Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'

Source: The New York Times, Author Adam Liptak
Date: 2008/04/23

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.)

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, contemporary America is viewed
with horror," James Q. 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 H. 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."

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is
still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has
relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery
rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely
to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences.
The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that
incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr.
Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison
sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000
people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are
almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the
war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Ms. Stern of King's College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people
involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for
illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael
B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of
people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of
them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison
policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the
United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled
based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries
would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so
the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison,
according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in
England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the
American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be
imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a
particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and
Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons,
and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison
rates.

"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that
makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,"
Mr. Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative
Perspective."

"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political
cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European
countries," Mr. Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the
Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long
influential."

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a
role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on
individual responsibility," Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has
shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal
policies," Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic,
and national comparisons can be misleading.

"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mr. Mauer of the
Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of
population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the
lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the
highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional
incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now
being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an
authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law
Review.

>From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of
punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates
predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and
rising in England.

"These figures," Mr. Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly
concluding that European sentences are appropriate."

Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that
imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy
Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime.
The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's
crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Mr. Tonry wrote
last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for
the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and
are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls,
generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal
justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular
demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries,
was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was
talking about," he said. "We have a highly politicized criminal justice
system."