Christopher Caldwell's thoughtful article on the status of Muslim immigrants in Sweden includes a staggering statistic:
In 2004, there were only 329 people serving sentences of more than five years in all of Sweden.
By contrast, the United States has approximately 132,000 prisoners serving life sentences and sentenced 430,000 individuals to state prisons for a mean sentence length of four years in 2002 alone, which means that at any given time there are hundreds of thousands of people serving more than a five year sentence in state or federal prison in this country.
Even accounting for the much smaller population of Sweden (approximately 9 million), these disparities are unbelievable. Obviously, there is a complex debate about the causes of the difference in the prison populations, but its sheer magnitude is shocking to me.
I understand from people who know from such things that sentence length is the driving factor behind prison population differences between the US and Europe (and Japan/Australia). Another important factor is imprisonment for small-quantity drug possession. Violent crime rates are generally comparable among western nations. In Germany, only a sliver (ca. 5%) of convicted criminals are sentenced for more than 6 years.
Criminologists and other philosophy-of-punishment types usually talk about standardized imprisoned-per-100,000 numbers. My numbers are a couple of years old, but the last time I looked the US imprisons over 750 people per 100,000. The most prison-happy country in Europe, which is either the UK or Portugal (I forget) sits at around 190. Finland, the Euro-miracle of prison population reduction, has about 65. I can't remember whether the US figures include county and and other sub-state municipality prisoners.
Posted by: DJ Ninja | February 10, 2006 at 03:15 PM