09 May The U.S. is Number One — in Imprisonment Rates
Andrew Sullivan notes here the release of the Kings College London annual report on rates of imprisonment around the world. Here is the link. Sullivan summarizes:
The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It’s pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S. The U.S. rate is 724 for every 100,000 people – up from 505 in 1992. Of major countries, the only close competitor is Russia with 581, and Cuba at 487. Iran and Israel, to give examples of countries with internal conflict, clock in at 206 and 209 respectively. Most major U.S. allies are in the 130 range or lower. I’m not sure what any of this proves. But this much we can say: the land of the free is also the land of the unfree. Millions of them. Texas, by the way, has an imprisonment rate of well over 1,000. There’s no country on the planet – no dictatorship on earth – as comfortable with locking people up as the state of Texas. The detention policies of the current administration may be more understandable in this context.
Do rates of imprisonment mean anything in measuring how free a society is? By the measure of political freedom and civil liberties put out by Freedom House, the USA is “free” but many of the other high-incarceration-rate nations (Iran, N. Korea, Cuba, Russia) rate as “not free.” The methodology of the Freedom House report takes into account equality before law and due process, but does not, as far as I know, take overall incarceration rates or disparate impact of the criminal justice system into account. I am with Sullivan in not knowing entirely what conclusions to draw from this statistical “achievement” of the United States. It is certainly clear that our culture tolerates having a much larger portion of our population imprisoned than any other democracy.
For now let me say thanks so much for ‘the link,’ as there are some valuable resources there in addition to the report. Grading papers at present (by the way, is it just me, or are students’ abilities and skills in spelling, grammar, and composition in precipituous decline?) so I’ll have to comment (thus everyone’s forewarned) later tomorrow: I won’t be bashful about either the causal variables at play here nor what conclusions one might draw.
of course it’s ‘precipitous’
U.S. Leads World In Imprisonment Rates
Kings College in London ran the numbers, and it seems that the United States has the highest imprisonment rate. Putting criminals in lockup on such a consistent and fair basis is probably cause for pride, but Andrew Sullivan is a…
Well, fatigue finds me leaving the comments and possible conclusions to others. I’ve hastily assembled a short bibliography on “criminal law, punishment and prisons” if anyone is interested. Just e-mail me and I’ll send it along. ‘Criminal conduct is no lower class monopoly, but is distributed throughout the social spectrum. Indeed, whilst “street crimes” and burglary attract the most attention, the less visible crimes of the powerful may be argued to produce significantly greater social harm, in terms of both monetary loss and of physical injury and death. But the same is not true of the distribution of punishment, which falls, overwhelmingly and systematically, on the poor and the disadvantaged. Discriminatory decision-making throughout the whole criminal justice system ensures that the socially advantaged are routinely filtered out: they are given the benefit of the doubt, or are defined as good risks, or simply have access to the best legal advice. Serious, deep-end punishments such as imprisonment are predominantly reserved for the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, and those who lack social support and personal assets. Increasingly, this class bias has taken on a racial complexion, as disadvantaged minority groups come to be massively over-represented in… Read more »
In the third set of comments from Garland above, the following sentence is corrected (‘by’ for ‘but’):
‘Crime is regarded as a generalized form of behaviour, routinely produced by the normal patterns of social and economic life in contemporary society.’