Crime is a social construct shaped by laws (also constructed) and police actions (collectively an expression of the sociopolitical zeitgeist). If our crime rate is high, it’s because we’ve constructed crime in such a way as to make it so.
Crime does not require incarceration. There are huge swaths of history where basically the only thing that would get you thrown into prison was failure to pay your debts. Or having severe mental illness, but they didn’t usually call that prison. Granted, the state often killed people under those systems, but I think we can do better than that if we make it our goal.
Any given prison has a subset of these three purposes:
Protecting the prisoner and the public from each other
Rehabilitating the prisoner
Punishing the prisoner
The fewer purposes an institution tries to fulfill, the more successful it is likely to be. The current prison system in America is a muddled mess of all three. Just stop a random small group of friends and ask them what prisons are for; they’ll probably argue about it for a long time if experience is any judge. If we could pick an actual single purpose for the prison system, I’m betting it would be better than it is now just for that, and a large number of current prisoners would no longer qualify for the “program”.
Huh… unexpectedly detailed opinions on this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve heard that, but I’ve never come across any convincing evidence that it works. Rather the opposite if I remember correctly: people generally don’t seem to commit criminal actions out of disrespect for the law, which is the motivation a deterrent would be addressing most. I fully agree, though, that people would likely bring deterrence up if asked what prisons are for.
I see rehabilitating as the prison sentence interacting with the person in a way that they won’t commit crimes after getting out of prison.
When I speak about deterrence then I don’t mean the effects of a prison sentence on the further crimes that the person commits but the effects of possible getting a prison sentence.
For that deterrence the anticipated likelihood of getting caught seems to be more important then the penalty when being caught.
The NIJ paper (created under Loretta Lynch) first says:
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.
Then later it says:
Studies show that for most individuals convicted of a crime, short to moderate prison sentences may be a deterrent but longer prison terms produce only a limited deterrent effect.
It seems to me that US prisoners are very bad at rehabilitation but that people do not want to go to prison and will avoid actions that they think will likely bring them into prison.
people generally don’t seem to commit criminal actions out of disrespect for the law,
I’m not sure what you mean with that. If you mean that most of the time people don’t violate the law for the sake of violating the law, that’s likely true even when they are cases where it’s part of the point as a mafia member getting his buttons after killing a person and thus proving that they are not a cop.
I have heard an account of an ex-gangster person that they rather go out with Brass knuckles then with a knife because they are okay with the prison sentence they would get after fighting someone with the brass knuckes and not the sentence they would get for knifing someone.
I also heard accounts that the RICO acts worked to get mafioso to turn on the mafia because the mafioso would be okay with serving 8 years and then get out but not with serving 30 and thus the police got enough mafioso to turn to make a significant dent in the influence of the mafia. You can fill this either as deterrence or as a new class of creating bargaining chips.
Despite/due to mandatory minimum sentencing, US prisons are full of people who got arrested for (e.g.) having an ounce of pot in their car during a “routine” traffic stop (whatever that is). Just having a law on the books seems to do very little to change the behavior of individuals.
Now, people don’t just keep pot in their cars because they’re thinking something like “they’ll never catch me”, in conscious defiance of the rule of law. Nor are they especially worried about what would happen to them if they did get caught. The potheads I know usually turn out to have pot in their cars because they want to smoke/eat the stuff and their home is a long way from their dealer and they had to work that day and they forgot it was in there so it’s been there for a week and now the whole car smells like it. They don’t usually even seem to think about the legality of their hedonic pastimes at all; they just likes pot and know where to get it.
This behavior is not consistent with prison time being an effective deterrent.
If someone commits a crime because they forgot something that’s qualitatively different then crimes that do require more intent to be committed.
Just having a law on the books is not enough to deter crime. You actually need for the people who might commit the crime to expect that there’s a reasonable chance to be caught.
True enough, and there’s a slippery slope to a police state in that observation. That’s part of the problem, actually: some neighborhoods are much closer to being in that police state than others. Presumably, just as much extralegal activity happens in other places, but we (society) systematically fill jails from these heavily policed areas. Looking back to the original question, I’d say that this suggests crime does not fully “explain the exceptional US incarceration rate”. You need to write laws in a particular way and establish at least a partial police state to get that much of your population in jail.
I think your argument is interesting, but doesn’t make sense in the context of this article. The author is using homicide as their proxy for crime, and homicide is the prototypical example of something which is always a crime (although there’s some variation in who can get away with it and what the punishment is).
(Also while it’s true that homicide was historically not punished by prison very often, your second paragraph dances around the fact that that’s because the punishment was worse—death)
The work OP did in the update does use homicide as a proxy for crime, but still finds that the US is “an enormous outlier” in the world when comparing homicide rates with incarceration rates. We also see enormous imbalances along (socially constructed) racial lines with regard to arrest rates, convictions, and sentencing, implying that the state of our prisons has little to do with “crime rates” as such.
