America Puts Away Too Many People

And Emily Badger finds little reason to believe it makes us safer:

[T]he Sentencing Project points out that declining violent crime rates in New York and New Jersey have actually outpaced the national trend, even as these states have reduced their prison populations through changing law enforcement and sentencing policies.

We certainly can’t take these three charts and conclude that reducing prison populations reduces crime. But these trends do make it harder to argue the opposite — particularly in the most heavily incarcerated country in the world. As the Sentencing Project puts it, “in the era of mass incarceration, there is a growing consensus that current levels of incarceration place the nation well past the point of diminishing returns in crime control.”

Reihan agrees the US uses incarceration too much. But he also wonders if other countries rely too little on it:

For example, while the prison per population rate (per 100,000) of the U.S. as of the end of 2012 was 707, it was 72 in Norway, 60 in Sweden, 58 in Finland, 73 in Denmark, and 78 in Germany: all roughly in the neighborhood of one-tenth the U.S. prison per population rate. Unfortunately, while violent crime is generally less prevalent in these countries (particularly intentional homicide — the U.S. has a homicide rate five times that of Sweden), it’s by no means nonexistent. Police recorded rapes in Sweden, for example, are twice as high as they are in the United States, though we might attribute this to better reporting. But Sweden’s robbery rate (103 cases of robbery per 100,000 people) is fairly close to that of the U.S. (133). And its police recorded assault rate (927 cases per 100,000 people) far exceeds that of the U.S. (262). Broadly similar patterns obtain in a number of other affluent European countries.

None of this is to definitively establish that, say, Sweden’s criminal justice system is too lenient, but it certainly points in that direction. So while it seems fair to say that the pendulum has swung too far towards reliance on incarceration as a crime control strategy in the U.S., the pendulum appears to have swung too far in the other direction in much of northern Europe.