Most criminals in Chicago get away with their crimes. It’s not surprising, given that the mayor is hostile to the idea of putting them in jail, and only 13% of violent criminals even get arrested in Chicago.
Mayor Brandon Johnson recently said, “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence. We’ve already tried that, and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence. The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country, we have moved past that. It is racist. It is immoral. It is unholy. And it is not the way to drive violence down.”
None of what Johnson said is true. We can incarcerate our way out of most potential crimes, by locking up repeat offenders and thus preventing them from harming other people. El Salvador showed this by increasing its incarceration rate to the world’s highest level, which resulted in its its murder rate falling by more than 95 percent, and its crime rate falling by more than 75%. El Salvador used to have one of the world’s highest homicides rate back in 2015. But after it put lots of criminals in jail, El Salvador’s homicide rate fell 98 percent, reports La Derecha Diario.
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)). Other studies find similar results.
Inmates tend to 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.
Johnson is wrong to claim that America has the largest prison population in the world. China incarcerates more people — while its formal prison population is slightly lower than America’s (about 1.7 million versus 1.8 million), China’s official prison population of 1.7 million doesn’t include three million people who have been been imprisoned in grim concentration camps because they are members of ethnic minority groups, nor does it include thousands of people compelled to provide forced labor in industries across China. So China’s actual prison population is much larger than America’s. Nor does America have the world’s highest incarceration rate: Several other counties have higher incarceration rates, such as El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan (even though oppressive countries like Cuba and Turmenistan often have secret prisons whose populations aren’t included in their official incarceration rate).
Incarcerating criminals is not “racist.” Putting criminals in jail helps minorities most, because crime victims are disproportionately black. More than half of all homicide victims in 2023 were Black (53.8 percent), even though blacks are only 14% of the U.S. population. “The homicide victimization rate for black persons (21.3 per 100,000 persons) was more than 6 times the rate for white persons (3.2 per 100,000),” noted the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in Homicide Victimization in the United States, 2023.
Letting criminals out early results in many killings, especially in predominantly-black areas like Baltimore. Many murders occurred in Baltimore because progressive prosecutors there didn’t seek long sentences for people who committed serious crimes. As a result, criminals were soon back on the street, where many of them went on to murder innocent people. Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime, noted City Journal.
Some argue that incarceration is racist because the black incarceration rate is higher than the incarceration rate for other racial groups. But it is not surprising that the black incarceration rate is higher, because the black crime rate is much higher. As the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics noted in Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).” Arrests largely reflect who is actually committing the crime, not racism. As the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics explained in 2021, although blacks are arrested at a higher rate, their arrest rate is proportional to their crime rate: “White and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018, at pg. 2 (2021)).
