I write this afternoon from Tulia, Texas, the panhandle community that gave a healthy bump to a number of journalists.  I met Adam Liptak of the New York Times in the Swisher County courthouse in Tulia in the course of the weeklong evidentiary hearing in 2003 that exposed undercover agent Tom Coleman as a racist idiot.  Liptak works the legal beat for the Times and has recently taken an interest in the uniquely American problem of mass incarceration.

Liptak’s “Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'” touches all the bases in three pages of tight prose.  Foreign criminologists, Liptak observes, stand aghast at the American proclivity for long prison sentences.   The war on drugs is the chief culprit: we locked up 40,000 people for drug crime in 1980, a number that has risen to a staggering 500,000.

Liptak observes that, unlike other developed nations, America elects its judges, prosecutors, sheriffs and police chiefs.  In other countries, criminal justice functionaries are trained professionals who are relatively immune from the popular appetite for tough on crime policies.

Liptak remains convinced that mass incarceration has made Americans safer.  This is an open question among criminologists, and Liptak’s own statistics demonstrate why.  In recent years the British crime rate rose while America’s rate was falling, a fact that many use as proof that our tough criminal justice system is working.  On the other hand, Canada’s crime rate has generally risen and fallen with America’s.  Both Canada and Great Britain incarcerate only a fraction of the people locked up in America.  Statistics, as always, can be used by folks who think mass incarceration enhances public safety and by those, like me, who believe mass incarceration makes us all less safe by undermining our most dysfunctional families and communities.

Liptak is right, democracy is the big culprit.  I am an ardent democrat, but some matters are best left to the experts: medical diagnosis is one of them, the criminal justice system is another.

The average person believes that locking up drug dealers lowers the demand for illegal drugs thereby enhancing public health and public safety.  It ain’t so, and every working cop knows it. 

Unfortunately, our leading criminal justice people (US Attorneys and the federal Attorney General) are appointed by politicians who are frequently (almost universally) guilty of tough-on-crime pandering of the crudest sort.   Mass incarceration is no answer to the drug plague, but few elected politicians have the guts to say so. 

This isn’t Mr. Liptak’s last word on a critically important subject.  He notes, in passing, that America’s fragile social safety net is part of the problem.  This piece of the puzzle deserves more careful attention than it generally receives.  Hopefully, the Times’ legal editor will have more to say on the subject down the road.