Why Nations Jail

Economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the massive increase of living standards that began 200 years ago “the Great Fact.”[1] When looking at the hockey stick–shaped graph of world GDP over time, its importance is obvious. Today’s material wealth is so much greater than the past’s, and it arrived so quickly, that it must play a central role in any theory of social change.

The U.S. imprisonment trend also looks like a hockey stick. Stable and modest growth occurred throughout the early twentieth century. Then in the 1970s, the line shot up, quintupling by the 2000s. Aside from dampening economic optimism, this trend evokes a similar visceral reaction to McCloskey’s. The change in U.S. inmate population has been so big and its accumulation so fast that it can’t be ignored.

David Garland coined the phrase “mass imprisonment” because he thought the phenomenon deserved a name all its own. Like Europe’s “great confinement” of the 17^th century or Russia’s “gulag archipelago,” modern America’s mass incarceration appears unique via two defining features, its sheer size and its racially disparate application.[2] The term has become standard parlance, and such “American” features take center stage in most causal explanations. Popular accounts tend to focus on economic conditions; America’s individualist culture; its history of slavery, segregation, and racism; and conservative political preferences regarding prohibition and retribution. To fix incarceration, it’s implied that America must change its conscience and support controls against racial bias, better social programs for the poor, drug decriminalization, and less punitive policing.

Culture, racism, and the drug war obviously matter. But I’d like to challenge some of these presumed causes by simply asking how much they fully explain global patterns, and how much their implied reforms would substantially reshape the trends. I argue that popular narratives have largely overlooked some factors that substantially contribute to prison growth.

In economic theory, the “Great Fact” has received an appropriately international analysis.  Yet I worry that prison discourse is too focused on the United States, when in fact incarceration transcends the American experience. Most countries have experienced growth. Ecuador, Indonesia, Cambodia, Israel, Serbia, and Georgia don’t share much economic, partisan, or cultural American-ness, yet all doubled their prison populations in a decade, while Britain took three.[3] An analysis solely of U.S. idiosyncrasies can’t explain global or historic patterns. Academic research has developed empirical evidence and nuanced theories for why some nations imprison more than others, but media commentaries lag behind, and their oversimplifications carry practical consequences.

Is American-style capitalism, with its supposed inequality and market volatility, partially to blame for large inmate populations? Maybe somewhat. Economic factors like unemployment, welfare spending, and union power correlate with cross-country imprisonment rates,[4] but causation cannot be discerned. Many studies have investigated this popular view with ambiguous results.[5] In short, no data confirms a consistent relationship between more liberal market economies – or higher economic performance – and larger prison populations. In fact, more economically free countries host less homicide and yet have better crime reporting.[6]

Is racism the primary driver of American mass imprisonment? While U.S. history is undoubtedly plagued by the legacy of slavery, and significant bias still infects our system, these experiences don’t much explain why other nations host similarly disparate prison populations. Or, sometimes, worse. From the peasant classes of ancient Greece,[7] to Romani inmates in today’s Czech Republic, or to Turkish prisoners in Germany, in each context one finds a greater proportion of the socially disadvantaged than is found in their general society. In fact, in England, Canada, and Australia, the minority to white inmate ratios all outpace the United States.[8]

The advent of American mass incarceration also occurred alongside measurable racial progress. The relationship between race and imprisonment is not clearly causal from the former to the latter. The facts suggest more about the racial effects of imprisonment than they do how race drives growth in the prison population.

Is America’s vengeful culture responsible? Again maybe partially, but such features don’t explain why so many other nations have multiplied their prisons without similarly rugged individualists supporting Nixon- or Reagan-ite tough on crime policies. While measured U.S. opinions do seem more punitive than in the past,[9] less is known for cross-country comparisons. Most experimental evidence suggests vengeful preferences are common across identities,[10] and economist Naci Mocan reports the opposite cultural relationship, with poor, war-torn, and collectivist countries hosting more vengeance.[11]

The shared timing of American incarceration with drug prohibition seems too tightly linked to be coincidence. But prohibition is not a sufficient explanation for U.S. rates, let alone for global patterns. Here’s why.

First, when the inmates of asylums are included in imprisonment statistics, the trend line less conspicuously resembles a hockey stick.[12] Second, drug violations only make up about 17% of state inmates and represent about 20% of the growth since 1980, with current admission rates matching.[13] Without drug convictions, American incarcerations would have quadrupled rather than quintupled. Perhaps this underestimates the criminogenic effects of prohibition, but multiplicative growth seems to stand apart from drugs.

