This report gives the most extensive review in the changing demography of race and incarceration and points to a fairly dramatic decrease in the ration between black and white disparity mostly driven by the change in drug offenses. The Key findings are below and below that I include the URL for the entire report:
"Key Findings
• From 2000 to 2016, racial and ethnic disparites declined across prison, jail, probaton, and parole populatons in the U.S.
For example, the black-white state imprisonment disparity fell from 8.3-to-1 to 5.1-to-1, and the Hispanic-white parole
disparity fell from 3.6-to-1 to 1.4-to-1.i
• Black-white disparities in state imprisonment rates fell across all major crime categories. The largest drop was for drug
offenses. In 2000, black people were imprisoned for drug crimes at 15 times the rate of whites; by 2016, that ratio was
just under 5-to-1.
• Among women, the black-white disparity in imprisonment fell from 6-to-1 to 2-to-1, a sharper decrease than the
decline among men. The disparity among women fell because of an increase in the imprisonment rate for whites for
violent, property, and drug crimes, and a decrease in the imprisonment of black women for drug crimes.
• The change in the black-white male imprisonment disparity occurred as the number of black men in state prisons declined
by more than 48,000 (to about 504,000) and the number of white men increased by more than 59,000
(to roughly 476,000). Comparatively, the black-white female disparity decreased as the number of black women
in state prison fell by more than 12,000 (to about 24,000) and the number of white women increased by nearly
25,000 (to about 60,000).
• Reported offending rates of blacks for rape, robbery, and aggravated assault declined by an average of 3% per year between
2000 and 2016, decreases that contributed to a drop in the black imprisonment rate for these crimes. This decrease was
offset in part by an increase in the expected time to be served upon admission, which increased for both blacks and whites.
• Hispanic-white disparities in all four correctional populations have narrowed steadily since 2000. For Hispanics
and whites on probation, the data showed no disparity in rates by 2016."
Does anyone else think this is a strange interpretation of the first chart? Looks like 20 years of continued increases in incarceration to me, despite reductions in crime. Then incarceration eventually starts going down when the reduction in crime starts to plateau. This doesn't look like a correlation to me, to say less of causation.
The incarceration rate started to drop in 2008 which is 11 years after the peak crime rate. The reason for this is that the people being released occurs, depending on length of sentence, some years after the crime, so you would expect a lag of some length between crime rate and incarceration. People are incarcerated for crimes committed in the past
Another point - the war on drugs is so structural it is difficult to capture its insane impacts in crime statistics - because creating these enormous black markets empowers organized crime. These empowered organizations create violent crime that is seemingly unrelated to drugs. We should have learned the folly of prohibition and Al Capone’s bloody gangland massacres but apparently not. Today Latin America particularly faces such massacres with regularity and the cartels are often more powerful than the states. Here in the US inner city gangs main source of revenue is often drug sales (perhaps supplemented with prostitution theft and gambling)
Drugs and alcohol are demanded whether illegal or not. People want soothing, no matter how much you tell them its bad. And anyone who has the personality to seek out such sees the hypocrisy of alcohol and tobacco being legal when obviously more addictive and harmful than several popular, illegal soft drugs. No amount of “War on Drugs” is stopping this dynamic, in fact, this war only limits access to more safe usage while necessarily exposing users to violent criminals, who eventually fight wars for lucrative black market turf.
Enabling safe relief valves that also guide users of hard drugs into the intensive therapy necessary to break usage seems to me the obvious path for a more healthy dynamic
I realize this is a bit off-topic, but feel compelled to add that the main cause of crime is childhood trauma. Obviously, lower crime rates would contribute to a virtuous circle here, but teaching parents nonviolent methods of discipline, reducing poverty, and supporting employment policies that allow parents to be more involved with their children would also lead to better outcomes.
The chart would imply this with the caveat that it is an association not necessarily proving causality. Common sense would suggest that keeping people prone to violent crime in jail prevents them from committing those crimes so some number of crimes have to be prevented by having the most likely perpetrators in jail. Whether that number prevented is more than say the number caused by making prisoners released more likely to commit crimes or damaging communities, I dont know, though I suspect it is.
Some 33% of violent crime prisoners released will be reincarcerated for violent crime (and some number more will actually commit violent crimes, not everybody is caught.). I dont know the chance that somebody never imprisoned will be convicted of a violent crime but it has to be a whole lot less than a third, maybe more like 0.5%
Very much a history-never-repeats-itself-but-it-does-often-rhyme observation ... everyone I've talked to seems to think an 80s-90s level hollowing out of the cities is coming. Maybe Chicago is unique or my friend group is (i.e., out of 13 families in the city in 2018 only 2 are left) but it sure feels like we're in a vicious spiral. Office vacancy is at record highs (>20%). I've heard projections as high as 35% with class C property just getting turned in. Tax base is getting smashed. I don't see how a mayor will be able to pull out of this tail spin.
