This is disingenuous. Crime is low in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway or Sweden in large part due to how society is organised. You can't say that put a different population in and it would fall apart. Rather let a different population grow up in these countries and they would simply do less crime.

From the things I know about France I can see many obvious reasons why crime might be higher. It is a very strict society compared to e.g. Scandinavia which allows e.g. children and youngster a much freer life. The French are more likely to engage in almost psychological terror against their children. Well behaved children who don't make noise and sit still is valued in France, while Scandinavians are far more tolerant towards the natural behaviour of children and perform very mild sanctions towards bad behaviour.

France is also a more elitist and technocratic society, while Scandinavia is more egalitarian and cares more about the common man than the elite. The dehumanising vast monotone areas built in France which are now rife with crime would never have been built in a Scandinavian society.

I know I sounded very negative now. I didn't include all the wonderful things about France, because the whole point was to highlight why it isn't just a matter of having different people. The organisation of society creates the people.

The same could be said about the US. It is a society organised to produce violence.

First, this is very exaggerated. Criminals don't walk free. If you have an afternoon to spend, I recommend you go to a courthouse and see by yourself. You'll get a better sample than what some politicians may tell you.

Second, France isn't a war zone and most of us live pretty safely and happy over here.

More importantly, do you know for sure that the situation would be better with harsher prison sentences?

Well, things look very different whether you are in Aurillac or in Marseille. But some areas could possibly be mistaken for a war zone! (http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/marseille-tirs-de-kala...).

More seriously, the problem is not so much homicides than common criminality. Courts almost always give suspended sentences for petty crime, and even when the judge does not suspend the sentence, the policy is to automatically suspend it behind the scene afterwards if it's less than 6 months (juge d'application des peines). And if a criminal still ends up in jail, he would only ever do between half and two third of the sentence. The whole system is designed to be toothless.

The example of New York City under Giuliani is a pretty spectacular example of the impact of a tougher penal policy against crime. I am not suggesting this should be the only response but I do think that no response will be efficient without it.

Giulianis success in NYC was consistent enforcement, not harsher sentences.

And as many speculate the removal of lead in the gasoline.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

Very interesting. On a similar note, John Donohue and Steven Levitt theorized that the result of Roe v. Wade and the resultant availability of abortions resulted in a drop in crime beginning roughly 18 years later: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...

Having a quick look at the crime statistics, France doesn't seem to be a hotbed of crime and violence at the moment.

According to what I could dig up from Google, it's had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people and a serious assault rate of 299 per 100,000 people over the last couple of years.

Those are respectively slightly higher (1.2 vs 1.0) and significantly lower (400 vs 299, although data collection methodologies may be different) than the UK where I live, which is generally considered to be a reasonably safe country crime-wise.

(Didn't really have time to dig into other crime categories - would be interested to hear if they buck the trend.)

Not claiming your statement isn't true, but unless I'm misreading the statistics the effect doesn't seem to be a massive crime wave.

The problem is not homicides which have been consistently decreasing over the years. The problem is rather assaults, theft, cars burnt, burglaries, etc. Many of which do not even get reported anymore. For that reason the official statistics are not a good indicator. Alternative indicators that rely on surveys are rather used to measure the evolution.

Wouldn't you have to report them to get reimbursed by your insurance?

That's right, but only if what was stolen was insured and worth doing the paperwork. So cars burnt are usually fairly reliable (but the gvt often tries to publish the statistics with long delays to hide the extent of a violent episode). Burglaries a bit less, depending on the damage to the property and what was stolen. But someone stealing your mobile phone or punching you in the face because you looked at them the wrong way, not so much. In fact most of the time the police tries to discourage people from filling a complaint, as it creeps up their crime statistics, and worse than that, their unsolved crime statistics.

The flipside of that is having people with lenghty but minor criminal records doing life without the possibility of parole for drastic offenses such as being the middleman for a $10 marijuana transaction, or stealing a $160 jacket [1]. I would gladly accept a rise in petty crime to not live in a country where such barbaric sentences for nonviolent crimes are even possible.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/report/living-death-life-without-parole...

It's not exactly the flipside, rather the other extreme.