A brief note on Heather Mac Donald, mass incarceration, and crime

Last October, Heather Mac Donald published a column in both the Wall Street Journal and City Journal arguing that mass incarceration isn't a problem in America, and that our crime rate is the real problem we should be focusing on. I would like to point out something that makes one of the arguments in it with respect to mass incarceration and crime totally bogus. The following is a quote from the City Journal version of the column:

The critics of “mass incarceration” love to compare American incarceration rates unfavorably with European ones. Crime is inevitably left out of the analysis. Jeremy Travis and Nicholas Turner, head of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Vera Institute, respectively, penned a classic treatment of this theme in the New York Times in August 2015. Germany’s incarceration rate is one-tenth that of the U.S., they fumed. “To be sure,” they acknowledged, “there are significant differences between the two countries.” And might those “significant differences” have anything to do with crime, perhaps with the fact that the U.S. rate of gun homicide is about 17 times higher than that of Germany? Of course not. No, for Travis and Turner, the key difference is that “America’s criminal justice system was constructed in slavery’s long shadow and is sustained today by the persistent forces of racism.” The same people who denounce American gun violence and call for gun control in a domestic context go silent about gun violence when using Europe as a club to cudgel the American prison system. The U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher than the combined rate of 21 Western developed nations plus Japan, according to a 2011 study by researchers of the Harvard School of Public Health and the UCLA School of Public Health. This disparity is largely fueled by the American firearm homicide rate: 19.5 times higher than in the comparison high-income countries, according to 2003 data. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, Americans kill with guns at nearly 43 times the rate of their counterparts in those same industrialized nations. Since the American prison system is driven by violent crime, it is not surprising that America’s incarceration rate is higher than Europe’s.

Actually, contrary to Mac Donald's claims, America's overall crime rates are comparable to those of other developed countries, but American crime is much more lethal than that in other such countries. Also, Mac Donald is wrong about opponents of mass incarceration leaving out the crime rate in America from this discussion: This video, citing the International Crime Victims Survey, makes the point that 
American crime rates are comparable to those of other Western countries. 

Lastly, I will take on Mac Donald's claim about how "the American prison system is driven by violent crime." I would like to reiterate what I said in a previous post: a 2014 report by the National Research Council found that, rather than rising crime rates, “The increase in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40 years is preponderantly the result of increases both in the likelihood of imprisonment and in lengths of prison sentences.”  Here's another quote from the same report that Mac Donald and anyone who supports her might do well to read (emphasis mine): "...the growth in incarceration rates beginning in 1973 was preceded for about a decade by a very large increase in crime rates. Incarceration rates showed their strongest period of growth in the 1980s, as violent crime fell through the first half of the decade and then increased in the second. Incarceration rates continued to climb through the 1990s as the violent crime rate began to fall. Finally, in the 2000s, crime rates have remained stable at a low level, while the incarceration rate peaked in 2007, and the incarcerated population peaked in 2010. Thus the very high rates of incarceration that emerged over the past decades cannot simply be ascribed to a higher level of crime today compared with the early 1970s, when the prison boom began."