One way would be to repeal as many regulations on the use of property in Chicago as possible. A second way, that would require cooperation from the surrounding suburbs, would be to combine all the public school districts in the Chicagoland area into a single unified public school district.
The best idea I've heard would be to fund the defunct class C office to resi conversations with the [edit: $2B+] war chest the city collects through TIF funds (e.g., up-zoning). But no one is expecting the city to do anything. The layers of corruption are insane.
I don't think these are that closely connected. One of the big reasons we have such over incarceration is unduly long prison sentences that neither add much to deterrence nor hold ppl who are likely recidivists (ppl age out of certain kinds of crimes).
Was recently with a group of friends, one of whom is a public defender near DC. He is a fierce advocate for appropriate administration of justice system-wide.
Asked his thoughts on reform, he suggested we first reduce prison terms, specifically by essentially eliminating incarceration past age 65. He noted brain psychology and low recidivism amongst older convicts, and the benefits of easing overcrowded facilities--a step toward rehabilitation vs warehousing.
It was a surprisingly incremental suggestion, but now that I think of it, one that fits well with the Slow Boring ethos--and the point of the article, which offers small examples of a holistic consideration of a societal issue.
2 things on that - 1st is that the 65+ inmate population is already quite small - less than 1%. And sentencing already takes advanced age into account, so many of the most aged criminals are in there despite a reluctance by the system to hold them. In some cases that's because they've committed heinous crimes are are life-long reoffenders with dozens of arrests and convictions. Point being the impact might be very slow and incremental indeed and would be a tiny step towards relieving overcrowding.
The 2nd is that even the over 65+ crowd reoffends at fairly high rates. Within a 5 year timeframe, 13% are re-arrested. That's much less than the 54.4% rearrested across all ages, but still, 13% is a lot over 5 years, especially when you consider that about 25% of 65+ persons will be expected to have passed on over a 5 year span.
I wonder though, given a more holistic approach that included many adjustments, whether that 13 percent wouldn’t nosedive in the medium to long term, or whether risking that 13 percent even now might not yet be worth considering such a policy, at least in some form.
More to my overall point, even if my friend’s suggestion isn’t as golden as one would hope, I think finding ways to, if you’ll permit a reach here, “Moneyball” many of our societal pathologies. As in: given limited resources, look to leverage multiple inefficiencies for better results.
For sure - I'm sure there's a hundred ways it could be improved. Many of them may already be being tried in one place or another.
It is challenging though - it's human behavior, not physics. There's no equation we can solve for the "right" answer. We just have to keep trying things and collecting data.
Eliminate seems like strong solution. One of the more tragic situations I ran across was a man who killed his wife when they were in their 70s. Definitely guilty - what would you say should be the appropriate consequences here?
I wouldn’t pretend to know. I guess I would first refer to the reply to your reply, but more importantly I’d humbly defer to my attorney friend.
I’d also turn to those advocates who call for balancing out power between prosecutors, defenders and, most keenly, judges, whom we pay to provide wisdom in these cases yet, as I understand things, hamstring them with mandatory sentencing and the like.
Nice to see a shorter piece with a good deal of citations. Would be interested to see the policy prescriptions expanded upon and deal with the potential pushbacks.
One thing that always sticks out when people write about criminal justice reform lack of focus on gender. Men make up a huge majority of the incarcerated and there are sentencing disparities that sometimes exceed even the racial disparities. Police shooting deaths are about 95% male.
It might be difficult to predict the political usefulness of making criminal justice reform an issue that aims to help men but given the gender divide in the political parties it seems like there might be some ground to gain.
Disraeli said there are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics. Yes, Mark Twain quoted Disraeli. The numbers are accurate and correlation between violent crime and incarceration is a no-brainer since some percentage has to result in arrest. However, it overstates a lesser important driver and ignores the primary one. Criminalization of drugs. If you look at the US rates of incarceration, you will see that they greatly exceed all other countiries. The massive increase correlates perfectly with drug criminalization. People minimize the issue by counting only drug arrests but ignore other crimes resulting from criminalization. When you criminalize something, you increase its value and create a criminal enterprise, just like prohibition. All drug criminalization was targeted at specific groups and is selectively enforced. Middle class white kids caught with weed are taken home to their parents. Black and Latinex kids go to jail. Relaxing weed laws alone creates statistically significant changes in incarceration and color disparities. Again, arrests need not be from weed arrests to be the result of weed criminalization. Notice I avoid the word marijuana since it was never in general use but was pushed by the government to make it look like a Mexican thing. Most people called it hemp. Violent crime is a driver and does impact arrests but that does not make it the primary driver of incarceration rates.
