currently occupied by the US military believes that EVERYONE in the USA should be locked up.
Other potential motivations for a higher incarceration rate:
1. Cheap labor. State governmnents can benefit from prison labor which is even cheaper than labor fees for undocumented immigrants.
2. Voter suppression. Felons can’t vote. The class that makes the laws and wants to keep power also wants to strip the lower classes, the inarcerated classes, from political influence.
“Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.”
is it just me or does this analysis seem to avoid some very important issues? Racial profiling, police and judicial racism, historical and current disproportionate sentencing of people of color. This “phenomenon” is no coincidence. The purpose of the American Justice system is to protect the rich from the poor, the powerful from the powerless; maintaining slavery-era domination.
What a crock - Democracy is NOT the reason for our high incarceration levels — it’s our capitalist fascism. Starve the lower classes of education, health care and a basic standard of living and deal with the resulting “crimes of poverty” by warehousing the poor in private, corporate-run prisons — and stick the working class with the bill.
I live in a small town. A whole city block in the middle of downtown was condemned including an old style newspaper, an office building, a restaurant, a small park, and three houses.
In their place is a big, ugly, county jail. The contiguous blocks are blighted with the county governmental center and the courthouse.
These are the first three buildings everyone must pass to get to downtown which consists of small shops and a small library.
There is no question about the priorities of the county I live in.
Runnin’ and buildin’ prisons is big business.
The more folks are put in jail, the better it is for business. Growth in the prison byz basically means growth of the prison population.
In order to keep our jails gettin’ more customers, let’s encourage folks to have as many kids as possible.
We prison managers and CEOs, we’z all pro life. That’s right, for pro life is good for the prison byz, and yeah for the military byz, like the ammo byz and stuff.
And byz is good for America.
God bless America.
Ding…..ding……ding more corporate welfare..give funeocons a prize!
Mission accomplished by the guy who would’ve been among the prisoners if he wasn’t stinking filthy rich! Who says Amerka don’t make anything anymore!
Well at least they get better healthcare in prison than the majority of Americans that are working 3 jobs just to keep the house they live in. Who is realy the prisoner here.
The War on Drugs is a war on the impoverished and indigent. U.S. prisons are warehouses for low-skilled laboring units. When the economy is doing well legitimate work opportunities abound; when the economy hits a recession or depression lay-offs occur, belts tighten, and people go into survival mode attempting to cope with the changing politico-economic landscape.
Private prisons have a vested interest in the classification of illicit behaviors and increased criminalization of the aforementioned. The Haves are winning the war on the Have-Nots.
Pennsylvanians aren’t the only bitter ones out there. I live in rural Alaska , on Amerika’s political-economic periphery, and I too, am really fucking bitter.
The more Americans locked up the better as far as I’m concerned then everybody else can live in peace without fear of some twat in the US organising a 9/11 and blaming some other country as a pretext to steal and murder.
For years now the world has had to put up with America and its desire, nay obsession with religion and greed, the American dream, what is it, to own the world. If so give up because most of the rest of the world is much smarter than Americans. If you want to see a really smart country in action go to Sweden or Cuba where the population are encouraged to work together for the common good.
A dog eat dog society is bound to fail because it produces top dogs at the expense of all the other dogs so only a few dogs live in extreme luxury. What it produces is a country of slaves constantly striving to keep their heads above water but being kept under by the few. The ones who rebel end up incarcerated or even murdered for their audacity.
Europe had the system for years until the people got wise and cut of the Kings heads along with their sycophants. The sycophants in America are the Congress and Senate, they do the Kings bidding.
I’ll toss in my two cents worth, having spent time in jails and a prison.
There are quite a few prisoners that find life is a lot easier in prison. You put up with some abuse, etc…but if you are unemployable and can’t afford to live as others do, jail is a great option - especially when it is cold outside.
I know many who will puposely get arrested when finacial times have become too difficult. In jail, there are no bills to pay, medical insurence, and on and on.
