U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations
By Adam Liptak Published:
April 23, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/america/23prison.php
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population.
But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a
reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive
American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for
crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely
produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they
are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say
they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American
prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind
bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the
International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a
distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number
excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative
detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of
re-education through labor, which often singles out political
activists who have not committed crimes.)
To the dismay of many Democrats, nomination race continuesToxicity
alert has some in U.S. discarding plastic bottlesAdministrative perk,
or abuse of authority?San Marino, with a population of about 30,000,
is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the
center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from
the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the
incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every
100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans
is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is
Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have
much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's
is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the
American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has
helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of
factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher
levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial
turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American
temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays
a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly
— yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the
rest of the world is enormous and growing.
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its
prison systems. They came away impressed.
"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness
than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American
penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."
No more.
"Far from serving as a model for the world, contem****ary America is
viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at
Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no
European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to
manage prisons."
Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other
country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,"
Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The
Handbook of Crime and Punishment."
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies
center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United
States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to
follow what is a normal Western approach."
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925
to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per
100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in
the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as
comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails
was not collected until relatively recently.)
The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the
much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of
people in American prisons.
"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,"
said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a
research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate,
particularly with firearms, it's much higher."
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