"Middle class white kids caught with weed are taken home to their parents. Black and Latinex kids go to jail"
I think that really mischaracterizes how that happens. The vast majority of weed arrests happen as a result of the arrestee doing something else that attracts the attention of law enforcement. Maybe they're arrested for assault or called in for domestic violence. Or maybe their driving erratically and dipping into the next lane. Police aren't generally going around sniffing for marijuana smoke outside bedroom windows or at rap concerts and music festivals.
Middle class kids of any race are clearly more likely to live in low-crime neighborhoods and less likely to be involved in violent crime that attracts police attention. In high-crime neighborhoods teenagers are stopped by police much more frequently because (some) teenagers in those neighborhoods are committing crime. When an arrest is made, MJ possession is tacked on as an additional charge and quite often it remains the most serious charge if a plea bargain is reached on the initial activity of arrest.
It's a little like the illegal immigration situation in some ways. There are 10-12 million more people in this country than our laws have intended to be there. But it's hard to reverse that status quo b/c many people benefit from their labor. If we stepped up deportations we'd suddenly have a labor shortage. Similarly, drug laws on possession of small quantities don't quite work as intended. They currently mostly function as additional charges that DAs can use as plea bargain material. If we removed them, we'd have to deal with a greatly backlogged legal system or much lessor sentences for a wider range of other crimes.
Your arguments are the ones usually made for law enforcement discrepancies, Unfortunately, they sound logical but do not stand up to rigorous analysis. When all else is controlled for, black men particularly are much more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and imprisoned. Your argument that weed arrests are pursuant to something else is generally correct. What you have to look at is why the stop occurred, whether it resulted in a search, and what followed if weed were found. Examples include broken tail light, cop claiming to smell weed, etc. The argument as to who lives in what type of area, has been thoroughly debunked by statistical analysis. There are always excuses and rationalizations but facts are facts. Every argument you make has been controlled for leaving race and gender as the critical factor in the discrepancies.
The number one drug in the United States driving arrests, violence, and incarceration is alcohol. But we apparently don't have the guts to legalize it. SMDH.
One of the links that links to "2020 homicide spike alone is enough to result in sentences that would fill 42 500-bed prisons for a year." seems to be a link to a local file:
I think when we talk about mass incarceration in the US I think we underrate being wealthy and able to afford it as a cause.
Poor countries with high violence obviously don’t have the state power or money for high incarceration rates, but incarceration is so expensive I think it’s costs put limits on how much even rich countries can incarcerate.
Some people talk about long American sentences as a cause for mass incarceration, pointing to obviously unjust ones but I don’t think, statistically, the non-violent drug offender serving 20 years is causing our incarceration rate. However, I have heard grumbling in European countries about short sentences for violent offenders--suggesting that short sentences are not universally supported in low-crime Europe. I suspect either extra money or a sudden spike in the crime rate would drive that tolerance down.
On a practical matter: in the US, any criminal reform has to deal with the fact that Americans are less constrained by money, and if enough want violent and sexual offenders locked up for 10+ years , violent and sexual offenders will be locked up for long enough to drive unusually high incarceration rates at current rates of violent crime.
The scary thing is I wonder if that's an unstable equilibrium. I hope if we fall out of it, we fall into the low crime state and not the high corruption state.
I'm in the middle of The New Jim Crow right now and I don't know how much has changed since the book has been written but this post doesn't seem to address the problems it has with mass incarceration.
First, the statistic that 58% of inmates have been convicted of violent crimes. It addresses this by pointing out that violent crimes get longer sentences, so that at any given point, the number of people in prison will be mostly violent offenders, but a big majority of the total people that spend some time in prison are non-violent.
Second, even though sentences tend to be shorter for non-violent offenders, the consequences of having a criminal record can include not being able to vote, not being able to get welfare benefits, jobs, etc.
I read through the linked CCJ report and it looks like disparity in drug arrests have dropped dramatically and imprisonment rate has dropped by 50% for African Americans in the last 20 years (which is great news!) but that's what's going to have an impact on Mass Incarceration, not the murder rate.
Of course, reducing violence and therefore violent crimes is a great goal and one that we've taken a step backwards on in the past couple years, but my point is that using statistics about murder rates, or the number of current inmates in for violent crimes is not addressing the problems that the term Mass Incarceration was coined to address.