Crime is a social construct shaped by laws (also constructed) and police actions (collectively an expression of the sociopolitical zeitgeist). If our crime rate is high, it’s because we’ve constructed crime in such a way as to make it so.
Crime does not require incarceration. There are huge swaths of history where basically the only thing that would get you thrown into prison was failure to pay your debts. Or having severe mental illness, but they didn’t usually call that prison. Granted, the state often killed people under those systems, but I think we can do better than that if we make it our goal.
Any given prison has a subset of these three purposes:
Protecting the prisoner and the public from each other
Rehabilitating the prisoner
Punishing the prisoner
The fewer purposes an institution tries to fulfill, the more successful it is likely to be. The current prison system in America is a muddled mess of all three. Just stop a random small group of friends and ask them what prisons are for; they’ll probably argue about it for a long time if experience is any judge. If we could pick an actual single purpose for the prison system, I’m betting it would be better than it is now just for that, and a large number of current prisoners would no longer qualify for the “program”.
Huh… unexpectedly detailed opinions on this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There’s a fourth purpose with deterence.
I’ve heard that, but I’ve never come across any convincing evidence that it works. Rather the opposite if I remember correctly: people generally don’t seem to commit criminal actions out of disrespect for the law, which is the motivation a deterrent would be addressing most. I fully agree, though, that people would likely bring deterrence up if asked what prisons are for.
When looking at a source like https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence it seems that some people mean with deterence what I would mean with rehabilitating.
I see rehabilitating as the prison sentence interacting with the person in a way that they won’t commit crimes after getting out of prison.
When I speak about deterrence then I don’t mean the effects of a prison sentence on the further crimes that the person commits but the effects of possible getting a prison sentence.
For that deterrence the anticipated likelihood of getting caught seems to be more important then the penalty when being caught.
The NIJ paper (created under Loretta Lynch) first says:
Then later it says:
It seems to me that US prisoners are very bad at rehabilitation but that people do not want to go to prison and will avoid actions that they think will likely bring them into prison.
I’m not sure what you mean with that. If you mean that most of the time people don’t violate the law for the sake of violating the law, that’s likely true even when they are cases where it’s part of the point as a mafia member getting his buttons after killing a person and thus proving that they are not a cop.
I have heard an account of an ex-gangster person that they rather go out with Brass knuckles then with a knife because they are okay with the prison sentence they would get after fighting someone with the brass knuckes and not the sentence they would get for knifing someone.
I also heard accounts that the RICO acts worked to get mafioso to turn on the mafia because the mafioso would be okay with serving 8 years and then get out but not with serving 30 and thus the police got enough mafioso to turn to make a significant dent in the influence of the mafia. You can fill this either as deterrence or as a new class of creating bargaining chips.
Despite/due to mandatory minimum sentencing, US prisons are full of people who got arrested for (e.g.) having an ounce of pot in their car during a “routine” traffic stop (whatever that is). Just having a law on the books seems to do very little to change the behavior of individuals.
Now, people don’t just keep pot in their cars because they’re thinking something like “they’ll never catch me”, in conscious defiance of the rule of law. Nor are they especially worried about what would happen to them if they did get caught. The potheads I know usually turn out to have pot in their cars because they want to smoke/eat the stuff and their home is a long way from their dealer and they had to work that day and they forgot it was in there so it’s been there for a week and now the whole car smells like it. They don’t usually even seem to think about the legality of their hedonic pastimes at all; they just likes pot and know where to get it.
This behavior is not consistent with prison time being an effective deterrent.
If someone commits a crime because they forgot something that’s qualitatively different then crimes that do require more intent to be committed.
Just having a law on the books is not enough to deter crime. You actually need for the people who might commit the crime to expect that there’s a reasonable chance to be caught.
True enough, and there’s a slippery slope to a police state in that observation. That’s part of the problem, actually: some neighborhoods are much closer to being in that police state than others. Presumably, just as much extralegal activity happens in other places, but we (society) systematically fill jails from these heavily policed areas. Looking back to the original question, I’d say that this suggests crime does not fully “explain the exceptional US incarceration rate”. You need to write laws in a particular way and establish at least a partial police state to get that much of your population in jail.
I think your argument is interesting, but doesn’t make sense in the context of this article. The author is using homicide as their proxy for crime, and homicide is the prototypical example of something which is always a crime (although there’s some variation in who can get away with it and what the punishment is).
(Also while it’s true that homicide was historically not punished by prison very often, your second paragraph dances around the fact that that’s because the punishment was worse—death)
The work OP did in the update does use homicide as a proxy for crime, but still finds that the US is “an enormous outlier” in the world when comparing homicide rates with incarceration rates. We also see enormous imbalances along (socially constructed) racial lines with regard to arrest rates, convictions, and sentencing, implying that the state of our prisons has little to do with “crime rates” as such.