| You are assuming that all that matters is wealth, which isn't the case. Bangladesh has lower homicide and robbery rates than the U.S. Even Vietnam has much lower homicide and robbery rates. The US incarcerates a lot because we have a lot more crime compared to other wealthy countries. The US has the same homicide rate as Argentina, about 5 per 100,000. That's a decent proxy for the overall size of our criminal class. In many cases, Argentina is a good proxy for the U.S. -- a formerly wealthy nation that has declined, suffers from corruption, and has quite comparable demographics and income distribution to the U.S. (although a lower level of absolute income). The US incarcerates 3.5x more people than Argentina, which drives the robbery rate to be about 1/10 that of Argentina. We can see what happens when some localities like SF or CA decide not to prosecute non-violent crime -- you get an explosion of robberies. So poorer nations like Argentina that also have a large criminal class end up just forced to tolerate higher levels of robbery. Whereas nations that don't have such a large criminal class - be they wealthy like Japan, middle income like Vietnam or poor like Bangladesh -- simply don't need to make a decision to warehouse so many people or face an explosion of crime. Unfortunately the US does need to deal with this and make some tough choices. Either we go the Argentina route and only incarcerate the most violent offenders -- basically taking the SF approach nationwide -- or we pay for a carceral state to warehouse our criminals. When you go the Argentina route, you get a lot of walled compounds, armed guards, as the wealthy have to spend money on personal security while the middle class and poor are just robbed a lot more. But pretending that we arrest people for no reason at all, and that this does not result in lower crime rates -- I think this is an inaccurate description of the trade offs. There are real trade offs here. |
It does not seem entirely intuitive to me that mass incarceration would drive down crime rates in the long run. Prisons are themselves maladaptive institutions that are harmful to most inmates and indeed are certainly hardening people who could otherwise have been steered in a more productive direction. There is also the fact that taking people out of their families and communities has terrible downstream effects that get passed on to the next generation, causing the cycle to continue.
Also, you say we don't arrest people for no reason, but there are a lot of people in prison who did not commit the crimes they were convicted of. Probably not a majority but I'll bet it's a non negligible minority. How would you feel about a society that locked you up in brutal conditions for something you didn't even do? What about people locked up for drug possession with the same people locked up for violent crimes? Does that make any sense?
Personally I think we are at an inflection point. What we have been doing in the US is not working. The illusion that we can maintain increasing levels of inequality by just locking up more and more people is fading fast. This problem can't be solved long term with more incarceration. I am not convinced that the people you've characterized as the "criminal class" are inherently so. It's also dehumanizing to describe them in this way. Many, if not most, are reacting to difficult situations bordering on the impossible. That's not to be pollyanna and pretend that there aren't some very dangerous people locked up. This is a very difficult problem.
We obviously aren't going to just empty our prisons tomorrow. But we should all be thinking about what kind of society we want to live in and how we might make progress towards that vision. In many ways, even wealthy America is already beginning to feel like a luxury penal colony. The existence of the brutal penal colonies distracts us from that fact.
I want safer cities and communities than what we presently have, but I don't believe that our current incarceration system is effectively getting us there, even if it looks somewhat effective compared to Argentina. Even then though, I ask at what cost? Do "criminals" not matter at all? I think they do, even if they have committed crimes.
If you actually believe that there is a large class of people who are inherently worse than others, you should really think through what the implications might be.