Michael Tonry (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law) has published "Why Americans Are a People of Exceptional Violence" on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Among Western countries, the United States is an exceptionally violent place. Serious intentional violence—homicides, other violent gun crimes, mass killings, and police killings of civilians—is dramatically more common. Many American laws—self defense retreat doctrines, stand your ground laws, permissive or minimal regulation of access to handguns and semi-automatic weapons, corporal punishment of children—are much more tolerant of behaviors that inherently present increased risks of violent behavior and victimization. American laws governing sentencing are unique among those of Western countries in both the absolute severity of the punishments they prescribe and allow and in the absence of viable legal mechanisms for challenging sentences on the basis either that their absolute severity violates minimum human rights standards or that they are disproportionately severe in relation to the seriousness of the wrongdoing for which they are imposed (in either case a form of unjustifiable state violence).
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