{"id":149022,"date":"2023-07-02T06:41:16","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T14:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=149022"},"modified":"2023-07-02T06:41:16","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T14:41:16","slug":"crime-and-the-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=149022","title":{"rendered":"Crime and the Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Voegeli writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Take the contention that no other advanced democracy has an incarceration rate approaching America\u2019s. It is rhetorically powerful but intellectually shoddy to make international comparisons of incarceration practices without also comparing countries\u2019 crime situations. Doing so implies that a nation\u2019s prison population depends simply and solely on how punitively it chooses to respond to a generic level of criminality. No serious person would contend that Anchorage spends an excessive amount on snow removal by pointing out how well Miami gets by without spending anything at all.<\/p>\n

Data provided at World Population Review\u2019s website allows for comparing nations\u2019 incarceration rates to their murder rates. If we treat the latter as an imperfect but serviceable proxy for the severity of a nation\u2019s crime problem, then the ratio between the two gives us an interpretation of incarceration rates that takes crime levels into account. Thus, for every person who is a murder victim in the United States, the number of people incarcerated is 127. Is that a little or a lot? It turns out to be near the middle of the distribution. Switzerland, widely considered a humane and well-governed nation, has a ratio of 124-to-1: America\u2019s incarceration rate is 8.6 times as high as Switzerland\u2019s\u2014but our murder rate is 8.4 times as high. Other countries in which the prison population is less than 127 times as high as the number of murder victims include the United Kingdom (117), France (99), Germany (74), and Canada (59); while those with a higher prisoner-to-murder-victim ratio than the U.S. include Japan (142), Italy (160), Australia (188), and New Zealand (222).<\/p>\n

Some nations have higher murder rates and lower incarceration rates than the U.S. But this combination is more plausibly ascribed to civic dysfunction than enlightened forbearance in the face of mayhem. Mexico, for example, imprisons just six people for every one that is murdered. While some Americans will be impressed that Mexico\u2019s incarceration rate is only one fourth of ours, I submit that a much larger number will be alarmed that its murder rate is nearly six times as high. Nigeria is an extreme case, with an incarceration rate of 32 per 100,000 and a murder rate of 34.5 per 100,000. In other words, you\u2019re more likely to be murdered in Nigeria than you are to be sentenced to prison for any crime. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that Nigeria has so many murderers largely because it has so few prisoners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Voegeli writes: Take the contention that no other advanced democracy has an incarceration rate approaching America\u2019s. It is rhetorically powerful but intellectually shoddy to make international comparisons of incarceration practices without also comparing countries\u2019 crime situations. Doing so implies … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t