Why do you assume that? Murder rates in the US were 10 times higher than in continental Europe even at the beginning of the 20th century, long before support programs existed on either side of the pond. (Indeed, in Europe, all the modern support systems, government welfare, and gun control hasn’t reduced crime—at least homicide rates—at all. Homicide rates in England, France, and Sweden hit modern levels in the 1920s: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in.... Germany and Italy saw major drops in the early 20th century, but I’d probably chalk that up to increased political stability.)

White Americans are substantially more likely to be incarcerated than Western Europeans, but not as substantially as the non-race differentiated number might suggest. White Americans are incarcerated at a rate similar to Russia.

I can't speak to the drug war in Europe, or if it exists, but it is a likely culprit for a large number of American incarcerations. 1.3 million arrests a year are for "possession only"[2] and the number of Americans in prison takes off late 80's early 90's as the drug war is ramping up [3].

My understanding of the American incarceration system, and this is mostly just my synthesized view from reading and thinking about it, I can't easily source this anywhere - is that there was a lot of crime in the late 80's and early 90's, especially in major cities. People realized that basically all violent crime is committed by relatively young men. So - they devised a system where a significant number of problematic young men (1 in 9 men [3]) are locked away for a period of time.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... (Under "Ethnicity" heading)

2 - http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/drug-war-statistics

3 - https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/

We actually don't. Obama tried to reduce the prison population by reducing the sentence or releaseing non-violent drug offenders. He found out that type make up less than 10% of the prison population.

The punitively long sentencing from the War on Drugs has meant that the people will go to great lengths to avoid arrest. Someone looking at 30-50 years for distribution won't think twice about murdering a witness if they think it will help them beat the charge.

John Pfaff, a professor who studies incarceration, found that despite a falling crime rate, the number of charged felonies has been holding steady. He suggests that aggressive prosecutors are charging felonies where previously they would have accepted a misdemeanor. He suggests that part of this is because they need to burnish their "tough on crime credentials", and part is the state generally pays for prisons and felonies where the county pays for jails and misdemeanors.

https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=16...

7 to 8 is as good as 10x.

Going from 1x to 8 is a huge 800% increase.

Whereas the correct 8 from the mentioned 10 is a mere 25% error...

Also longer sentences.

That trend, however, lagged a similar increase in violent crime. Violent crime increased by a factor of five from 1962 to 1992: http://www.newgeography.com/files/cox-crime-3.png.

The causation seems to run in the direction of more crime leading to more incarceration. Incarceration rates stayed stable in the 1960s and early 1970s. By the time incarceration started ticking up in the early 1970s, violent crime had already increased by 2.5x. By 1980, the incarceration rate was about 40% higher than in 1960. But violent crime had increased by a factor of 4. The increase in incarceration rate didn’t catch up to the increase in violent crime rate until the mid to late 1990s, when violent crime started edging down.

I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea that criminal justice reform is required now that crime rates have gone down dramatically. But we need to grapple with our own history and the nature of our society. We went through a very violent phase from 1960 to 2000. We don’t know why that happened. But it seems pretty clear that our incarceration rate was a lagging response to that phenomenon.