THE UNITED STATES IS the most violent developed country in the world. It is also the most incarcerated. For more than four decades the second problem has grown, often under the guise of addressing the first. While the country’s homicide rate has fallen sharply from its peak, it remains higher than that of any other developed democracy, sandwiched between Estonia and Chile in international rankings. America imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, free or unfree, anywhere in the world, except the tiny archipelago of Seychelles. The total number of Americans under penal supervision, some have argued, even rivals the number of Russians in the gulag under Stalin. Nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world is an American, though the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population.
If you move in affluent, white, elite social circles, you probably know these statistics but never really see them in action. In the world’s most punitive criminal system, the application of punishment is uneven in the extreme. Black men aged 20 to 34 without a high school degree have an institutionalization rate of about 37 percent. For white men without a high school degree, it’s 12 percent, or nearly three times lower. In Sandtown-Winchester, which is 96.6 percent black and is the small slice of West Baltimore where Freddie Gray lived and died, there were, in February 2015, 458 people in prison. In Greater Roland Park/Poplar Hill, an affluent Baltimore neighborhood that is 77.5 percent white, there was a grand total of three.
Just as punishment is unequally distributed, so too is violence. Within the same city, the threat of violent death from homicide is radically unequal across different neighborhoods. Chicago has many affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods on the North Side where the murder rate is less 1 per 100,000. But on the city’s poor, predominantly black South Side, several neighborhoods have a homicide rate that is 9,000 percent higher. On the whole, across the country, African Americans are victims of homicide at a rate of nearly 20 per 100,000. For whites, the rate is 2.5. Put another way: for white Americans, lethal violence is nearly as rare as it is in Finland; for black Americans, it’s nearly as common as it is in Mexico. So to talk about the American experience of crime and punishment is to miss the point. Though Dayvon and I are both Americans, we live in different countries.
Different systems of justice are a centuries-old American tradition, indeed a foundational one. But the particular system we have now—the sprawling alternative state of jails, prisons, probation, penal supervision, warrants, “stop and frisk,” “broken windows” policing, and the all-too-frequent shooting of the unarmed—dates back to the late 1960s.
Three things happened in the 1960s to shape the politics of how and upon whom we enforce law. The first was the success of the civil rights movement in beginning to dislodge decades of Jim Crow and crack open the vise of American racial hierarchy. This hard-fought success also produced intense, even violent white backlash, widespread fragility, and resentment at the social order being unmade.
The second was a once-in-a-century crime rate increase that would last several decades. The scope of this social upheaval is difficult to overstate. In 1965, the year of the Watts riots, there were 387,390 violent crimes in a nation with a population of about 194 million. By 1979, the number of violent crimes jumped more than 300 percent to 1,208,030, in a country whose population increased by only about 15 percent. The trend would continue until 1992, the year the country set an all-time violent crime record with 1,932,274 incidents. The great crime wave showed up in almost every geographical area in the country and across every category of crime, from rape to murder, assault to larceny. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before.
Any social indicator that rose as rapidly as crime did would rightly be seen as a national crisis. If the number of people who died in car crashes doubled in ten years or if inflation went up 750 percent in thirty-five years, our politics would demand some response. So the question in the late 1960s wasn’t so much if something would be done but what would be done.
The third thing was that even as white backlash was gaining strength and crime was on the rise, street protests were exploding. In 1965 the unrest and police response in Watts left thirty-four dead. In 1967 twenty-three people were killed in Detroit following a police raid on a speakeasy. More uprisings followed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., resulting in forty-three people killed in riots throughout the nation.
There are many theories as to why crime exploded during this period, and they vary significantly in their persuasiveness, but what mattered most politically was how easily politicians and then voters were able to make the connection between the unraveling of order and the violations of law. When people are allowed to take over the streets in protest, what’s to stop them from robbing and stealing and killing?
In 1968 Richard Nixon ran for U.S. president making precisely this argument. When he appeared before the delegates of the Republican National Convention in Miami to accept their nomination, he offered a grim vision. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We hear sirens in the night. . . . We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.”