Whole Lotta Arresting Going On

"I was astonished 44 years ago. Most people were," says criminologist Alfred Blumstein, a professor of operations research at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, who served with criminologist Ron Christensen on President Lyndon Johnson's crime task force.

Alfred is even more astonished now. What is the source of his amazement?

Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study published Monday in Pediatrics found.

"Arrest is a pretty common experience," says Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and principal author of the study.

The new data show a sharp increase from a previous study that stunned the American public when it was published 44 years ago by criminologist Ron Christensen. That study found 22% of youth would be arrested by age 23. The latest study finds 30.2% of young people will be arrested by age 23.

Blumstein says the increase in arrests for young people in the latest study is unsurprising given several decades of tough crime policies...

Now, Blumstein says, youth may be arrested for drugs and domestic violence, which were unlikely offenses to attract police attention in the 1960s. "There's a lot more arresting going on now," he says.

This is a good time to remember that there are more incarcerated people in America than in any other "civilized" country as the New York Times reported in April, 2008.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment.

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London...

We should take the word "criminals" in this context with a grain of salt.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

There's no getting around it — America is special! Of course, we did not lack proof of our "specialness" before seeing these results from Pediatrics.

And now we learn that nearly 1 in 3 young Americans (>30%) will be arrested before the age of 23. Obviously the odds that these young people will end up in the slammer is a lot higher if they get arrested. Smoking a little pot, perhaps? Accidently wrote a few checks which bounced? Stealing some food to feed the baby which came too early? Shoplifted an iPod because you couldn't afford one?

Who knows? Who cares? You're screwed now, even if you don't go to jail!

The high rate of arrest among youth is troubling because the records will follow them as adults and make it harder for them to get student loans, jobs and housing, says Kurlychek, an associate professor at University at Albany-SUNY who studies juvenile delinquency. "Arrests have worse consequences than ever for these juveniles," she says.

Arrest records "follow you forever. The average teenager who steals an iPod or is arrested for possession of marijuana — why do we make that define their lives?"

Even better, perhaps you'll be arrested in the near future for using cash and shunning credit cards. Here's a video clip taken from a Homeland Security propaganda film. Watch it and weep.

 

Comments

[John D]

I totally agree that many of our sentences are too strict, and result in unnecessary jail time. I also think our culture may be a factor in more illegal activities occurring in the US than in other countries. Our lack of social cohesion, the materialistic greed of 'keeping up with the Jones', the lack of two parent families and discipline; and the vast gap between poor and wealthy probably causes relatively more criminal activity in the US. Using the pareto principle we should ease up on the 80% of the wasteful enforcement of victimless crimes like drug usage and focus on the more serious 20%.