Another way out for them is that maybe all the countries with similar homicide rates should imprison people as much as the US, but their institutions don’t function well enough.
I’d be interested to see more analysis of this hypothesis. It seems quite likely to me that the US having an unusual combination of violence and competence is at least part of the explanation for the high incarceration rate. Would be curious to know how much.
Maybe a simple follow-up analysis would just be to check the ratios of homicides to people-in-prison-for-homicide for various countries (rather than comparing against incarceration rate more generally). Would be interesting to know on a crime-by-crime basis how the US compares to other countries.
I really want to try this...From a few minutes of googling it seems pretty hard to find this info for other countries. Will update if I’m able to cobble the data together.
I think that you would have to only consider countries that have similar suicide rate as well as conviction rate, as I’ve heard that some countries (Japan) rule every unsolved homicide as suicide to have a perfect police track record.
I am not qualified to estimate if it’s true but that’s something else to consider.
I’d be interested to see more analysis of this hypothesis. It seems quite likely to me that the US having an unusual combination of violence and competence is at least part of the explanation for the high incarceration rate. Would be curious to know how much.
Maybe a simple follow-up analysis would just be to check the ratios of homicides to people-in-prison-for-homicide for various countries (rather than comparing against incarceration rate more generally). Would be interesting to know on a crime-by-crime basis how the US compares to other countries.
I really want to try this...From a few minutes of googling it seems pretty hard to find this info for other countries. Will update if I’m able to cobble the data together.
I think that you would have to only consider countries that have similar suicide rate as well as conviction rate, as I’ve heard that some countries (Japan) rule every unsolved homicide as suicide to have a perfect police track record.
I am not qualified to estimate if it’s true but that’s something else to consider.