Why are Americans in general much tougher on crime than Europeans?

Great Debates
21

I think we’re tougher on crime because of the sensational types of crimes we have & the impact on the public. I mean, American criminals put a lot of creativity and effort into their work and thereby achieve successes that our European counterparts wouldn’t dare to even dream of. Words like prolific are often used to describe our overachieving citizens who pursue a life of crime.

America’s still got it!! We produce way more than our share of people who rape and eat others, shoot prostitutes then gouge their eyes out, go into schools, churches, malls, cinemas, etc and mow down strangers with gunfire. Who cares what the criteria is. We’re #1!!!

22

Or maybe Americans are just better at solving & prosecuting crimes. So our crime stats are high, but maybe that’s because bank fraud, extortion, rape, child molestation, organized crime, etc go undetected in other countries. And we’re tough on those kinds of crimes :cool:

23

I was asking about a cite for how in Western Europe they apparently “turn a blind eye” to pickpockets, child abuse and occupied home invasions, as you earlier asserted.

The cite you’ve given correctly begins with the disclaimer that reported crimes can be more indicative of policing policies and availability than incidence of crime (otherwise Iceland is apparently the new Gangsta’s Paradise).
And even if it was specifically crime figures for the crimes you listed, it would be showing the opposite of the point you were trying to make: if such countries turned a blind eye to those kinds of crime they wouldn’t be in the crime figures.

24

From your own cite just a little further down the page.

but you didn’t see fit to include that.

also, another cite you use. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-…rimes-per-1000
shows those known hotbeds of terror, violence and criminality Iceland and Sweden at the top of the list with a clear 20+ times the crime level of that peaceful idyll Colombia and 10+ times that of Mexico.

So I’m suspecting those bald stats do not give a true reflection of the numbers and types of crimes committed.

Do you think those figures are accurate and…more importantly…representative?

25

An interesting comparison between the US and the UK here

The UK seems to account any kind of assault as a violent crime, even if it is only a verbal assault or a fierce look.

26

No, racial tensions peaked in the late 1960s when there were major race riots in a number of cities. However, crime continued to skyrocket for another twenty years after.
Income inequality has grown from the early 1990s but crime has been falling since then. It is now less than half of what it was even as inequality has gotten worse.

27

This ignores that the response to the crime wave was effective. Crime is way down since its peak in 1992.

28

LOL.

Are you the guy with the unconventional views about Muslims as portrayed in your pit thread - the person, it seemed very clearly, who had lived an unusually narrow life experience?

29

Not true; private prisons have been instrumental in getting mandatory sentencing laws passed through their lobbying efforts.

Start here: The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor.

30

I will also add, we don’t have plenty of private prisons, we barely make it to double figures.Out of a total of around 150, private prisons are a small minority, its also worth noting that every single one of those private prisons is in the lowest quartile of poor performance too.

If we had a similar sentencing policy to the US, we would have around 400k prisoners locked up, and some of our political leaders over the last 20 years seem to have tried to emulate US prison policy, result is that our number in prison have risen from just under 50k to almost 90k in that time.

In Holland with their much more relaxed attitude, they are now seeking to close prisons, because they can’t find enough criminals to fill them and their crime is far lower than ours.

Maybe there is a lesson, uptight social attitudes may lead to harsher penalties, and once into the criminal justice system then your criminal is much less likely to reform, instead they seem much more likely to develop a long and not very lucrative career in prison or on the streets offending.

I wonder if Trump really has the balls to find out if the Dutch experience will work in the US.

I think that we need to be far more selective in who we send to prison, we let far too much riff raff into prison for my liking - we need to be more choosy

31

Back in the 1960s the US had a incarceration rate one quarter what it is now. According to your logic this should have resulted in less crime. Instead we got three decades of skyrocketing crime. Why repeat failure?

32

You have it the wrong way around, you had one quarter the crime, and much lower incarceration levels, you now have this huge number of people in prison, and yet your crime is extremely high, and in violent crime its rather higher in terms of murder.

You have to realise something here, the US has maybe 5% of the worlds population yet it has 25% of the worlds prisoners. This is an astonishing figure, clearly something is different in the US.

The UK has imported many rehab programs and lots of US designed ideas, and the result is that in 20 years, our prison population has near doubled.

Now the UK could just keep going the same way as the US, we could import more US ideas, I have a feeling that crime will continue to rise, and prison populations will follow.

European attitudes are somewhat different, not just in terms of crime itself but also in social attitudes, and their crime is falling and their prison population is also falling.

