The cost of the U.S. criminal justice system is notoriously high. The conservative American Action Forum reported in 2020, “The United States spends nearly $300 billion annually to police communities and incarcerate 2.2 million people.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg. “The societal costs of incarceration — lost earnings, adverse health effects, and the damage to the families of the incarcerated — are estimated at up to three times the direct costs, bringing the total burden of our criminal justice system to $1.2 trillion.” Moreover, a massive body of data confirms that disproportionate numbers of Black people are arrested, incarcerated and killed by police.
These two very different systems didn’t just happen. Each country made choices. For all the money spent on police, courts and incarceration, do we in the United Statesfeel safer than the Dutch? Almost certainly not. Because we are not. The Netherlands made choices about guns and drug addiction that have led to startlingly different outcomes.
Our choices have not made us safer and have cost us dearly.
In real terms, the U.S. criminal justice system and ubiquitous guns require an industry — ambulances, emergency room personnel, police, courts, judges, prisons, lawyers, private security and more — that the Dutch system does not. As I walked down the streets of Amsterdam, I imagined what we could have bought with the money we spend onthe criminal justice system: universal college education, universal medical care, a strong social safety net.
The human cost of crime in America — a family driven into poverty because a breadwinner is murdered, a child permanently disabled from a gunshot, children terrorized in schools — is astronomically higher than in the Netherlands. And then there is the opportunity cost in the United States — the murdered child who doesn’t grow up to invent the next cancer cure, the school that is forced to use resources on lockdown drills and grief counselors rather than reading teachers.
Are Americans that much more violent and crime-prone than the Dutch? If we are, we certainly aren’t spending money on mental health, counseling and emotional development that might abate it. (And to the extent that racism, a lack of social cohesion and inequality contribute to crime, the same voices that demand easy access to guns and mass incarceration also oppose steps to minimize those societal ills.)
We are very good at feeding a criminal justice system; we’re not so adept at eliminating crime. Regardless of what societal differences exist between the United States and the Netherlands, different criminal justice policies very likely could allow us to spend less money, lower incarceration rates, reduce the human and opportunity costs, and increase personal safety.
Understand, then, that we have our current criminal justice system because we have fetishized guns, criminalized addiction, neglected mental and emotional health, and resisted addressing social factors driving crime.
We could do it differently. We simply don’t want to.