Too much and too little

Taken at face value, America's experience seems to suggest otherwise. It is sometimes claimed that a trend towards much sterner sentencing in the United States has gone hand in hand with falling crime. Many sorts of crime have indeed declined in America of late, but much the likeliest cause is changes in the country's demographic make-up. Young men commit disproportionately many crimes; when their numbers dip in relation to the population at large, as they have, crime dips too. (A new surge of young males is on its way.) Those who cite America in praise of tougher sentencing ought to reflect instead on the fact that their model now imprisons seven times more people, in relation to its population, than do European countries, on average; and that it nonetheless suffers a very much higher rate of violent crime, notably murder, than any comparably prosperous nation.

These distinctively American phenomena - incarceration and lethal violence have much to do with two other ways in which America is unusual: drugs and guns. This fact suggests some altogether different remedies. One is to decriminalise drugs, a policy long advocated by The Economist. The best argument for such a policy is that it would make America (and other countries) safer, by denying many of its violent criminals their main incentive to harm others. On this, to be sure, voters will take some convincing: the case, though sound, is by no means obvious. But the other clear candidate for change - ­sweeping reform of American gun laws - is something most voters already appear to want. Un­fonunately, their political leaders seem unable to deliver it.

Even if crime in America could be made in these ways to resemble crime in other countries, the idea that currently guides many governments, not just America's, would remain to be addressed. That is, does prison work?

Nobody would expect the crime rate to drop if the prisons were emptied: in that sense, at any rate, prison does work. But it does not follow that a policy of more incarceration, indiscriminately applied, makes sense. The extraordinary cost of keeping somebody locked up is clear; the corresponding benefits, at the margin, are less so. There is no persuasive evidence that greater imprisonment acts as a significant deterrent to would-be criminals. For most crimes, rates of detection are so low that the risk of facing punishment, mild or severe, may seem too small to worry about. As for rehabilitation, rates of recidivism vary according to the prison regime, but in no case lend support to the view that prison makes good citizens; often, a harder, better connected and more professional law-breaker emerges than the one who went in.

These points suggest that society should be extremely reluctant to lock people up. At the same time, however, "liberals" are wrong to ignore, as they nearly always do, another reason for incarceration: that, as somebody once put it, a criminal in jail cannot rape your sister. It may be that protection, more than any crude desire for revenge, is why popular opinion generally favours getting tough. And in this, popular opinion is surely right: protecting society is a better reason to deny somebody his liberty than the prospect of deterrence.

Ex.5.1. Match the words in the two tables as they occur together in the article above, give the Russian for the word combinations and compose your own sentences with them. Ask your groupmates to translate your sentences from Russian into English.

I.

1) mandatory	a) violence
2) mild/severe	b) criminals
3) lethal	c) hostility
4) would-be	d) sentences
5) sterner/tougher	e) punishment
6) outright	f) crime
7) falling	g) sentencing

Дата добавления: 2014-12-24