Actually, while that probably contributes, I am told that the big culprit is Swedens practice of recording each rape as a separate incident, rather than just prosecuting them as a bundle. That jacks the numbers up a lot for marital rape.
It occurs to me that it is possible that having a gun makes you individually safer in a high-gun environment, while a higher prevalence of guns in the environment makes everyone in it less safe.
Two opposite processes. Every time someone gets a gun to make him/herself safer, everyone elses safety drops a little. In the end, the cumulative effect of everyone else having guns is larger than the individual effect of your own gun.
Wrong. Incarceration rate is defined relative to a single point in time. Imprison the same number of people annually, but keep them in prison twice as long and the incarceration rate doubles. (And indeed long prison terms is a major reason for the U.S.'s shamefully high incarceration rates.)
I’m not E-DUB, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that what he was saying was that you can have a revolving door without changing the incarceration rate, by sending more people to prison, but for shorter periods of time.
For instance, sending 6 million people to prison for 4 months each, gets you the same incarceration rate as sending 2 million people to prison for a year each.
We aren’t, though. Relative to the rest of the world, we send a lot of people to jail, and keep them there for a very long time.
If what we have is a “revolving door” system, then everywhere in the world is somewhere between “revolving door” and “no door”. SA, as usual, makes the US out to be shockingly lax, when we’re actually shockingly punitive.
I tried to find crime clearance statistics, but there seems to be a problem with definitions. In some countries crime is ‘solved’ if a probable suspect can be named. In Sweden it needs a conviction. Somehow I can’t help thinking that the rate is higher in Europe, but I’m biased.
However I found that US homicide clearance rate is about 65 %. Finland’s thirty year average is more than 90 % and in 2008 it was 103 % ! ( They had some catching up, it was 79 % in the previous year… )
All in all, it doesn’t look good for The Land Of The Free.