My regular readers know that I love data. When somebody throws a number at me I always have to look it up. I am regularly hit in the face with the number 700 Americans incarcerated per hundred thousand. This is reported as the highest incarceration rate in the world. It turns out to be an accurate number of Americans in jail and in state and federal prisons.
So what does it mean?
Here are three rather baffling charts.
* The first shows the relative incarceration rates around the world. The United States (in brown with over 700 per 100k) is definitely at the top of the list.
*The second chart shows the incarceration rate by male and female in the United States since 1925 but it excludes jail data. Jail refers to any sentence of a year or less.
In this chart (without jails) we have an incarceration rate of 500 per hundred thousand which has soared since the late 1970s and leveled off sometime in the early 2000s. This reflects a rise of convictions in the previous decade and a peak in crime in 1991.
* The next chart shows the homicide rate for most nations.
We have some homicide rates that are astronomical: for Honduras 90 per hundred thousand, Venezuela 50 per hundred thousand and Brazil 30 per hundred thousand. The United States is under 5 per hundred thousand. Orders of magnitude different.
Look at charts 1 and 3. The incarceration rates are unrelated to the homicide rates. Honduras is 159 prisoners per hundred thousand, Venezuela is 169 prisoners per hundred thousand and Brazil is 274 per hundred thousand. (Guatemala is 87 prisoners per hundred thousand.)
High homicide rates low incarceration rates.
There are probably many explanations. One of which is that the United States has criminal laws that put drug sellers in prison while Latin American countries rarely do. Another is that the American criminal justice system is more efficient and more successful at imprisoning dangerous criminals.
The other explanation may actually be the best. We have so many people in prison we don't have to worry about them wandering the streets and murdering other people.
At this point I can only look at the data. I have very little confidence in criminology since the people that figured out why our crime rate turned down in 1991 were economists. (Because abortion became available 20 years earlier.) That leaves me on my own, with you, to understand the crime data.
I love data.