[lbo-talk] Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Sep 9 19:04:37 PDT 2007


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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list