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I'm a big believer in rehabilitation, forgiveness and second chances, but there's something that troubles me. Since 1991 America's crime rate has fallen immensely. America started adapting more draconian sentencing in the '90s such as locking large numbers of people up for life.
Europe on the other hand has seen a massive rise in crime that started around the same time it did in America (the late '60s/early '70s). Unlike America however it did not start to fall after the end of the Cold War, but has continued to rise, albeit quite slowly since the turn of the millennium.
If you exclude homicide Europe is actually more dangerous than America now and has been since the early '90s. I think the reason for that is the massive presence of firearms in the US rather than American culture being otherwise more inherently violent.
I deplore America's prison culture and the fact we imprison more people today than Stalin did in the gulags. But it makes me wonder. Is Europe's crime rising because their punishments are not harsh enough? I don't think the death penalty would make any difference, but do you think they need to take a page from the American system and start sentencing people to 150 years in prison? As someone who is very pacifistic I hate to say it, but is America doing the right thing and Europe being too soft on crime?
Or can the divergence between American and European crime rates be explained by something entirely different? Ethnic tensions seem to increase crime and America was very ethnically tense from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Europe had very homogenous societies for the most past until the 1980s. It should be noted that Canada's crime rate has been falling as well as America's and they don't have the death penalty, nor do they sentence people to life without any hope of ever getting out (though the Dangerous Offender act is close). I would hardly call Canadian justice "soft" though as they actually have more draconian sentencing than the States for some things such as drunk driving.
Europe and the US often have crime from different social sources. The street gang culture on American streets is third world crime with first world victims. This sounds crazy until you remember that the gang MS13 has connections to El Salvador. Gangs can become easy to control with the right tactics such as injunctions. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong but isn't a lot of Europe's crime related to Roma Gypsies? We don't have such an element on the streets in the US. I would imagine that they are harder to truly target as they are relatively migratory.
One has to exclude murders because of the American gun culture. Our murder rate is higher because killing is easier with guns.
Now my entire post is purely speculative so please feel free to correct me on anything.
The OECD statistics show that the US has a higher intentional homicide rate than all of Europe except Estonia, more recorded rape cases than all of Europe except Sweden, there are only 5 European countries with a higher number of robberies than the US, there are 5 European countries with more cases of vehicle theft than the US, there are 12 European countries with more assaults than the US and 9 European countries with more burglaries than the US. Apart from the latter two, in which the US would be middle-of-the-pack if it were part of Europe, the US has a higher crime rate than almost all of Europe - at least, those European countries that are part of the OECD (27 in total).
This will of course be anecdotal and laden with preconceived notions, but here we go with a couple of observations:
- the decline of crime in the US shows a knee-in-the-curve (sharp change) some 17-20 years after the Roe vs. Wade decision. The reasoning goes that the teenagers and young-men who grow up to be criminals mostly hail from broken families and disadvantaged households, where the kids are unloved and not properly raised. Well, if those would-be kids would have been aborted starting in 1973, the potential pool of criminals would be attenuated. The fetuses abroted in 1973 would have been 17 in 1990... prime criminal age... except that they were never born, and therefore weren't around to commit crimes. This is the hypothesis of the very influential book, "Freakonomics". To summarize, declining rates of violent crime in the US are due to the success of legalized abortion.
- despite the vituperative argument over illegal immigration in the US today, overall I think that Europe has struggled more than America to absorb its recent immigrants, legal or illegal. The conjecture would be the violent crime in European immigrant ghettos has been flaring for the past decade or so, offsetting the otherwise declining crime-rates amongst "natives".
I don't necessarily support or condemn these conjectures... just food for thought.
For the millionth time on this forum- Europe is a continent. There's so many countries in it, each drastically different in culture, economics, demographics, and certainly crime. It's like fearing Victoria, BC because of the crime in Guatemala City. Compare countries to countries, not a country to a continent.
Wow, can we officially award all of these 1st grade geography expert's medals so that they don't feel compelled to remind us about our continents in any thread where they can conceivably find a way to crowbar it in?
What's the big deal with comparing the US to Europe? The US is about as diverse as a country can possibly be, so it makes more sense to me to compare it to continent with loose similarities than to a country within the continent that is no bigger that one of our fifty states. Is that cool? Can we get on with the thread?
For the millionth time on this forum- Europe is a continent. There's so many countries in it, each drastically different in culture, economics, and certainly crime. It's like fearing Victoria, BC because of the crime in Guatemala City. Compare countries to countries, not a country to a continent.
You're right, but continental Europe is comparable to the continental US in terms of size and population as well as overall economy. Comparing a single European country to the US is lop-sided as most of those countries are no larger than our larger states. It may not seem like it due to being within the same political nation state but Washington state is vastly different from Texas which is vastly different from Ohio which is vastly different from Maine so I think the comparison, while a rough one, makes more sense than comparing France, which is the size of Texas with about twice the population, to the whole of the US which spans an entire continent.
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