Incarceration Again

Its hard to know what to make of this.

One could quibble about adjustments for age, immigration. Or one could say its a function of putting blacks in jail for drug use. Or one could say less than 1% of the population everywhere in the world is incarcerated so who cares.

But the deeper question is about the optimal level of social integration.

Is a peaceful and happy society better or one with more conflict?

Peaceful you say, oh yea, wanna fight about it?

Jeebus. Please put the nasty states back in, ‘kay?

The two new graphs have discomfiting implications. If we consider them along with the NRA’s regular claim that many more murders would occur were it not for the second amendment. Given how astonishingly high the homicide rate is here, the incarceration rates and the NRA’s claim together suggest that, were it not for guns used defensively and for incarceration, we would have murder rates so staggering that it would need a log scale to get US figures on the same chart with other countries. From this perspective, there must be a level of demented, psychopathic tendencies bubling beneath these heavy restraints across society out of proportion to all other countries, a terrifying potential for mayhem that is only kept in check by the heavily armed citizenry and draconian sentences, which instead makes us look merely aberrant. Thus the gun lobby and the prison lobby (in the States, alas, there is one), for all their proclaimed patriotism, paint a picture of the patria that is far, far uglier than anything their opponents could dream.

different ethnic groups having different proclivities towards violence

I know that white people have been historically responsible for most of the world’s violence, but, really Brett, do liberals like you always have to bring this up?

Kieran – I agree your new graph is more striking. But…

I wouldn’t concede that the incarceration numbers only tell us “a little bit of the story”, except in the trivial sense that no graph tells us “the whole story”. They tell us something very important: the number of people in the country whom the state has deprived of their liberty. A high number ought to be a matter of concern and, on the face of it, regret, before we think about its causes and what good it has bought us.

(Granted I think that the comparison with truly miserable places such as failed states and any country which is itself a “kind of prison” wouldn’t tell us anything useful.)

As for the crime rate, which some commenters on your last thread thought was essential “context”, I don’t see why it should be, if the matter under consideration is liberty. It’s doubtful that many crimes reduce liberty at all (eg. possession of drugs, prostitution, and depending on your politics, property crime.) If the point is that a high crime rate leads people to be fearful, and this reduces their liberty then okay, but (i) this implicates you in a richer conception of liberty and (ii) the crime rate is not the only factor which can have this effect. Also some people (some libertarians!) have extremely negative and limited conceptions of liberty in which it is essentially a right held against the state and obviously for them no crime reduces liberty. It hardly needs to be said that if protection from crime is thought of as another good, distinct from liberty, ie. security, then it is highly controversial to suggest that one can be traded off against the other.

Shorter “engels”: Incarceration is a distinct and important evil, albeit a necessary one.

brett belmore says:

The US is far more ethnically diverse than the rest of those countries, after all.

Not so. Canada and Australia are both extremely ethnically diverse. Canada’s population is about 18% foreign born compared to 11% in the US. Canada also has very significant numbers of aboriginal and native-born visible minority citizens.

“Also some people (some libertarians!) have extremely negative and limited conceptions of liberty in which it is essentially a right held against the state and obviously for them no crime reduces liberty.”

On the contrary, crimes clearly CAN impact liberty, whether they’re committed by the private sector or government. But we do have a “negative and limited” conception of liberty, for a very good reason: Accepting the existance of “positive” rights has roughly the same effect on moral reasoning that allowing division by zero has in mathematics.

Certainly the practical results of more commitment to negative liberty than in Europe are evident: we get negative health, negative lifespan, negative job satisfaction, negative social mobility, and as we see here, negative freedom from incarceration. And who could be negative about all that?

16: I suspect lifestyle differences may account for that. Having access to the top available medical technology can only do so much, especially if you are trying to counteract decades of poor diet and exercise. Not that Britain doesn’t face some of the same challenges….

