Opinion | Amsterdam shows why the U.S. criminal justice system is a failure

I recently traveled to the Netherlands with family. One evening, after an exhilarating performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, we decided to walk to our hotel. It was a 30- to 40-minute walk, but the weather was pleasant. At times, our path took us near parks that weren’t very well-lit. It was late on a weeknight, so some streets were rather deserted. Yet I never once felt nervous, defensively clutched my purse or wanted to reroute us to main thoroughfares. Now, I also feel safe walking in most parts of New York City. But that’s largely because police are everywhere. Visible on the street, in cars, on horseback.

And that got me thinking. What are the choices about crime each country made, and what are the costs of those decisions?

In the Netherlands, there are roughly 2.6 guns for every 100 people; there are more than 120 guns per 100 people in the United States. In the Netherlands, it is very, very hard to get a gun; in the United States, it is ridiculously easy to get guns. In fact, according to a report by Mariel Alper and Lauren G. Beatty in the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly “21% of state and 20% of federal prisoners said they possessed a gun during their offense. … About 29% of state and 36% of federal prisoners serving time for a violent offense possessed a gun during the offense.”

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In the Netherlands there are about 27 gun homicides a year. Not 27 per 100,000. Total. In the United States, the Pew Research Center reports, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021. (The U.S. population is about 20 times that of the Netherlands; U.S. gun homicides are more than 1,777 times the number in the Netherlands.)

Also, the Dutch do not incarcerate people for drug addiction. It’s one reason they have locked up so few people. The Guardian reported, “Since 2014, 23 prisons have been shut, turning into temporary asylum centres, housing and hotels. … The number of prison sentences imposed fell from 42,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2018 — along with a two-thirds drop in jail terms for young offenders. Registered crimes plummeted by 40% in the same period, to 785,000 in 2018.”

By contrast, a report from the Prison Policy Initiative found that in the United States, “Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 350,000 people, and drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system. And until the pandemic hit … police were still making over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences.” As a result, “Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.” In short, the United States has 163 times the number of incarcerated people as the Netherlands, more than eight times as many per 100,000 people.

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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 States feel 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.

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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 on the 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.)

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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.

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