In Defense of Flogging Read Free

guard 2.3 million prisoners outnumbers the US Marines. If we condensed our nationwide penal system into a single city, it would be the fourth largest city in America, with a population greater than Baltimore, Boston, and San Francisco combined.
    America now has more prisoners than any other country in the world. Ever. In sheer numbers and as a percentage of the population. Our rate of incarceration is roughly seven times that of Canada or any Western European country. Stalin, at the height of the Soviet gulag, had fewer prisoners than America does now (although the chances of living through US incarceration are quite a bit higher). Despite our “land of the free” motto, we deem it necessary to incarcerate more of our people than the world’s most draconian regimes. Think about it: We have more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do.

    It didn’t used to be this way. In 1970, before the war on drugs and a plethora of get-tough laws increased sentence lengths and the number of nonviolent offenders in prison, we incarcerated 338,000 people. There was even talk of abolishing prison altogether and the hope that prisons would be left on the ash heap of history. But that didn’t happen. The prison-abolition movement seems to have died right after a 1973 Presidential Advisory Commission said, “No new institutions for adults should be built, and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed,” and concluded, “The prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking level of failure.” Since then, even though violent crime in America has gone down, the incarceration rate has increased a whopping 500 percent.
    Some have linked this drop in crime to the increase in prisons. To oversimplify a bit, if more muggers are behind bars for longer periods of time, they can’t mug you as much. Granted, if everybody were in prison, there would be no crime on the street. But this extreme, appealing though it may be for its logical simplicity, fails for several reasons. Between 1947 and 1991 the prison population increased
from 259,000 to 1.2 million. During this time the homicide rate nearly doubled, from 6.1 to 10.5 per hundred thousand. Today the homicide rate is back to where it was in 1947—and yet now we have two million more people behind bars than we did then. Even if prison were responsible for some of the recent crime drop, we’re not getting much bang for the buck.
    To understand the uselessness of incarceration—to appreciate just how specious the connection between increased incarceration and decreased crime really is—consider New York City. Not only did New York drastically cut crime, it did so while incarcerating fewer people. New York has seen the most significant crime drop of any big city in America: real, substantial, sustained, and, over the past two decades, twice the national average. In 1990 there were 2,245 murders in New York City. In 2010 there were 532. During this period of decreasing crime—and while the city’s population increased by more than a million people—the number of incarcerated New Yorkers actually decreased by eleven thousand. Less crime should equal fewer prisons. This seems obvious, but it’s not the case in the rest of the nation. Had New York followed national
patterns and increased its incarceration rate by 65 percent, the city, with an additional fifty-eight thousand prisoners, may very well have bankrupted the state. To incarcerate that many more people from New York City would cost roughly $2 billion per year, nearly doubling the size and cost of the entire state’s Department of Corrections.
    Better policing and massive immigration—not increased incarceration—contributed to New York’s crime drop. In the 1990s the NYPD got back in the crime prevention game: Drug dealers were pushed indoors, and crack receded in general. Also, police focused on quality-of-life