Mass Shootings, Mass Incarceration, And American Greatness; Or, Are We Great Because We're Horrible?

America's triumphs and tragedies may be connected.

America leads the world in incarcerating its citizens. We have 716 people in prison for every 100,000 citizens. If you look at a table on incarceration rates globally, like this one, by way of comparison, Taiwan has 280 prisoners per 100,000 citizens and England and Wales have only 149.

There are a few ways to explain this international disparity.

One is that our criminal justice system is broken — and if you read this column weekly, you’ll find a lot to support that view.

Another explanation is that we simply have more people who turn to crime in the United States. If that’s right, then because our citizens are more likely to commit a crime than people in other countries, we need a higher prison population to punish them.

This overlooks Australia, which was, of course, founded by criminals, has only 151 people in prison per 100,000, which kind of suggests a problem with the idea that we’re uniquely predisposed to crime. I had long rejected this argument out of a sense of patriotism. It simply cannot be, I assumed, that Americans are more disposed to lawlessness than those in other countries.

Last week there was another mass shooting. That sentence is tragically timeless. The Onion headline “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” was last week’s #Meme Of The Week.

Which makes me wonder if perhaps these two unique American phenomena — our tendencies toward mass incarceration and mass shootings — are related.

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I don’t think our penchant for mass shootings is an indication that we’re more lawless as a group of people, such that our prison rates are justified. The folks in prison are disproportionately black, the ranks of our mass shooters are not.

Though I wonder if there isn’t another connection.

On Facebook, a musician named Jonathan Byrd had a widely shared post about guns and America; it’s on Huffington Post now. He is skeptical of the idea that gun control will stop shootings in America because many other countries — without mass shooting problems — also have lots of access to guns.

Here’s how he explains why some people here shoot strangers in public:

[Other] countries . . . take care of their citizens. You can go to school, see a doctor, or take a year off work and have a baby without worrying about losing your home or other financial catastrophes. . . .

In the U.S. you are mostly on your own. If you have a strong family and/or community, you’re set. If you don’t you’re screwed. . . . If you lose your job in the U.S., it can be life-threatening. How would you react to a life-threatening situation?

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For Byrd, our lack of safety net leads to a lack of hope. And a lack of hope leads to mass shootings (there are missing premises, yes, but run with it a bit).

John Rawls, the political philosopher, argued that if you didn’t know what position you’d have in the world, and you had a choice from that position of ignorance about how to order to society, you’d be rational to make things as well off for the worst off as you can.

Leaving aside how mind-blowingly bizarre an argument that is for a political philosophy — really, you don’t know anything about the world, but yet you’re supposed to figure out how to structure the political and economic facts of society? — the “worst off are pretty well off” principle is not miles away from the system adopted in many, if not most, other countries in the developed world.

You know, the ones where elementary schools don’t have active shooter drills.

In America, as Byrd points out, we’ve not taken that approach. We do a good job of paying for military spending, but a less good job of educating our people, providing a meaningful safety net, or providing health care. If you’re not doing well in America, you’re not doing well indeed.

There’s a hardness to us.

I wonder, if Byrd is right that this hardness is what leads to mass shootings, is it also lurking in the shadows of the causes of mass incarceration? We seem to be willing to throw other people away, either to the streets or the prisons, if they aren’t winning our great America lottery.

Yet, at the same time, what we’ve been able to do as a country is truly amazing. We’re still the country people want to come to: our Universities lead the world; Silicon Valley creates the products the rest of the world wants to buy; we invented cell phones and flying — flying! — and submarines. We put a man on the moon. When it comes to getting stuff done, we rock.

Perhaps our hardness is responsible for our greatness.

Like Orson Wells says in the Third Man:

in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Of course, Orson Wells’ character was supposed to be evil.