In fact, many prisoner’s best friends are in jail with them. You aren’t free but you are free from having to live life in these difficult times or if you have already been institutionalized.
When many are re-arrested, for quite a few it is like a homecoming.
Just want to turn the issue on its head.
pistonbroke: The wrong people are locked up. It won’t help the world.
hybridoma2001: Sad that prison is considered a good life option. There is an O’Henry story about that - someone who keeps trying to get back in jail to get out of the cold.
The main reason behind the high prison population in the US, is clearly US drug policy. In an effort to be “tough” the legislators in the US have pushed through many well intentioned for the most part, but poorly thought out laws. Mandatory minimums is one example, they were put in place because of a percieved problem of judges not handing out appropriate length sentences to drug dealers.
While this on the surface is an acceptable policy goal the problem is in application these laws are terrible. The force non-violent drug offenders into plea agreements that result in prison time, because if they don’t plea and they get found guilty they are facing serious time. So they pick to do 18 months instead of 5 years.
Other well intentioned laws like felony-murder statutes cause some of the same problems, by inflating sentences they force more jail time resulting plea bargains. Felony murder statutes are rooted in common law, but their application in the US is flawed.
I stress the effect on plea bargaining position, because statistically most people in prison are their because of a plea bargain, most cases don’t go to a full trial. By making penalties so severe and out of proportion to the crime often you give the prosecutor a very strong bargaining position which they can exploit to force a plea.
and your paying for all of it! wake up! it’s time to either shit, or get off the pot…put up..or shut up!…either pay for the out of control “friendly fascism” .the corporate fascist theocracy…or…don’t bother and..well..maybe you’ll get a visitor on visitng day..then again..maybe you wont..
better to live on your feet, than to die on your knees…most Americans..obviously believe the opposite…and pay for the right to do so..to die on their knees…
lot’s o luck..
hybridoma2001 said: “I know many who will puposely get arrested when finacial times have become too difficult. In jail, there are no bills to pay, medical insurence, and on and on.
In fact, many prisoner’s best friends are in jail with them. You aren’t free but you are free from having to live life in these difficult times or if you have already been institutionalized.
When many are re-arrested, for quite a few it is like a homecomin”
I hear what you’re saying. I think this is due to the fact that there is no real assistance for ‘felons’ upon their release. They’re thrown back out into the dog-eat-dog society with no money, no support and the stigma of being an ‘ex-con’ hanging over them. They’ve been dehumanized to the point where I would suspect they start to believe they are less than human… Therefore, the only society they can fit into, is the inmate society. It’s a sad statement at the complete lack of compassion in American society.
The article omits discussing the high lead blood level of most criminals and how it affects IQ.
Excerpt:
Today one in nine children under the age of six is said to have unacceptably high blood lead levels (14) even though lead paint was banned in 1978 (and hadn’t been used extensively since the 1950’s!) Lead in gasoline has been phased out, and lead solder hasn’t been permitted on copper tubing since 1986 (eight years ago.) The EPA says that lead stabilizes in five years. So except for fluoride use, any pipes, whether of lead or lead-soldered, should not now be hazardous. The most revealing statistics, though, are the high blood lead levels in 400,000 newborns each year. Newsweek in its article on lead and the threat to children (15) said that pregnant women passed this toxic substance to their unborn children by eating, drinking, or breathing it. http://www.sonic.net/~kryptox/environ/lead/lead.htm
Another excerpt from a study titled ‘Very Low Lead Levels Linked With IQ Deficits’:
…the five-year study found that children who have blood lead concentration lower than 10 micrograms per deciliter suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/04/030417080210.htm
funeocons got it right as far as I’m concerned:
funeocons April 23rd, 2008 8:35 pm What a crock -Democracy is NOT the reason for our high incarceration levels — it’s our capitalist fascism. Starve the lower classes of education, health care and a basic standard of living and deal with the resulting “crimes of poverty” by warehousing the poor in private, corporate-run prisons — and stick the working class with the bill.
The article served as a reminder of that taboo subject of fluoridation.