Brett: Your understanding of moral reasoning is as impressive as your grasp of ehtnic diversity in Canada and Australia. Look at the world around you. Now try it again without sneering and squinting your eyes. You’ll see that on the whole positive rights are like negative ones. If a society agrees to have them, they have them. If it doesn’t, they don’t. Just because the US is big doesn’t mean that it’s a model for the rest of the world. Other societies have very succesfully agreed on positive rights.

(As I think Alesina et al argue in their looks at differences in US v European conceptions of welfare, some of this may have to do with the timing of hte US consitution. It was written in – and remains relatively unchanged from – a time when civil and property rights were at the fore, and positive social rights were relatively unknown. The post-WWII European welfare state settlements, however, came at a time when social rights were much more a part of national discourses. And so, to various degrees in various nations, positive rights became part of the framework. And none of the nations with lots of positive rights have had a moral collapse. Really. In fact, the crime and incarceration figures we’ve been looking at might indicate quite the opposite.)

Re 16 and 17: I’m sure i saw a study a couple of years ago saying that the average 85-year-old Jamaican has a longer remaining life span than the average 85-year-old American, due to lifestyle. Jamaicans of that age still walk, apparently. Silly people. Would be interesting to see if, within a nation such as the UK, elderly urban dwellers have better health than elderly suburbanites. Diets would probably be very similar, but urbanites tend to walk more, I think.

Connect the dots.

Donald Johnson points out that the Southern part of the US has a traditionally more violent culture.

Abb1 asks what is going on with the lack of violence in Canada.

Looks like there’s a north-south gradient, folks.

So Kieran–your next project is to break out US rates by **latitude**. What percentage of bottom-rim states (Texas, Alabama, Florida etc.) is in jail, versus what percentage of top-rim states (Washington, Minnesota, Maine, etc.)?

Of course it’s hard because some Northern states ship their prison populations south (e.g. Connecticut was shipping its prisoners to cheaper incarceration in Virgina for a while–cruel and unusual punishment if anything is).

But that’s the kind of detangling project that a guy like you would love.

So I blame it on latitude. And latitude is a proxy for…? Beats me.

Looking at the two graphs, the simplest explanation is:

1. rate of death due to assault tracks handgun availablity (see, e.g., UK vs Switzerland).

2. incarceration rates track rate of death due to assault (perhaps with some kind of biasing feature for a free and crime-oriented media).

Do the figures for rate of ‘death due to assault’ include assaults in prison?

After all, the French, as is well known, have their own racial problems […] complicated, in France, not in the US, by their status as recent immigrants, religio-cultural differences etc.

I think there’s a flipside to this as well. What separates the US from other high immigrant nations is that in the US, there was extensive diversity before there was an extensive welfare state, whereas in Canada, Sweden, France, et al, the diversity is coming after the welfare state was already well-established. Alesina and others (including most famously in the UK, David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect) argue that this will lead to European countries becoming more like the US – ie less supportive of a strong welfare state.

As you imply, perhaps the US has dealt with diversity by establishing an incarceration state rather than a strong welfare state. I can’t see that happening in other developed nations as they negotiate rising diversity, though. Peter Taylor-Gooby argues that the presence of a politically powerful left in Europe means that it’ll be much harder to dismantle welfare provision in France etc than it was to forestall similar provision in the US. (There is loads of evidence that anti-welfare state American politicians used racial diversity as in their fight to keep the welfare state small.) And even in the UK, LSE criminoligist Tim Newburn argues convincingly that while New Labour has very willingly adopted the incarceration rhetoric of the US, when push has come to shove, it hasn’t been nearly so eager to adopt the reality (though numbers have gone up, I think).

“Negative rights imply that you are entitled to not having X done to you while positive rights entail that you are entitled to have X done to/for you. The difference is the mere presence or absence of a ~ ( tilde).”

Surely there is a fundamental difference between the rule “stay out” and the rule “stay in”: with respect to buildings, “stay out” corresponds to no-trespass, while “stay in” corresponds to imprisonment. The difference is a negation, but there is nothing “mere” about it.