And again, if uniquely American factors cause mass incarceration, then why is there a global pattern?[14] The majority of popular explanations merely push the question back a stage. If American-style trends are to serve as general explanations for global imprisonment patterns, then other countries should share similar policy and cultural histories in proportion to their incarceration rates relative to the United States. What about the United States and other prison growth nations allowed for these phenomena to occur in the first place?

The common narratives are not wrong per se, but likely incomplete. Current research emphasizes a general relationship between social institutions and incarceration. Nations with similar political, economic, and cultural systems tend to host similar criminal justice procedures and similar prison populations.[15] Remaining debates largely surround how best to organize nations into institutional categories that make sense of the incarceration pattern. In short, what particular institutional types shape incarceration and how? Most tend to emphasize that social changes such as employment cycles, public opinions, or partisan trends shape class and racial tensions. Less appreciated is how the organizational patterns of institutions may relate to incarceration outcomes regardless of the particular interests or motivations of voters or policymakers.

One can understand this missing factor of organizational influence by thinking comparatively about American drug prohibition. Legalized narcotics are extremely rare. You can’t walk down the streets of Germany, Sweden, or England and sell heroin without getting arrested. Most countries prohibit drugs, but only America launches an ominously but fittingly titled “war on drugs.” It is not so much that we prohibit drugs, but rather how we finance and manage that prohibition, which sets us apart. I believe that America’s drug war, American criminal justice services more generally in recent decades, and those criminal justice systems that have behaved similarly, are all united by how much more power they afford to the national as opposed to local levels in criminal justice decisionmaking. And the result is mass incarceration.

Theory shows that more hierarchical organizations commit more errors of overidentification.[16] Increases in criminal legislation, arrest rates, convictions, and sentence lengths would all seem to be relevant manifestations. Similarly, many public choice scholars have noticed that by concentrating perceived deterrent benefits while dispersing costs, democratic politics rewards the expansive spending, employment, and voter appeasement accomplished through criminalization and prison growth.

Cross-country empirics also support the idea that organizational factors are at play. Nicola Lacey[17] has observed the organization of electoral processes correlate with incarceration rates. Nations with winner-take-all elections host greater political incentives to appease punitive biases. They also have more difficulty coordinating voting blocks for reform. In contrast, plurality systems foster more inclusion of minority interests.

Similarly, my recent paper coauthored with Claudia Williamson shows nations founded in the British common law tradition rather than civil law host larger incarceration rates. While the common law is typically more decentralized, we suspect criminal justice systems were historically founded and subsequently organized more hierarchically relative to other common law social sectors.[18] Furthermore this concentration of national power was exaggerated in the twentieth century.[19]

Just as market economies require decentralized networks of individual actors for technological innovation to occur, so too do legal norms and public policies likely benefit from competitive-like arrangements. When criminal justice authority is held at the local level, as is more common around the world and throughout history, authorities are better attuned to the local demands and concerns of citizens. Yet in our system, the typical response to perceived local biases in criminal justice is to further empower federal oversight. 

When local police forces multiply rapidly and are equipped with military style technologies thanks to federal financing, there are often unintended consequences. Though motivated by concerns for the disadvantaged, there is no practical guarantee that national power won’t also have structural biases. Yes, local cops, judges, and juries can be racist, but coping with better-funded riot police and swat teams is nonetheless a burden on poor minorities. From Ferguson to Baltimore we seem to be stuck with the worst of both worlds: racially biased local cops and a militarized national response.

Further, changes in social morality, public opinion, or traditional policy initiatives do little to reform the organizational patterns of institutions. Politics doesn’t typically aim at, nor is it capable of, fundamentally reshaping the political or legal process.

That’s a problem, because measured correlations between organizational factors and prison populations seem big. In our study, we initially merely sought to give descriptive magnitudes for relevant variables associated with incarceration.  A standard deviation decrease in an obvious factor like homicides (about 12.5 per 100,000 citizens) was associated with approximately 48 fewer inmates per 100,000 citizens, whereas French civil law countries hosted approximately 76 fewer inmates per 100,000 citizens than common law nations. The organizational features of institutions don’t just matter, they seem to matter a lot.

Second, institutional organization shapes incentives and thus may serve a more foundational role than standard causes. Suppose mass imprisonment occurred not because Americans were so morally outraged about drug use or fearfully retributivist regarding violence, but rather because policymakers and citizens were structurally encouraged to embrace legislation, enforcement, and spending. Legalizing particular drugs won’t change this general incentive structure; it will only divert it. With similar incentives in place, future increased crime rates or headline cases could reignite the imprisonment cycle, albeit under some other form of crime.

Policies that ignore structural influences may thus fall short. Worse, by expending real resources or by enhancing national authority they may add insult to injury. More accurate theories of incarceration may be needed to produce more effective reforms.