On Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) said, “Jails, and incarceration, and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities.” But more policing and detention of violent criminals made Chicago safer in the past. As Tim Hecke notes, the big reduction in homicides that occurred in Chicago from 1994 to 2005 “came during the very period Johnson described as plagued by a ‘sickness’ of arrests and incarceration.”
Incarceration makes communities safer by keeping violent criminals and thieves locked up where they can’t harm law-abiding people. When Italy released inmates early, that increased its crime rate a lot, according to a 2014 study. (See Alessandro Barbarino & Giovanni Mastrobuono, the Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration from Several Italian Collective Pardons, American Economic Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-37 (2014), available at https://www.aeaweb.org/
Inmates tend commit more crimes after being released. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4). Most inmates commit more crimes after being released, even when they have already served over ten years in prison.
Most prison inmates are incarcerated for violent crimes. 63% of state prison inmates in America are doing time for violent crimes — others are there for serious theft or property crimes — and the typical state prison inmate is a repeat offender with 5 convictions, not there due to indiscriminate “mass incarceration.” Only a tiny percentage of inmates in state prisons are there for drug possession.
Left-wingers falsely claim America has the world’s highest incarceration rate. It doesn’t. El Salvador’s incarceration rate rose to triple America’s incarceration rate, and its murder rate fell by over 90% after it increased its incarceration rate, saving thousands of lives.
More police presence also makes communities safer by deterring crime. As this blog said in the past,
Higher police spending is correlated with lower murder rates, so defunding the police costs lives.
Criminologists say that to cut high violent crime rates, America needs to hire more police. As criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has…extraordinary levels of under-policing.” America has fewer police compared to its population than most developed countries. As a graph provided by Professor Nix shows, the U.S. has far fewer police per homicide than most developed countries. America has less than a tenth as many police per homicide as Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Austria, and the Netherlands.
Europe spends more of its economy on its police than the U.S. does. That may partly explain why Europe has a lower murder rate. More cops on the beat means they can solve more murders, and catching murderers deters murders from being committed. If a murderer doesn’t think he will be caught, he may commit murder even if there are strict penalties for the few murderers who are caught. Nothing is more important in deterring crime than the rate at which criminals are caught.
