Doug wrote:
> I thought that European property crime rates were
> comparable to the U.S. - it was only in murder that the U.S. is an
> outlier (though less so recently than 5 or 10 years ago).
Have you ever looked at Franklin Zimring's Crime Is Not the Problem? He's got pretty extensive numbers showing property crime rates higher in many European countries than in the US, but much higher rates of violent crimes (not just murder) here. Not sure where they come from.
Re the larger topic of this thread, doesn't the US incarceration boom have more to do with larger numbers of people being cycled through short sentences than with time actually served getting longer? A quick look at the BJS website yields the following:
year prisoners admitted prison population 1978 162,574 296,050 1983 250,061 423,898 1988 379,742 606,810 1993 518,562 909,381 1995 562,724 1,078,542 1996 502,823 1,125,000
... suggesting that average time served has been pretty steady around 2 years. (This is for state and federal prisons only.) But maybe there's a better way to get at this.
Along with the drug war (which is a smaller factor than it's sometimes made out to be) it seems like gang hysteria play a significant role here. A few years ago, when I lived in Chicago, there was a database of supposed gang members called GRIPS, to which your name could be added by, among other things, being seen on the street talking to other "gang members." Your presence in GRIPS could then be adduced in the courtroom to turn a crime that would have resulted in a fine or probation into something jailable. In Search and Destroy, the best book I've seen on the criminal justice system, Jerome Miller describes a similarly iterative gang database in Denver that managed to include a majority of the city's non-white teenage males.
Josh