The US is very much about the individual, it lionises those who make good, it has far lower levels of social provision, for example in healthcare and welfare. There is no way in the US that it would be politically acceptable to move in a European direction, in fact quite the reverse.

Does a more socially collective approach result in lower crime? I dunno, but whatever the US approach is, it simply has not worked well, not when compared with its industrialised peers.

This is not to say that the US way does not work at all, in some areas such as trade and military domination it clearly does work well, the US is the worlds only true superpower - but just how much is that worth when ever increasing numbers of its citizens are unable to take part in the wealth bonanza?

I have no idea when US numbers of socially excluded citizens will stop rising, I think the idea of marginalising migrants who benefit the US economy greatly, and leads to unbelievable levels of hypocrisy in relation to immigration, I think this is not an idea likely to reduce crime, I think it is far more likely to increase social division.

These are the extremely difficult and almost intractable issues that the US faces, maybe Trump has some ideas that will help, maybe not.

33

In 1990 we had about half the amount of people imprisoned as today. Yet our crime rate was twice as high. So clearly imprisoning more people did not cause the crime levels to rise.

34

No, you have me mixed up with someone else. I have been to several European countries many times as well as 3rd world countries and I work for a French company now. France has my sympathy for their current troubles.

Crime in general is more common in Western Europe than in the U.S. That generally means that you will have something stolen rather than be killed but assaults are more common in the UK for example because of the tolerance for after hours street violence that seems to be endemic.

I am not making a moral argument. It is just a logical fact that locking the people most prone to criminal activity for a very long time will reduce the crime rate in general society. That is what happened during the crackdown on crime in the U.S. from the mid-1990’s until today. It worked spectacularly if your sole goal is to reduce the crime rate. You can do the same thing with almost any measure. You could also improve test scores in a school by kicking the dumb kids out or reduce obesity by euthanizing obese people.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. The general strategy works very well as long as you filter people that are real societal threats to those that aren’t. Young drug users that rarely hurt anyone but themselves need help. Serial killers need to stay in prison until they die. People in the middle of that continuum need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis because recidivism rates are way too high even for felons released in the American justice system.

35

This portion of your post is extraordinarily dangerous.

You may well have in mind a set of criteria for those being ‘most prone to criminal activity’ but your personal definition would never survive in that form through the political process, you only need to look at the bitterness and hatred that the presidential election has generated.

The likely result is that your personal definition itself would be fraught with problems you had not foreseen, but much worse - the interpretation would soon be twisted in ways you would soon despise.

We value freedom in so many ways and these are often so subtle that we have difficulty in understanding the scope of a free society, you cannot simply build your way to a crime free society by locking up more and more likely individuals, for a start you cannot afford it, but it also changes society because you change the nature of national authority.

The British used to believe that if they removed the ‘criminal classes’ from society then crime would diminish, but that assumes that criminal classes are a distinct sub group, which it is not. Worse still, this was never effective, during the times when the death penalty was rampant, and transportation a favoured means of isolating crime prone individuals, crime was still a significant problem.

Criminals come from all areas and all levels, and using hugely disproportionate sentencing will set back any real hope of rehabilitation, all it does is make crime a keepers game, where those from socially excluded backgrounds have absolutely nothing to lose, and this includes not just the criminals themselves, but also whole sectors of society. This would then feed into developing a stereotype potential criminal , and the logic there is to lock up those who are from such backgrounds before they have the time to harm the rest of the population - it is after all, logical to prevent crime by pre-empting it’s practitioners.

Social exclusion is far more likely to nurture crime, we see this from loners who develop their own take on the world and the way in which is offends them, through to neighbourhood poverty - where your only horizon is one of crime not of opportunity - through to political activism for some perceived (or even genuine) slight to the worldview of your social grouping - be it religious or idealist or nihilist.

Even if we had 100% social cohesion (whatever that might mean) and even if we had genuine equality of opportunity we will still have crime - what we really want as much as anything is a reduction in reoffending, because reoffending by its nature speaks of individuals who have learned nothing.
If you want to empty prisons and reduce crime, you have to either prevent individuals from taking it up in the first place, or try the more difficult option if rehab, you simply cannot continue locking away ever more individuals due to the financial cost, the waste of human resources in a highly competitive world, and the change in nature of a democratic society - the concept of which would be severely diminished.

36

There are people whose basic attitude seems to be that once you’ve gone to prison you are a felon, it’s a basic part of you, more basic than the color of your hair or the shape of your nose. Rehabilitation? Reintegration? A legal, legit, decent job, for someone who’s done time? Hah! Those people haven’t even reached the stage of “punishment must be commesurate with the crime”, never mind rehabilitation or redemption.