The difference between negative and positive rights is roughly the difference between keeping and taking — again generally regarded as rather different.

Perhaps positive “rights” should, for clarity, be called something else. There is no need for everything good to be called “a right”.

“1. rate of death due to assault tracks handgun availablity (see, e.g., UK vs Switzerland).”

And then you get into inter-state comparisions here, and that falls apart.

I think we’d go a LONG way towards erasing that differential, were we to abandon this lunatic “war on drugs”, and modify our welfare systems so that they stop creating urban ghettos.

Unfortunately, we’ve been paying people to stay in places where their long term prospects for them OR their children ever becoming productive and self supporting are poor at best. I’d propose making public assistance, beyond a short stint, only available conditional on moving to someplace with a lower than average unemployment rate. Paying people to stay in an economically depressed area may make sense to the politicians ruling that area, who don’t want their people leaving, but it doesn’t make sense for the people. All it does is encourage the creation of a culture of poverty.

“Perhaps positive “rights” should, for clarity, be called something else. There is no need for everything good to be called “a right”.”

That’s an excellent idea. I think the only reason people got to calling these things “rights”, is that they wanted to apply the existing understanding that you were obligated to respect rights. It started out as a rhetorical ploy, in other words, and only later evolved into a philosophical mistake.

Two simple explanations for this.

First, when segregation was ended, new laws were enacted, keeping black men in jail and depriving them of the franchise.

Second, for the poor, there is no recourse to law. If you have ever been involved with the civil justice system, you know what I’m saying. (And just stuff it, Brett- like you would know.)

Society can only monopolize the use of violence if people have access to the law. With about a quarter to a third of us being too poor to go to court when we’re wronged, other ‘stuff’ is going to happen.

Of course, you would hardly ever need to go to law if you had a strong union, universal health care, and equal access to contract law. (That’s ‘gay marriage’ in the common tongue.)

‘Nuff said.

Albion’s Seed: well, the idea that southern state culture is based on emigration from Britain is hardly new – Hunter S. Thompson was a strong supporter (not to mention a human data point himself), but he got it from Nelson Algren’s Linkhorns. It has superficial attractions, but the data contradicts it.

Not only is the UK on the line of best fit, it’s one of the lowest. And the nations in the group whose dominant narrative comes from British emigration – Canada and Australia – may be at the high end of the pack, but they are still spectacularly lower than the US. Despite being even closer to that model than the UK or even the US, they are still in the “normal” group.

dd,

“that puts the rate of white incarceration at a mere double the rate of the next contender.”

I’d say that’s enough to say that the US would be “streets ahead” even if there was no disproportion between white and other incarceration rates.

Brett,

“Negative rights can be entirely fulfilled, simply by leaving you the heck alone. Respecting one negative right does not interfere with respecting another. On the contrary, respecting one negative right usually assists in respecting others.

Positive rights, on the other hand, entail obligations on the part of other people to act.”

It seems somewhat eccentric given the particular subject of this thread to say that negative rights can be respected without violating other negative rights. Respected, perhaps, but not enforced. Do citizens not have a positive right to have their negative rights protected, thus placing obligations on others, via the state? Would we say that a state that made no effort to do so was respecting the rights of its citizens? It seems that the right not to be killed may clash with the right not to be imprisoned – two forms of the right to be left “the heck alone”.

“Then I feel compelled to observe that you are an anarchist, not a libertarian, as you do not believe in the positive right to property ownership.”

Let’s put it another way: a right to be left the heck alone would not be the same thing as a right to have your stuff left the heck alone, and indeed the two would conflict as soon as anyone thought that they liked the look of some of your stuff, and fancied walking off with it.