Is the idea that non-violent crimes should be deterred and punished by something that isn't prison? And if so, what? Or is it that they shouldn't be crimes?
The major categories of non-violent crime I'm seeing from this link
are burglary, drug trafficking and weapons violations. It's not clear to me how we deter those behaviors without something like prison.
Fwiw, and New Jim Crow might have addressed this, sometimes the crime someone is imprisoned for is not the activity they were arrested for as a result of plea bargains. So a fair few of the imprisoned nonviolent offenders have been arrested for a more serious violent crime, ie arrested for assault and drugs were found when arrest was made, pled guilty to drugs and assault charges dropped.
The big thing I've taken away from the book so far isn't about the number of people who are currently locked up. It's about treating people better once they've been released from prison. Having a "criminal record" shouldn't make it so you can't live a normal life.
From your link:
"Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. 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."
Fwiw, I think that links mischaracterizes WHY people are arrested for drug possession. The vast majority of those are arrested for drug charges were actually stopped and / or arrested for another reason, and then drugs were found on their person, ie they were driving erratically, had committed an assault, fled from a traffic stop, etc.. Drug charges were slapped on in addition to the whatever else. Another important minority were transporting large quantities of drugs. They do discuss the problem of properly characterizing arrests in another section of the link.
I wish I knew more about how much that's been tried already.
But probation and parole are similar programs, in that the person lives free but under certain restrictions. And they are widely used for all types of crimes already to reduce prison sentences and modify behavior..
As a longtime RBC reader I was very happy to read a Prof Humphreys post here! I seem to remember from that site that there was good criminological evidence that the key way punishment reduced drug crime was by being likely and rapid, rather than severe or brutal. Is this also true for violent crime?
I assume that likely and rapid has some impact on nearly all crime, but it might be a little less impactful wrt violent ones. When it comes to assault or homicide, there is already a likely and rapid deterrent - the victim or their friends and relatives may violently respond or retaliate!
But in any case - the distinction between violent and non-violent is not nearly as clear as its often assumed to be. Burglaries and thefts often start out non-violent but suddenly become violent when a victim or witnesses defend themselves, for example.
Beyond that, the legal categorizations are often fuzzy. Burglary is usually classified as non-violent, but many states and countries classify it as violent depending on whether it was a residential or commercial property, whether the burglar carried a weapon, whether the property was empty and even if it was a night or day. In some jurisdiction simple assault is not always considered a violent crime.
There are many more example, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's not a clear dividing line between "the violent criminals" and "the non-violent criminals". Certainly some people tend towards one extreme or the other, but more often violent and non-violent crimes are entertwined.
I say mostly because I think it also matters "why" we need to categorize it as violent or not. And I don't actually know the answer. The only obvious reason I can think of is as a sound-bite categorization for debates like we're having in this comment section, ie, to be able to say "58% of prisoners are in for violent crimes" or "non-violent offenders should wear ankle bracelets w/o prison"
And if that's the only reason then it's an almost useless categorization. I think SBF and Bernie Madoff should be in prison for their non-violent crimes. The burglar who enters houses unarmed is very much potentially violent and threatening, but not as violent as the one who enters with a gun or a serial killer.
So it all comes down to the details and I don't find the violent / non-violent characterization all that useful. Maybe it has some important legal distinction I'm not aware of.
I mean, this all seems correct to me, but the premise seems weird. Why do we need justification to convince us that reducing violence is a desirable good? Why even mention it will disproportionately help black Americans, or reduce incarceration? Shouldn’t reducing violent crime be an end of itself, if anything is? Again, while all the suggestions here are sensible, the framing seems to speak to a presumed “woke” audience whose worldview has gone totally bizarro so that it required this kind of roundabout apologetics to justify what ought to be totally obvious. Protecting the life, liberty and property of of the citizenry is the first duty of the modern state. Its raison d’être. The how is worth debating, saddens me that we should spend time now on the why.
I think this article is aimed at a "woke" audience (which isn't really the SB reader base), and aimed at dealing with a woke audience.
I've never really thought about how long the "tail" of incarceration is, but the COVID increase is something we will be addressing for a long time even if the US can get crime rates back down.
The author also works at Stanford, where "the state imprisons people" may also be viewed as a more serious problem than "citizens are killing each other"
We should, in general, spend much more on prosecutors, public defense attorneys, judges, and support personnel for all of those.
Again, this is just an observation, based on my job this week: A juror sending a man to prison for a good long while. That in and of itself is unremarkable. What surprised me was that this was for a crime committed more than 39 months ago.
