That’s how George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok describes the U.S. criminal-justice system.
In a blog post, Tabarrok highlights a new paper by Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani in the American Journal of Law and Equality. It finds that the U.S. is unusual among developed countries, not only in its relatively high prison population (which is well known), but also in its low rate of police officers per capita. They write:
In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate.
Lewis and Usmani lay out five facts in their paper that fly in the face of much of the conventional wisdom around policing. They are:
- “Mass incarceration is not a world of mass policing.” The U.S. imprisons far more people than other developed countries despite also having fewer police officers per capita than most developed countries.
- “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.” When looking at the number of prisoners per homicide (instead of per capita) the U.S. is in the middle of the pack. But the number of police officers per homicide is still extremely low. “America has about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country,” they write.
- “Low clearance rates in America are not driven by lack of police focus.” American police aren’t uniquely inefficient in solving crimes, but rather there aren’t enough of them to do the job. The number of police per homicide is extremely low, but the number of homicide arrests per police officer is extremely high, compared to other developed countries.
- “America combines low levels of certainty with high levels of severity, especially in its most disadvantaged communities.” By that, the authors mean that your chances of being arrested for a serious crime in the United States are relatively low, but your chances of being imprisoned (and of being imprisoned for a long time) if you are arrested is relatively high. That asymmetry is especially prevalent among African Americans.
- “Police violence may be a symptom of under-policing rather than over-policing.” They find that there is a negative correlation between the number of police officers per homicide and the number of police killings. So the countries in Europe and Asia with very low rates of police violence have far more police officers per homicide than the U.S. does.
The authors write, “The United States is ridden with much more serious crime than other comparably wealthy societies. It responds to this exceptionally high level of serious crime with an exceptional combination of relatively small police forces and comparatively long sentences.”
It’s easy to see how that imbalance may contribute to our exceptionally high violent-crime rate. If people think they have a low probability of being caught, they are more likely to attempt violent crimes. The threat of severe punishment doesn’t deter criminal behavior if criminals don’t believe they will ever get arrested in the first place. The authors note that, “The empirical literature on deterrence is unequivocal that increasing the size of police forces is a much more efficient way to prevent crime than increasing the length of prison sentences for those who are apprehended and convicted. . . . Today in the United States, a single dollar spent on policing is almost sixteen times more effective at deterring crime than a dollar spent on incarcerating additional prisoners.”
The authors say that if the U.S. were brought in line with the average relationship between police and prisoners for developed countries, it would have 1.9 million fewer prisoners and 500,000 more police officers. Logically, hiring more police officers would have to come before the reduction in the prison population, so the higher probability of being caught would deter potential criminals.
On levels of policing, the empirical evidence is on the conservative side of the argument. Both from an economic-efficiency point of view and a crime-deterrent point of view, the U.S. needs more police, not less. Once there are more police officers, less punitive incarceration policies become more realistic.