…As for US/Canada comparisons, the attempts at broad surveys I’ve seen (such as the World Values Survey) suggest to me that the differences in individual mores and opinions between the US (considered as a whole) and Canada are actually not that large. There’s a larger gap between Canada and the UK, which is culturally more like a Continental European country: if I recall correctly, people in the UK have more social-democratic, culturally liberal/rationalist attitudes about things, though not as much so as on the continent. (Australia was even more like the US.)

Now, it’s possible that if they broke out the Southeastern US as a separate region, they might get very different answers. But the similarities between the US, Canada and Australia suggest to me that the greater levels of violent crime and incarceration here may have more to do with policy than with some ineradicable difference in the American soul.

Well, a Canadian friend tells me gay people have been getting married in Canada for years. And he’s enjoying that de facto legalization thing.

So you can wonder- would enacting reasonable laws have anything to do with decreasing violence?

The bottom line for the out-of-whack incarceration rate and crime rate is the American notion that preventative measures are impractical, ineffective and inefficient. You don’t give pain-killers until patients are howling in agony; you don’t give aid until people are destitute, and then as little as possible. You don’t engage in social engineering to promote productivity and social harmony–you lock up the unproductive and disruptive.

You can show all the data you like, show the correlation between income gaps and the absence of a decent welfare state but no one is going to believe it because they’re convinced that a certain percentage of the population, most of them black, will inevitably be unproductive and disruptive, and that projects to try to fix that are sentimental, unrealistic and wasteful–money down the toilet. You just wait until they, inevitably, commit some crime–and anything will do–and they lock them up.

The psychological appeal is easy to see. Prevention doesn’t produce any dramatic, immediate, visible results. Playing cops and robbers is much more fun and throwing people in jail provides catharsis and a sense of accomplishment–bigger emotional bank for the buck than all those wimpy little social programs.

Logicguru’s post suggests to me another way the rhetoric of negative liberty reinforces the problem. It sets up for this narrative: “We left them free to do anything they wanted, not tied to anyone’s apron strings, no comissars forcing them to be this or that, and the ungrateful bastards turned around and became criminals.” Having disavowed initial responsibility for our fellow citizens, there’s room for extra fury later when they refuse to levitate themselves to prosperity.

I think you can better understand the U.S. murder rate if you look outside the “first world” (rich democratic states). South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, for example, have more murders than the U.S., I believe.

I don’t think “ethnic diversity,” per se, has anything to do with the crime rate, but a legacy of slavery and segregation might be key.

“The US is far more ethnically diverse than the rest of those countries, after all.”

I’m not sure that this is true. France has Basques, Bretons, Alsatians, Arabs and other non-white colonials, and old refugee populations (e.g. from Russia or Poland). Spain has a somewhat similiar diversity.

What Brett means is that America has more blacks. (Hawaii is the most racially diverse US state, without a very high murder rate.

I think that the racist heritage of slavery (and the frontier, to a degree) is the answer, and a lot of the rest derives from that. Hostility to the welfare state and support for the drug war often have a racial ground (“welfare queens” and “crack peddlers” are automaticaly assumed to be black). The emphasis on armed self-defense does too.

The “Albion” book, as I’ve seen it paraphrased, is misleading because it ascribes differences to preexisting British difference. Certain British groups gravitate to the slave areas and to the frontier, but the American experience was decisive.

Raymond Gastil’s “Cultural Regions of the United States” finds that white-on-white murder rates correlate closely with “degree of Southernness” — highest in the South, and lowest in New England and the Upper Midwest. (Because of migration patterns, Northern places like Alaska, Ohio, and Wyoming have an intermediate degree of Southernness.)

Z, what you say strikes me as very interesting, but I would like to know more. When you speak of ethnic diversity in late 19th century France, are you speaking of visible minority ethnic groups, which is what recent scholars of the effects of diversity on welfare states (eg Banting, Kymlicka, Alesina, Taylor-Gooby) tend to focus on? For instance, Sweden has loads of Finns (something like 3.5% of the population, I think), but their presence in the country is thought to have far less potential effect on social solidarity than middle eastern immigration might.

