When Talking About Defunding the Police, Don’t Forget Prisons

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The ratio of police officers to population in the U.S. is on the low side among rich nations. Prosecutors and judges appear to be thinner on the ground here, too, though the statistics on that are less timely and probably less comparable. Measures of arrests and prosecutions also face comparability issues, but data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at least don’t show America to be a big outlier.

What part of the U.S. criminal justice system does stand out by international standards? The prisons. Even after almost a decade of declines, as of 2016 this country’s prison and jail population was tops in the world, both in absolute terms and relative to population, according to the most recent World Prison Population List from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research in the U.K.

The punitiveness of modern U.S. criminal justice is out of line not only with international norms but also with the country’s history—the incarceration rate is now more than three times higher than it ever was before 1980. Yes, there was a lot of violent crime from the 1970s through the early ’90s, and the prison boom was in part a reaction to that. But incarceration went up much faster than crime did, and while numerous studies have concluded that putting more police on the street reduces crime, the evidence that longer sentences and increased incarceration do so is much weaker. Mass imprisonment also brings huge economic and human costs—it’s been a big contributor to the long fall in male labor force participation—that have been borne disproportionately by black Americans. None of this really tells us how best to address current calls to reform or defund the police, but it does indicate that we really shouldn’t forget the prisons.
 
Fox is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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