These differences in crime rates involve many countries with low imprisonment rates. The robbery rate in the U.S. is not only lower than that in Britain but also that in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Scotland and Spain, according to the same study. The imprisonment rate in these countries is one-fifth to one-tenth that in the United States.
You cannot make an argument about the cost of prisons without taking into account the benefit of prisons. The Pew report makes no effort to do this. Instead, it argues that spending on prisons may be crowding out spending on education. For instance, tax dollars spent on higher education in the U.S. have increased much more slowly than those spent on corrections. The report does not ask whether the slower growth may be in part because of the sharp increase in private support for public universities, much less whether society gets as much from universities as it does from prisons.
But Pew rightly points to problems in the nation's imprisonment policy and in what it does (or, typically, doesn't do) to prevent crime in the first place. Take California. It has failed to manage well the health -- especially the mental health -- problems of many of its inmates. Federal judges are in the process of imposing tough new rules to rectify the problem. Nor has the state found good ways to integrate former inmates back into society. Instead, parole officers routinely send people back to prison if they misbehave -- and sometimes the return orders are for minor violations.
California does not handle drug offenders wisely either. Just how big this problem is remains uncertain because some inmates involved in serious crimes plead out to drug offenses to avoid tougher prison sentences. For serious drug users who have not committed a major crime, the goal should be to get them into a community treatment program and keep the offenders there.
To do that, we might emulate the HOPE (Hawaii's Opportunity for Probation with Enforcement) project in Honolulu. The program, started by state Judge Steven Alm in 2004, aims to get probationers to stay in a treatment program. Alm makes offenders take a random, mandatory drug test every week. If they fail, he immediately sends them to jail for a short time to discourage them from being on drugs. Within four years, according to a study by professors Mark Kleiman of UCLA and Angela Hawken of Pepperdine University, the violation rate among HOPE probationers fell by 90%. (Oddly, the Pew report, in discussing our "excessive" use of prison, makes no mention of the fact that there are about as many felons on probation as there are in prison.)
