We are the world's leader in putting people (about 90% men) in prison/jail despite the fact that we don't come close to be the leader in crime rates, being much lower than countries such as South Africa and Venezuela, lower than France, and on about the same level as England. Yet we lead everyone in incarceration rate. Any thoughts on why that is?

I have a quick thought . Get tough on crime politics led to mandatory sentencing guidelines that took discretion from the judges .

btw Clueless Joe when he was a Senator was the poster boy for Mandatory Minimums in his 1994 crime law .

Considering the fact that the recidivism rate is nearly 70%, that does not bode well for the future. The incarceration rate for men age 20 to 50 must be frighteningly high, perhaps as high as 2% or 3%.

Another factor I thought about was aggressive prosecutors who use the position as a stepping stone for higher offiice .

This ties into a huge problem. They pile on charges ,many of them bogus so that the charges can be plea bargained down. The prosecutors do not have to really prove the guilt or innocence It is called the threat of a 'trial penalty ' to not cop a plea .

What's even worse is that exculpatory evidence can be hidden by the prosecution during plea negotiations. There is no accountability as there are no records of how a deal is reached . Not even the judge is privy to the negotiation process .

Many of the incarcerated do not get their day in court . It is a grossly unfair system . There have even been times when DNA evidence overturns a conviction when a guilty plea was made from coercive plea bargaining

The reform is simple but creates new problems . No one should be incarcerated without a trial by jury . The problem then becomes it overwhelms the court system .

I wonder what the rate of mistrials, acquittals, exonerations or other miscarriages of justice looks like in this regard, as the problem, while maybe compounded by mandatory minimums, may lay further down the custodial chain.

And incarcerations don't teach the prisoners anything positive for an eventual productive life outside. My nephew spent six years in a state prison, no rehab offered, reoffended but, thankfully, instead of going to jail or prison, has been put in a very structured county rehab program.

The entire system needs to be overhauled.

I just wonder how legal practices and culture are different in other countries which have higher crime rates and yet significantly lower incarceration rates than we have.

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Originally Posted by jlisenbe

other countries which have higher crime rates and yet significantly lower incarceration rates than we have.

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Offenders aren't incarcerated and are free to continue to commit crimes?

Yeah. That thought occurred to me as well, but if that is true, then why aren't their crime rates significantly higher than ours? They are in some cases, but not in all. Germany, for instance, has both a low incarceration rate AND a low crime rate. Same is true of Canada. How are they doing that?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/co...tes-by-country

https://worldpopulationreview.com/co...ate-by-country

Also maybe worth adding to the mix is looking at training levels of law enforcement officers.
Wondering if that has any bearing on these rates...

Not only what CurlyBen said, but also, are offenders given rehab training?

But more to the point, do other countries employ those practices more that us? Do Canada and Germany, for instance, have better trained police and better rehab training than us? I rather doubt it, but I do wonder about it.

As Shakespeare once said ; The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.(Henry VI).

The United States has 5% of the world’s people, 25% of its incarcerated people, and 50% of its lawyers. The legal profession is somewhere around 10% of the GDP and most of the politicians making the laws come from that profession.

The US has 6-12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom; countries with comparable standards of living .

American prosecutors win 99.5% of their cases, 97% without trials. We may as well have the Red Queen running our system.

Yes we have a need to overhaul the rehab system. We incarcerate way too many non-violent people. But the system of inane mandatory sentencing combined with the plea bargain system defacto denies the right of presumed innocence.

The BBC did a piece on police training not so long back...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56834733

I'd love to see a breakdown of those hours as class work on courses like history or sociology versus law and actual police procedures.

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50% of its lawyers.

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most of the politicians making the laws come from that profession.

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Between those two, you have an enormous part of the problem. There are so many laws now that they can get you on something if they really want to, and especially with tax laws.

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There are so many laws now that they can get you on something if they really want to, and especially with tax laws.

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A long time ago John Stossel made the charge that everyone was a criminal This bridges the political divide and yet half the country doesn't understand that a police state is a natural outcome of a nanny state .

Would you guess; there is big money in the department of corrections?

could the incarceration rate be rising in proportion to new crimes created by legislation ?

The Heritage Foundation and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center is counting .


Count the Code: Quantifying Federalization of Criminal Statutes | The Heritage Foundation


The researchers created an algorithm with key phrases like “shall be punished” and “shall be fined or imprisoned” to narrow their search of the more than 175,000 pages in the U.S. Code. They found 1,510 criminal sections and estimated that there were about 5,199 crimes in total buried in the Federal code .some “are so vague that . . . no reasonable person could understand what they mean.”
There were about 36% more criminal sections in 2019 than 25 years earlier.
Some of the laws are down right bizarre.
Here are some of the goofiest federal laws still on the books (nypost.com)

This does not take into account state and local laws that are routinely enforced or not .