It’s at least arguable that the United States uses prison, or jail, as a punishment more than just a little too much. However, this new report insisting that half of all families have seen a member sent there is rather less than it seems. The actual statement being made is that half of families have had someone sent there for a night or more, which is very much less horrifying.
The usual distinction is that prisons are run by the feds and states, jails by the counties, and that sentences of less than six months are spent in the latter. Given that half of any group seeing family members in prison would be horrifying, in jail is very much less so. You can, in theory, end up in jail for looking at a cop the wrong way, and who hasn’t done that?
However, there’s one important point here that does need some explaining. This is the contention that the poor end up in jail or prison more often than those richer. Entirely true, but the traffic is not all one way. For while it’s true that the richer have the better lawyers to keep them out, it’s also that being in is likely to lead to poverty. Thus it’s not true to insist that this evidence of greater incidence among the poor is a result of the bias in the system against the poor.
Sure, I think we all believe that there is such bias, as we might imagine there’s racial bias. As we also absolutely know there’s gender bias — men are very much more likely to be jailed than women. But we still cannot say that all of what we see is due to that bias because of that very complication above.
To vary the example a little, it’s entirely true that ill health seems to strike the poor more than the rich. We’d even be willing to agree that poverty causes ill health at least at times. But it’s also equally true that ill health causes poverty. That incapacitating heart problem that strikes when you’re 40 is unlikely to leave you rich at 50 — not because of the costs of treatment, not because you lose all you own, but because you’ll (the clue is in the incapacity) not be earning for a decade, which will reduce economic well-being.
That concentration of ill health among the poor thus has two causes, at least, and we cannot ascribe all of it to just the one. This is, despite it’s obviousness, an important distinction all too often missed. It’s not difficult to find someone who will claim that if poverty and inequality cause ill health, then reducing the poverty and inequality will reduce the ill health. Books like The Spirit Level are built upon this very idea. But if it’s the ill health being the cause, then reducing the inequality’s not going to make much difference.
So too with incarceration rates. My own prejudice, for the nothing it’s worth, is that the U.S. does use prison and jail much too often. I’m also entirely willing to believe that there’s anti-poor bias in the system. But this idea that the incidence among the poor proves the level of bias the system has against the poor just isn’t so. For getting caught up in that system, spending anything more than the most trivial few days in it, is likely to lead to poverty itself. The traffic is two way — who thinks that someone coming out of a two- or four-year prison sentence is going to be financially well off? Even a few weeks in the county lock-up can seriously damage economic prospects like keeping a job and so on.
Poverty indeed causes many things, but equally many things cause poverty. It’s important to distinguish between the two. For absolutely no one at all believes that abolishing poverty and inequality is going to do away with all the crime that we use prisons and jails for.
The last people who believed that — no, really, they thought that when the socialist system was properly established there would be no more crime — were the Soviets. And boy, were they wrong.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
