Does crime explain the exceptional US incarceration rate?

When looking at homicide rates it's worth remembering that a good healthcare system reduces the rates as it's able to help people who get shoot survive that would die if the healthcare system isn't as good.

To a reasonable approximation, unusually high US crime rates are unusually high homicide rates[*]. Other kinds of crime are average for a wealthy country. Burglary is slightly lower.

The second anomalous thing about the US is the very high rate of gun ownership. Whilst advanced emergency room technology can be expected to lower the rate of successful homicide, all other things being equal, the availability of killing technology would increase it.

The third anomalous thing about the US is the high incarceration level. The prison population, anywhere, is the product of sentence length and incarceration rate (itself a product of crime rate and successful prosecution rate). Things like three strike rules guarantee long sentences for minor offences.

[*] "However, some countries such as Canada have similar definitions of what constitutes a violent crime, and nearly all countries had the same definition of the characteristics that constitutes a homicide.[citation needed] Overall the total crime rate of the United States is higher than developed countries, specifically Europe, with South American countries and Russia being the exceptions.[43] Some types of reported property crime in the U.S. survey as lower than in Germany or Canada, yet the homicide rate in the United States is substantially higher as is the prison population" WP

Related to this is that so far we’ve basically taken the homicide rate as exogenous, but of course there’s reverse causality. Having a large chunk of the population in prison will affect the murder rate. [...] Another way out for them is that maybe all the countries with similar homicide rates should imprison people as much as the US, but their institutions don’t function well enough.

Note that some people make the reverse argument: that a high imprisonment rate makes things worse, especially if the sentences are long and prison conditions are harsh and tending towards punishment rather than rehabilitation. People in prison end up socialized into interacting with other prisoners, which gets first-timers into a stronger criminal mindset. Once they get out, they might not have many opportunities available other than going back into crime.

At least this article notes that e.g. Finland has a low incarceration rate as well as a low recidivism rate, though the report that it cites for the recidivism figure explicitly concludes that the rates are not directly comparable between countries, so take that with a grain of salt.

Crime is a social construct shaped by laws (also constructed) and police actions (collectively an expression of the sociopolitical zeitgeist). If our crime rate is high, it's because we've constructed crime in such a way as to make it so.

Crime does not require incarceration. There are huge swaths of history where basically the only thing that would get you thrown into prison was failure to pay your debts. Or having severe mental illness, but they didn't usually call that prison. Granted, the state often killed people under those systems, but I think we can do better than that if we make it our goal.

Any given prison has a subset of these three purposes:

• Protecting the prisoner and the public from each other
• Rehabilitating the prisoner
• Punishing the prisoner

The fewer purposes an institution tries to fulfill, the more successful it is likely to be. The current prison system in America is a muddled mess of all three. Just stop a random small group of friends and ask them what prisons are for; they'll probably argue about it for a long time if experience is any judge. If we could pick an actual single purpose for the prison system, I'm betting it would be better than it is now just for that, and a large number of current prisoners would no longer qualify for the "program".

Huh... unexpectedly detailed opinions on this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another way out for them is that maybe all the countries with similar homicide rates should imprison people as much as the US, but their institutions don’t function well enough.

I'd be interested to see more analysis of this hypothesis. It seems quite likely to me that the US having an unusual combination of violence and competence is at least part of the explanation for the high incarceration rate. Would be curious to know how much.

Maybe a simple follow-up analysis would just be to check the ratios of homicides to people-in-prison-for-homicide for various countries (rather than comparing against incarceration rate more generally). Would be interesting to know on a crime-by-crime basis how the US compares to other countries.

You can get a complementary analysis by comparing the US to its past self. Incarceration rate, homicide rate. Between 1975 and 2000, the incarceration rate grew five-fold while the homicide rate fell by half.

Out of interest, what is the reasoning behind using homicide rates as a proxy for crime more generally? Countries with (relatively) high rates incarceration for non-violent drug offenders might skew the relationship (Thailand for example).

There is then a second question about whether or not non-violent drug offenders should be imprisoned (at all/at the rates that they are in some countries), but the argument that incarceration is explained by crime might hold in these countries.