Title of this post is headline of this recent Washington Post commentary by Charles Lane. Here are excerpts (with a little cursory commentary to follow):
“Mass incarceration” update: It peaked during the years 2007-2008 and has been quietly but consistently falling ever since. The U.S. prison and jail population that equaled 760 out of every 100,000 people in each of those two years had declined by the end of 2016 to 670 per 100,000, according to the Justice Department.
Does that 11.8 percent drop represent meaningful progress? Well, compared with what? If the standard is the low-violent-crime, low-incarceration norm enjoyed by the United States’ peer nations in Western Europe and Japan, the progress here looks modest at best. Germany, for example, had an incarceration rate of 76 per 100,000 in 2016, and a murder rate of 1.18 per 100,000, according to the United Nations.
Yet the United States is clearly headed in the right direction: We have managed to halt and reverse ever-growing incarceration rates, including, crucially, for black men, whose numbers in prison have fallen by about 98,000 since 2009, according to the Pew Research Center. The overall incarceration rate is now at a 20-year low, Pew reports.
Meanwhile, violent crime, despite a troubling uptick in 2015 and 2016, has not reverted to the out-of-control rates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to FBI data released last month, the 2017 U.S. murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000, roughly quintuple Germany’s, but still about half what it was in 1991.
In one significant respect, however, the problem in the United States may be underincarceration. As a Post team reported in June, murder goes all but unpunished in large areas of numerous U.S. cities, with impunity concentrated in heavily minority areas where police-community relations are at their worst and gang intimidation at its strongest. In Baltimore and Chicago, The Post report noted, police “solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests.”
And because no one seriously questions that murderers and other violent offenders should be imprisoned (indeed, 54 percent of the state prison population is serving time for violent offenses, not drug offenses or other nonviolent crimes), these data imply that, for some U.S. jurisdictions, mass incarceration is not the issue, but rather something possibly more corrosive: uneven incarceration. Minority communities experience a criminal-justice system that simultaneously over- and under-enforces the law....
Despite recent decreases, the United States still incarcerates more people, in absolute numbers and as a share of our population, than any other nation on Earth. This statistic is nothing to be proud of.
Considered in proper context, though, it reflects not only historic social and racial inequalities, and punitive attitudes, but also the fact that the United States is the only large nation on Earth with both a functioning criminal-justice system and a fairly high level of violent crime.
The goal of criminal justice should not be any particular level of incarceration, high or low, but rather fair, consistent and effective enforcement focused on the most repugnant and most socially destabilizing crimes. We’re not there yet, but compared with the recent past, we are doing better.
I commend this commentary for noting that "we are doing better" on crime and punishment in the US, while also noting that we also still have way too much violent crime and way too much prison punishment in our nation. These realities should call for, especially after the last few days of hate-fueled crimes, some real soul-searching about what makes America less than great on these metrics. I certainly have some thoughts on some factors that I think fuel these realities (e.g., disparities, drugs, guns, leadership), but what I think is most important is that any and everyone concerned about either crime or punishment give real thought to the progress we are making and how far we still have to go even when merely compared to any comparable nation.
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