The Injustice of Under-Policing in America – Swift Certain Fair Resource Center

The Injustice of Under-Policing in America

The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”
**
America combines low levels of certainty with high levels of severity, especially in its most disadvantaged communities
One way of summarizing much of what we have shown so far is to observe that the United States seems to emphasize the severity of punishment over the certainty of sanction. The exceedingly high prison/police ratio and the low level of police per homicide together suggest that the United States relies on long sentences rather than the sanction of arrest to control crime. One way to estimate certainty and severity more directly is to decompose the prisoner/homicide ratio into the ratio of arrests to homicide (estimating certainty) and the ratio of prisoners to arrests (estimating severity). Figure 4 plots these two ratios across the developed world. The result supports our judgment: the United States has relatively low levels of certainty but relatively high levels of severity.
This graph plots measures of certainty (arrests/homicides), severity (prisoners/arrests), and their product (prisoners/homicides, or punitiveness) in the United States and the developed world, as well as for Black Americans specifically. It shows that the United States’ relatively ordinary levels of punitiveness reflect low levels of certainty and high levels of severity and that this combination is especially true for Black Americans.
One advantage of using homicides, arrests, and prisoners to measure these two concepts is that we can say something about how certainty and severity are distributed within the United States. As Figure 4 also shows, while all Americans suffer from an exceptional balance of certainty and severity, it is Black people in the United States who are especially subject to it.