What was the nature of the ehtnic diversity in France at the time you discuss? Was it rich in clearly visible minorities, or are we talking lots of, for instance, Jews and Poles and Italians? Because I think that might make a difference. (Please note, I’m not trying to impugn what you’re saying; i’m genuinely trying to learn more.)

I also wonder if you think that France’s high level of early diversity played a role in the country’s emphasis on solidarity. Do you know anything about this?

Cheers

Reuben, I think the answers to some of your questions depend on what you call a “visible” minority. If I recollect correctly (I don’t have Noiriel books at hand), immigrants in France in the 1900s were predominantly Italians, Poles and Belgians. Were they visible in the sense of a different color? Mostly no. Were they visible in the sense of a different culture, language and religion? Most certaily yes (I insist on religion because at that time France was very much concerned about questions of separation of church and state so that Poles and Italians were seen by some secularists as a real menace to the French identity due to their fervor). Especially as some cities had an imigrant population of over 50%.

As to the question of diversity and solidarity as you asked it, Reuben, this is exactly the theoretical question Noiriel asks in one of his major work (State, Nation, Immigration). His hypothesis is that individuals identifying themselves as citizen of a particular state or nation is a part of a large sociological movement in which individuals participate mostly because it is in their interest to do so, especially because they can then benefit from social policies. So, basically, yes, Noiriel thinks social policies are very much linked to the construction of national identity.

For the record, though, I’d say that France (alleged) emphasis on solidarity does not ultimately stem from its diversity. Other factors seem more important to me.

I am no expert of those questions and I’m sure you are way more knowledgeable about them than me Reuben, but same as abb1, I guess, if you are interested in a further discussion, send me an e-mail and I’ll do my best to provide you some links or literature.

I’m sort of sick of the word “diversity”. This almost always means “black Americans, etc.” Ex-slaves. France has no ex-slaves, but lots of “diversity”, if that word means anything.

The “diversity” of the US is different not just because our minorities are different-colored than we are (“visible”). In N. Ireland and Serbo-Croatia physically virtually identical populations murder one another. It’s history. During most of American history black Americans had no rights, and before 1965 or so they didn’t have many. Historical enmity is what it was.

Somewhat similiarly with Native Americans and Mexicans, both initially involuntary Americans.

Anyone find explanations by David Cole, Joel Dyer, Joy James, Marc Mauer, Christian Parenti, or other, like, experts, you know, compelling? I mean, it’s not like anyone has written books on this subject or that it’s news to anyone who’s been paying attention.

Any explanation of America’s unusually high incarceration rates can not be separated from the racial composition of its prisons.

You think the racial composition is significant (and I’m sure it is, in a sense), but what about the social-status (class) composition? What percentage of federal and state prisoners come from the bottom 13% of income earners?

A while ago Matthew Yglesias posted something that I think was pretty insightful: he said that if you actually looked at the criminal justice system in action, the main thing driving incarceration rates was how many prison cells there were. If the cells were there, judges and lawmakers would find ways to put people in them; if not, they’d find ways around it.

So maybe part of it is that we just built too many prisons.

36 I have worse data on Australia but it still seems to have a somewhat higher rate of “white” immigration compared to Canada or the US. Again if anyone has good numbers I’d be interested to see them, though I don’t know that this by itself explains much about the issue in question.

One thing mentioned in the media here in NZ about AU immigration is that a large number of the ‘foreign-born’ population are from the UK and NZ. So it is a poor measure of diversity.

John Emerson,

Why are Americans racist?

Accepting the existance of “positive” rights has roughly the same effect on moral reasoning that allowing division by zero has in mathematics.

Yep; leads to the invention of L’Hospital (‘s Rule), in which we treat both the upper and the lower (class). badoomp-ching.

Americans are racist because of the heritage of slavery, the Indian Wars, and the Mexican War. These are all relatively recent realities in historical time (less than 175 years ago).

