This week, Marc Levin, chief of policy and innovation for Right on Crime, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, debates Rafael A. Mangual, fellow and deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a contributing editor of City Journal. We hope you enjoy this substantive, information-packed, engaging exchange.
Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor, is also a syndicated columnist and of counsel at First Liberty Institute.
The U.S. has 8.5 times the incarceration rate of Germany. Of course, there are many differences between nations, and some might suggest other developed countries like Germany should incarcerate more people, but the U.S. is clearly an outlier. Moreover, the exponential gap in incarceration rates cannot be explained solely by the variation in crime rates, as the crime index in the U.S. is only 36 percent higher than Germany. While my Newsweek Debate opponent, Mr. Mangual, is correct that the U.S. has far more homicides than Germany, homicides are relatively rare and amount to only a small slice of violent crime and prison admissions. The U.S. violent crime rate in 2018 was 380.6 per 100,000 people, which is only about twice as much as Germanys’ rate of 181.1 in the same year.
The question of whether the U.S. over-incarcerates on a “mass” level is one many attempt to answer via international comparisons. Presenting America’s incarceration rate alongside that of another Western European democracy can, at first glance, seem shocking; but such arguments reflect an oversimplification that masks major differences that go a long way toward explaining the delta between America’s prison population, and, say, Germany’s (to take Mr. Levin’s example).
