Comments on: One Percent of All American Adults are Incarcerated

By: links for 2008-03-06 at Matthew Henty

links for 2008-03-06 at Matthew Henty — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:28:09 +0000

[...] Crooked Timber » » One Percent of All American Adults are Incarcerated (tags: inequality sociology prison) [...]

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:33:14 +0000

The government decides how many prisons to build, which (for the UK) sets the limit on the incarceration rate.

I apologize for suggesting that the debate has become utterly surreal. In Britain, at least (and probably in other jurisdictions, as well), the surreal has apparently become all too real.

Now, do you really believe that that’s how the incarceration rate should be determined—that is, that the number of prisons built, and hence the number of prisoners occupying them, should be decided without regard to, say, the number of crimes being committed, or the number of criminals being convicted?

By: SusanC

SusanC — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:34:16 +0000

I seem to remember someone from the UK’s Serious and Organized Crime Agency saying that given their estimates of the volume of the drugs trade, they would double the size of the UK prison population if they could apprehend and convict everyone who was guilty of drug offenses. (I wish I had a citation for this…) The point being that this would be undesirable even if it was possible.

Sure, soci-economic factors undoubtly have an effect. But also availaility of prison places, court time to deal with cases, police officers to investigate etc.

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:36:53 +0000

I for one am immensely relieved that only 1% of us have been naughty! I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

By: Hattie

Hattie — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:47:07 +0000

Stopping the war on drugs would sure make a difference. It would be something like getting rid of Prohibition.
But issues of public safety and concern for crime victims remain.

By: Ketzl Brame

Ketzl Brame — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:04:56 +0000

About the racial disparity in US incarceration rates: this report from Human Rights Watch contends that the War on Drugs is primarily responsible for the disparity and that it’s not due to blacks using drugs more than whites. “Although the proportion of all drug users who are black is generally in the range of 13 to 15 percent, blacks constitute 36 percent of arrests for drug possession. Blacks constitute 63 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons. In at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of white men. ”

A rational approach to drug interdiction, if we must try to enforce that policy, would surely involve GPS-equipped bracelets, remote monitoring and blood tests rather than incarceration. I don’t know why we don’t take that approach for everyone except for hardened violent criminals. We’ve got the technology, it’s cheaper than prison and it would allow convicts to still hold jobs and take care of their children. From all I’ve seen and read about prisons, most of them are seething cauldrons for inculcating already pissed-off people in violence, gangs, extremist ideologies and organized crime, universities for turning out hardened criminals. It has only the slightest deterrent effect.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:15:00 +0000

There’s certainly something to say for the law-enforcement practices and their efficiency. One could imagine that in Brazil, for example (more specifically Rio/St. Paulo metropolitan areas), incarceration rate would’ve been much higher had the police been more efficient. Nevertheless, for the most part it’s obviously socio-economic reasons.

By: Ned Baker

Ned Baker — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:05:18 +0000

I’m going to shamelessly comment without reading the previous 84 comments.

If anyone would actually read the Pew Center report, which is the source material for this recent statistic, they would see the whole story. While the United States is leading the world in prisoners per capita, the report also discusses a lot of successes that US states have had in solving this problem. It covers the maxing out of the prison population in Texas and what that state is doing to reduce its prisoner count (for practical reasons). The study mentions the priceless value of preschool as a means of reducing crime, improving quality of life, keeping citizens out of prison, and actually saving states money.

All of these achievements and valuable insights were right there in the Pew report. We can build a stronger society if we focus on being constructive instead of sensationalizing and dumbing down the news.

If I read another news article about this that just says “1/100” I’m gonna go nuts!

By: SusanC

SusanC — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:02:36 +0000

one would think that governments set incarceration rates the way they set tariff rates

The government decides how many prisons to build, which (for the UK) sets the limit on the incarceration rate. If the goverment builds more prisons, the police and courts will create more prisoners to fill them. (At least, at the margin. There is possibly some threshold beyond which prison capacity is no longer the limiting factor.)

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:36:14 +0000

Do you reckon there’s a plausible case to be made that incarceration rates in Europe are too low?

Why on earth do you think this would change my answer?

This whole discussion has gotten utterly surreal—one would think that governments set incarceration rates the way they set tariff rates. Incarceration rates are a function of crime rates, reporting rates, sentencing rules, policing practices, prosecutorial policies, parole decisions, and various other factors. Might those not play at least some role in determining whether a given incarceration rate is too low, too high, or just right?

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:28:38 +0000

“Any nation where you have to use people smugglers to leave is, in my book, a prision.”

Contra distinct to having your anal cavity, or its metaphoric equivalent, checked by medium-function social autistics because you’re traveling cross-country within a nation where you’re a citizen by birthright. A nation that until recently was loudly claiming to be the freest on earth.
Which yadda-yadda is met yadda-yaddda by the swinish reposte that bad people that hate us for our freedoms have made this necessary.
I’m afraid your analysis is flawed by willful, rationalized misprision, Bellmore.
The logic is essentially that because bad people have used their bad freedoms – to get on our planes, to move freely in our country – to hurt us, we’ll have to give up some of our good freedoms to get rid of those bad freedoms, possibly mostly all our freedoms, such as they are, until that happy day when all those bad freedom-using types have been stymied, or culled.
The same logic: horrible things are being done in private = bad privacy, so in order to get rid of that bad privacy, we’ll have to relinquish good privacy.
So in order to get rid of bad people…well you can see where that goes. Hasta la vista.
Speaking of Cuba: The revolution didn’t just replace a bunch of capitalist pigs with fatigue-wearing machos de la raza. It replaced scum-sucking American gangsters and their deeply embedded vice architectures, gangsters who were running a wide-open criminal enterprise using Cuban politicians as beards. The Fidelistas were quite naturally and legitimately concerned with retaliative reactions from those quarters. Then as the years rolled on those concerns became institutionalized, because the pressure from American stooge-politicians and those aforementioned gangsters never let up. This was all saturated in plain old capitalist thugocracy, such as removed Arbenz in Guatemala etc. Pretending that a teenager you’ve been beating the shit out of for years has suddenly gone loco and needs to be drugged and/or locked up because they’re rebelling and disrespectful of your authority – that’s one of the symptoms of psycho-parenting in action.
Not that the US was ever a parent to Cuba. But we were sort of the supposed kind of beacon of liberty to the world there for at least a little while. And Fidel’s Cuba began exactly in a desperate fight for liberty, against the corrupt and filthy social order they replaced. Context, Brett, it’s always really about context, not character. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.

By: steven crane

steven crane — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:11:36 +0000

pushing carts for three years brings you up to a whopping $8/hour, someguy. i know because i was there.

your entire #42 comment exhibits cluelessness.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:53:12 +0000

Yeah, traveling to Cuba is illegal in the US, but leaving the US isn’t. And you can be sure that if the Cuban government were stupid enough to offer cash grants to anybody who showed up on their short on a raft, we’d legalize rafting there, if only to cost Raul the money. ;)

All of which has little to do with our disturbingly high rate of incarceration, save only that, while we have a lot of problems here, I doubt we’re going to get good solutions from people who idolize dictators of ANY ideological persuasion.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:42:20 +0000

I’m not sure about that, it’s against the law to travel to Cuba. Same concept.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:30:18 +0000

“If the Cuban government tomorrow starts giving, say, 500K to every American who arrives there on a raft, the US will become – without doing anything new – one of those nations too.”

Bunk. If the Cuban government tomorrow started giving 500k to every American who arrivied on a raft, they’d be arriving on a raft after leaving America legally.