By contrast, the subjugation of the Welsh, the Scots, and the Bretons took place gradually over a period of centuries much longer ago, and as I understand many of the subjugated peoples were granted full participation once they accepted defeat.

On the other hand, Basque and Catalan autonomy in Spain, and Irish autonomy in Northern Ireland, still remain live issues.

In none of these cases is visible race a real factor. Americans are probably not more racist than others of W. European descent. (Look at the cases of the aborigines in Africa, or the Turks in Germany. The Turks are even white). But as it happens, whatever racism there originally was was exacerbated by the fact that our victims in the XIXc and before were mostly non-white.

The Chinese and Japanese cases are a good test. They are voluntary Americans, not victims of conquest, and while they suffered legal disabilities and savage violence at times, ultimately they became mostly accepted as Americans (as did Jews). There is still a lot of residual anti-Asian racism, but it’s much milder than racism against historical victims.

Anti-Indian racism is mild to nonexistent in many places, but becomes intense near reservations and in urban neighborhoods where Indians are common.

Kieran, I accuse you of cherry-picking data because you hate America! You say you are looking at “basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies” but the facts are obviously biased. Where is Finland, say? And Iceland? And Belgium? And those notoriously violent Luxembourgians?

Once again, we see how liberals try to make America look bad, first by including “not exactly model states” and now by excluding data…

Quo Vadis: those are two good, related questions, but I don’t see that yours is better.

Very few incarcerations indeed are for murder.

John Emerson,

If I understand correctly, your model of racism in the US is primarily economic. In other words, in terms of labor (slavery) or land ( Indian and Mexican wars) racism was part of what helped one group ( the “whites”) to get stuff from the others ( the “blacks” and the “browns”) .

Seems roughly plausible but i’m not sure it captures all teh ups and downs in racism, particularly the racist association of African Americans with crime. This has hardly been a constant pattern from the slavery days to today. For example, is you look at the records of the Eugenics movement at Cold Springs harbor from the early 20th century, the negro was not at all the focus of degneracy – the Irish and the Eastern Europeans are the targeted groups.

Now again this could be a labor cost induced racism, but doesn’t seem explained by a grand “slavery and conquest” narrative.

I’m very much of the opinion that these graphs simply reflect the vast productivity gap between the USA and the rest of the world. The American penal system is clearly hugely more efficient in terms of output. Likewise, American violent assaulters are performing at a spectacularly greater rate than their un-American comparators.

Oh, and just to note in passing that if you turn the graph on its side (and reflect it), it’s very much a hockey-stick graph.

Let’s get a little perspective:

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the prison population, or more than 2 million of eight million imprisoned worldwide.

About 1,222,000 of 1,983,000 incarcerated in 2000 are nonviolent, or 61.6%, not exactly a winning argument for the idea we are protecting society from the “worst” offenders.
(see:http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/punishing/punishing.html)

Remember also, many crimes defined as violent, may be bar fights, domestic disputes and DUI collisions—bad events perhaps, but not necessarily the work of career criminals.

An entrenched corrections industry, replete with glitzy Las Vegas conventions and lobbyists are a driving force in criminal justice expenditures and policy, if you can call lining your pockets a policy. And the conviction-driven prosecutors armed with mandatory sentencing who have taken judicial discretion away from the courts.
(see: Paul Craig Roberts, Presumed guilty, http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12212005.html)

Releasing millions of americans back into their communities (96% of all prisoners are released), saddled with lifelong “felonies” that bar them from meaningful employment, six million children living as orphans of the prison boom, should not nake any of us feel safer.

Tonight on one of those interminable “cop” shows, I watched Las Vegas police incarcerate a women for stealing two packages of steak. She had a six month old child in the car, and they made clear the child would be placed in state custody, and probably into the foster care system, since she had no relatives to care for it. They had no choice either.

That should really work out well. Nice use of public resources.