Re: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
On Sep 9, 2007, at 9:36 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
You just said that the US has a rate of incarceration that’s 8x
France, and that 1/3 of it is violent crime?!We only stand out on murder. Or so I remember.
C’mon, don’t you read your own posts? Murder in the US is like
1.2% of “violent crime”
I said two things. One, that U.S. crime rates, aside from murder, are
not out of line with Western Europe’s. The victimization data in
table 2 at
http://www.csdp.org/research/hosb1203.pdf
supports that.
The other thing I said was that U.S. murder rates are off the charts,
which is also true - look at table 1.1 of that doc. Of course murder
is a small part of crime.
So my point is that U.S. crime rates are not out of line with
countries that jail a far smaller portion of their pop. We’re
outliers on incarceration, not crime (except for murder, except we’re
pikers next to SA and Russia).
Doug