Those people seem to be much more common in the US than in Europe or Latin America.

37

Locking up individuals where you are put next to more criminals, where you are under threat, where you have to keep proving your credentials in the prison society is also not likely to work, and the larger the prison, the more this problem is reinforced since there is always another prisoner who you have to encounter.

Large prisons make control far more difficult, because what you have is a social system, it makes the job of the rehabilitator far harder, because you become one lone voice in a sea of criminally opinionated chancers.

The US is well known for its very large prisons, and the UK has moved toward that direction in closing smaller prisons, and is currently in a program of building some very much larger ones, 2500 place prisons is very large for the UK and that is what is currently under construction

The justifications for this are things such as greater scope for efficiency savings - well the issue is that the ‘efficiencies’ are merely operating costs instead of the real savings to be made from rehabilitation, and I have yet to see any evidence that larger prisons will actually improve rehabilitation rates - quite the contrary, I have seen evidence that smaller prisons are more effective, and we have the US experience of large prisons where rehab rates are woeful and that it leads to higher prison populations.

Another justification is that lots of UK prisons are old, and this leads to them being expensive to operate and that conditions are generally bad - however like any structure, lack of maintenance, repair and investment will inevitably result in run down prisons, and its no wonder at all that conditions are poor.UK prisons, like much of our public sector have undergone ideologically driven cuts in funding for at least the last 8 years, and this is in line with lots of the neoliberal view of the world where costs are driven down to the minimum by privatisation.

Its worth noting that in the US, that Feds have finally understood that you cannot have prisons on the cheap, and is withdrawing support for private prisons - I realise that entails just the federal prisons which is a minority of the total prison population but someone somewhere in the US has started to question the privatisation mantra for public services

The thing that undermines the US style large prison is that evidence does show that prisoners who maintain links with their families, especially drug users, are more likely to be rehabilitated, yet larger prisons means fewer of them, meaning they will be far more geographically spread out and this means less family contact.

Everything we have borrowed from the US has increased our prison population, whether its is cost cutting, larger prisons, reform programs.

If you want to reform prisoners, or have any sort of control over any sort of population, what you do is reduce the impact of peer pressure - and that means reducing the numbers in each cadre - so a smaller prison will be better controlled than a larger one, and you have more staff with more influence both in direct control but also so that they have more scope to implement their own initiatives, instead of having large prisons controlled centrally from a ministry in London

38

I don’t think reducing the size of prisons will reduce peer pressure on American criminals. Once they’re out in society again, they can’t get a legitimate job and will be associating with a lot of other criminals in the same position.

But I have a question about rehabilitation. What exactly is it supposed to do? The criminal knew what they did was wrong and did it anyway, and indeed was imprisoned (punished) for it. It’s not like rehabilitation is teaching them stealing is wrong (or assault is wrong, or murder is wrong, etc). And even with rehabilitation, they can’t get a legitimate job.

39

Realistically I don’t think it’s ever going to work because of how the person is perceived by society. You could have a normal quiet and intelligent but isolated loner kid in a middle class family that is turbulent. He’s bullied in school and gets self esteem problems. He’s never rude or threatening but one day he gets into an fight and sexually assaults his teacher

Now the problem with people is the judge by action and not by intention solely (both need to be taken into account. So even if he was put in a better family people from and was rehabilitated, people wouldn’t look at him as ‘This kid with troubles sexually assaulted someone and now he’s better’ they would say ‘This fucking low-life coward sexually assaulted a teacher and now he’s free to do it again.’

In effect, it self reinforcing by society and the individual. Throwing away good and evil, most ‘evil’ people did one bad thing that society considered so bad and could never look at them again. After being ostracized financially and being physically beaten they become angry and act out making it look like they were an ‘evil’ person rather than a troubled individual in harsh circumstances who committed ‘evil’ acts

40

I’ve lived for some time in both the US and a couple of European countries and I’ve certainly had the impression that the US crime rate is far higher than the Western European one.

Granted, that is only based on my personal impressions. Which does not come from a personal experience of crime, but the amount of fear of crime in the population. The number of news stories reporting crime. And the amount of time and energy expended trying to protect oneself from crime or avoid it. This seemed off the scale in the US.

Beyond that, I believe using the UK as indicative of crime rates in all of Europe is disingenuous. While I don’t have the time to fully convert everything to per 100 000 population, a quick look at Europe’s crime statistics seem to indicate that the UK is above most other large European countries in general, and well above in terms of violent crime.

Europe is a lot more varied than the US, and if you were to use the UK as a basis for comparison, it should probably be compared to one of the higher crime areas of the US.