America’s Under-Incarceration Crisis

The brutal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte commuter train and other recent high-profile crimes by repeat violent offenders have exposed that, far from the “over-incarceration” problem that liberals so often lament, the United States actually has a serious under-incarceration crisis – and it’s costing innocent lives.

In the wake of Zarutska’s gruesome murder by Decarlos Brown, Jr., a man with 14 prior arrests, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat, outrageously claimed that arresting criminals is not the way to stop crimes from occurring. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Lyles said.

Of course, basic reality and common sense directly disprove Lyles’s statement. If Brown Jr. had been in jail – as he should have been – for any of his prior crimes, Iryna Zarutska would still be alive today.

But that absurd reasoning – that putting violent people in jail won’t stop violent crime – is now the default position of the Democrat Party. U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett was even more direct when she declared on a podcast recently that “committing a crime doesn’t make you a criminal.” New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, has questioned the “purpose” of jails and prisons. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said that jails and law enforcement are “a sickness that has not led to safe communities.”

Liberals cite plenty of reasons for opposing incarceration as a crime-fighting tool, including claims that the criminal justice system is “systemically racist” and that “society” is to blame for “failing” career criminals. Additionally, liberals believe that “tough on crime” policies like “broken windows policing,” or “stop and frisk,” are discriminatory, and so criminals that would otherwise be identified and detained by police are allowed to roam free in the name of “equity” and “social justice.”

But one of the left’s favorite lines, as Mayor Lyles alludes to, is that we can’t lock dangerous people up because prisons are “overcrowded.” Accordingly, liberals tell us, we must empty out the jail cells. The constant refrain from the political left is that prisons are now over capacity, and so certain “non-violent” crimes should not be punished.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment just how dangerously radical that notion is, because it reveals the total lack of coherent logic at the core of the liberal mindset.

According to the left, America supposedly does not have enough jail cells. But instead of the sensible solution, which would be to build more jail cells to lock up the criminals, the left’s proposition is that we release the criminals.

Moreover, the claim that prisons are bursting at the seams is dubious at best. Despite the media narrative, prison populations have been falling for over a decade, even as violent crime remains high in many major cities. Far from being “overcrowded,” many state systems, especially in blue states, are operating below capacity, while thousands of offenders, especially so-called “non-violent” career criminals like Decarlos Brown, Jr., (who had prior arrests for robbery with a dangerous weapon and assault) never face meaningful prison time at all.

In truth, not only do more people need to be locked up, especially repeat offenders, but their sentences need to be for much longer.

Consider an NIH study published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, which examined all violent crime convictions in Sweden from 1973 to 2004 among people born between 1958 and 1980.

That study found that the vast majority of violent offenders were repeat offenders – just one percent of the population accounted for 63 percent of all violent crimes. If the Swedish government had imposed a ten-strike law for criminals (that is, anyone who commits ten crimes goes to jail for life), it could have reduced violent crime by 20 percent. That number rises to 50 percent with a three-strikes law and 80 percent for a one-strike law.

In the United States, U.S. Sentencing Commission data shows that 63.8 percent of violent offenders commit another violent crime after being released from prison. In liberal cities, some criminals are arrested and released dozens of times for so-called “minor” crimes before committing more serious offenses. Alexander Wright, who attacked a New York City subway worker in 2022, had been arrested no less than 41 times.

In short, the bulk of serious violent crime is concentrated in a very small, identifiable group, and so any criminal justice policy debate must begin with the incapacitation of the worst violent offenders. If you toughen sentencing so that those who repeatedly and violently offend are kept off the streets for longer (or permanently, for the very worst), you can achieve dramatic reductions in violent crime.

In short, more, not less incarceration, is the answer. Eventually, with stricter consequences, would-be criminals will think twice before offending. As is, many commit crimes with impunity knowing that they will quickly be released to victimize more people.

We can see what this looks like in practice in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele. After decades of gang violence that made the country one of the deadliest in the world, peaking at over 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015, his government launched a “war on gangs” in 2022.

Critics claim Bukele’s crackdown is too heavy-handed, but the results speak for themselves. In 2022, homicides dropped to 7.8 per 100,000; in 2023 they fell further to 2.4 per 100,000; and in 2024, El Salvador recorded just 114 homicides nationwide, or about 1.9 per 100,000.

By many metrics, that makes El Salvador among the safest countries in Latin America. The government rightly credits this drop to its incarceration surge: arresting tens of thousands of suspected gang members, increasing prison capacity (including building a megaprison that can hold up to 40,000 inmates), and doling out harsh sentences to violent criminals.

These examples show that, contrary to the narrative of over-incarceration, the problem is not that America locks up too many people, but that we don’t sufficiently lock up the worst people for long enough.

Of course, leftist politicians and activists will often point to “falling crime rates” as proof that their policies are working, and that crime isn’t the problem that those on the right make it out to be.

But much of what gets advertised as a decline in crime is in fact another result of so-called “criminal justice reform,” where cities and municipalities either reclassify crimes like shoplifting from felonies to misdemeanors, decide not to charge or prosecute entire categories of offenses, or to even go as far as to deliberately manipulate crime data, as was allegedly the case in Washington, D.C.

By removing these incidents from the official books, the data looks better on paper, but the lived experience of citizens tells a much different story: lawlessness on the streets, emboldened offenders, dangerous mass transit systems, and a public that knows full well crime is not actually dropping, it’s just being redefined away.

When Democrats say that “we will never arrest our way out of homelessness or mental health,” or “committing a crime doesn’t make you a criminal,” they are stating unequivocally that they value preserving the freedom of repeat violent offenders more than the safety of innocent people.

America has neither too many criminals locked up nor too many prison cells. Rather, we have far too many high-risk offenders and mentally unstable people still walking free. A society that refuses to jail its most dangerous individuals is a society that has chosen chaos over order and tolerance for evil over care for the innocent.

Adam Johnston is a writer whose work has been featured in The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Daily Caller. He is also the creator of the Substack publication “Conquest Theory,” where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @ConquestTheory.