In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes

In his latest column for The New York Times, Eduardo Porter highlights the growing costs of crime and incarceration in the United States. Porter cites new work from The Hamilton Project, including Ten Economic Facts about Crime and Incarceration in the United States, and A New Approach to Reducing Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime by Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll.

Porter highlights a Hamilton Project graph to discuss the unprecedented rate at which the United States incarcerates individuals compared to other OECD nations.

"In 2012, 2.2 million Americans were in jail or prison, a larger share of the population than in any other country; and that is about five times the average for fellow industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The nation’s unique strategy on crime underscores the distinct path followed by American social and economic institutions compared with the rest of the industrialized world."

• Read Eduardo Porter's full article in The New York Times, In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes.
• Read our latest set of economic facts, Ten Economic Facts about Crime and Incarceration in the United States.
• Read a new Hamilton Project paper, A New Approach to Reducing Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime.
  
  To learn more, please attend or watch live webcast of our event taking place tomorrow at the National Press Club in Washington, DC at 1:00 PM EST: The Social and Economic Effects of Crime and Mass Incarceration in the United States. Join the conversation on Twitter using #SmartSentencing.