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.
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.