Incarceration Nation: A statistical blind spot that makes the US crime rate seem lower than it is
July 1, 2014
A statistical blind spot that makes the US crime rate seem lower than it is
By Josh Voorhees for Slate
The Times West Virginian
Tue Jul 01, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — Imagine an American city with 2.2 million people, making it the fourth largest in the nation behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Now imagine that city is a place where residents suffer routine violence and cruelty at rates unlike anywhere else in the country, where they are raped and beaten with alarming frequency by their neighbors and even the city officials who are paid to keep them safe. Now imagine that we, as a nation, didn't consider the vast majority of that violence to be criminal or even worth recording. That is, in effect, the state of the U.S. correctional system today.
Each year, the federal government releases two major snapshots of crime in America: The Uniform Crime Reports, written by the FBI, and the National Crime Victimization Survey, compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). As part of the former, the FBI tallies a year's worth of crime as reported by police departments around the country. The latter estimates the same by surveying a sample of the American public. The two reports provide the best available data on crime in America and together are used as something of a proxy for how successful our justice system is at curbing crime around the country. According to both, America has become significantly safer over the past two decades, with today's violent crime rate nearly half of what it was at the start of the 1990s. Neither report, however, takes into account what happens inside U.S. prisons, where countless crimes go unreported and the relatively few that are recorded end up largely ignored...
...With the exception of fatalities — which, after all, pretty much count themselves — the Justice Department statisticians go to the greatest trouble to tally rapes and sexual assaults inside prisons, or at least they have since Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003 mandating for the first time that they go through the trouble of estimating the crisis. The most recent numbers are staggering. In a 2012 survey, a full 4 percent of the nation's prisoners and 3.2 percent of jail inmates reported being sexually victimized in the previous 12 months, more than half of which said the alleged incident involved a prison guard or other staff member. When you account for inmate turnover that figure represents roughly 200,000 possible victims a year, according to BJS...
...The number of people incarcerated in the United States quadrupled during the past four decades before plateauing (and then slightly receding) in the past five years. The inmate population grew so fast during the boom that states were unable to build prisons fast enough to keep up: At last count, more than half of the state prison systems, as well as the federal one, were operating at or above 100-percent capacity. If we choose to continue to lock people up at a rate unparalleled in the world, we should at least be honest and acknowledge that doing so is aimed at eliminating violence from our streets, not necessarily our country....
- See more at: http://www.timeswv.com/headlinenews/x1760119547/A-statistical-blind-spot-that-makes-the-US-crime-rate-seem-lower-than-it-is#sthash.hezSm59d.dpuf
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