When Talking About Defunding the Police, Don’t Forget Prisons
Among rich nations, the U.S. doesn’t appear to be over-policed. Where the U.S. stands out is in the number of people it keeps behind bars.
The ratio of police officers to population in the U.S. is on the low side among rich nations. Prosecutors and judges appear to be thinner on the ground here, too, though the statistics on that are less timely and probably less comparable. Measures of arrests and prosecutions also face comparability issues, but data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at least don’t show America to be a big outlier.
What part of the U.S. criminal justice system does stand out by international standards? The prisons. Even after almost a decade of declines, as of 2016 this country’s prison and jail population was tops in the world, both in absolute terms and relative to population, according to the most recent World Prison Population List from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research in the U.K.