This report gives the most extensive review in the changing demography of race and incarceration and points to a fairly dramatic decrease in the ration between black and white disparity mostly driven by the change in drug offenses. The Key findings are below and below that I include the URL for the entire report:
"Key Findings
• From 2000 to 2016, racial and ethnic disparites declined across prison, jail, probaton, and parole populatons in the U.S.
For example, the black-white state imprisonment disparity fell from 8.3-to-1 to 5.1-to-1, and the Hispanic-white parole
disparity fell from 3.6-to-1 to 1.4-to-1.i
• Black-white disparities in state imprisonment rates fell across all major crime categories. The largest drop was for drug
offenses. In 2000, black people were imprisoned for drug crimes at 15 times the rate of whites; by 2016, that ratio was
just under 5-to-1.
• Among women, the black-white disparity in imprisonment fell from 6-to-1 to 2-to-1, a sharper decrease than the
decline among men. The disparity among women fell because of an increase in the imprisonment rate for whites for
violent, property, and drug crimes, and a decrease in the imprisonment of black women for drug crimes.
• The change in the black-white male imprisonment disparity occurred as the number of black men in state prisons declined
by more than 48,000 (to about 504,000) and the number of white men increased by more than 59,000
(to roughly 476,000). Comparatively, the black-white female disparity decreased as the number of black women
in state prison fell by more than 12,000 (to about 24,000) and the number of white women increased by nearly
25,000 (to about 60,000).
• Reported offending rates of blacks for rape, robbery, and aggravated assault declined by an average of 3% per year between
2000 and 2016, decreases that contributed to a drop in the black imprisonment rate for these crimes. This decrease was
offset in part by an increase in the expected time to be served upon admission, which increased for both blacks and whites.
• Hispanic-white disparities in all four correctional populations have narrowed steadily since 2000. For Hispanics
and whites on probation, the data showed no disparity in rates by 2016."
Source:https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Trends-in-Correctional-Control-FINAL.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0JkQbCBfklDnM9Jsm3r6YDPGouVcMMZqhzQ5jhHlJ2Mm_NIcO_S29fHZI
Does anyone else think this is a strange interpretation of the first chart? Looks like 20 years of continued increases in incarceration to me, despite reductions in crime. Then incarceration eventually starts going down when the reduction in crime starts to plateau. This doesn't look like a correlation to me, to say less of causation.
The incarceration rate started to drop in 2008 which is 11 years after the peak crime rate. The reason for this is that the people being released occurs, depending on length of sentence, some years after the crime, so you would expect a lag of some length between crime rate and incarceration. People are incarcerated for crimes committed in the past
Another point - the war on drugs is so structural it is difficult to capture its insane impacts in crime statistics - because creating these enormous black markets empowers organized crime. These empowered organizations create violent crime that is seemingly unrelated to drugs. We should have learned the folly of prohibition and Al Capone’s bloody gangland massacres but apparently not. Today Latin America particularly faces such massacres with regularity and the cartels are often more powerful than the states. Here in the US inner city gangs main source of revenue is often drug sales (perhaps supplemented with prostitution theft and gambling)
Drugs and alcohol are demanded whether illegal or not. People want soothing, no matter how much you tell them its bad. And anyone who has the personality to seek out such sees the hypocrisy of alcohol and tobacco being legal when obviously more addictive and harmful than several popular, illegal soft drugs. No amount of “War on Drugs” is stopping this dynamic, in fact, this war only limits access to more safe usage while necessarily exposing users to violent criminals, who eventually fight wars for lucrative black market turf.
Enabling safe relief valves that also guide users of hard drugs into the intensive therapy necessary to break usage seems to me the obvious path for a more healthy dynamic
I realize this is a bit off-topic, but feel compelled to add that the main cause of crime is childhood trauma. Obviously, lower crime rates would contribute to a virtuous circle here, but teaching parents nonviolent methods of discipline, reducing poverty, and supporting employment policies that allow parents to be more involved with their children would also lead to better outcomes.
Is there any evidence that the opposite is true? Increasing incarceration decreases violent crime?
The chart would imply this with the caveat that it is an association not necessarily proving causality. Common sense would suggest that keeping people prone to violent crime in jail prevents them from committing those crimes so some number of crimes have to be prevented by having the most likely perpetrators in jail. Whether that number prevented is more than say the number caused by making prisoners released more likely to commit crimes or damaging communities, I dont know, though I suspect it is.
Some 33% of violent crime prisoners released will be reincarcerated for violent crime (and some number more will actually commit violent crimes, not everybody is caught.). I dont know the chance that somebody never imprisoned will be convicted of a violent crime but it has to be a whole lot less than a third, maybe more like 0.5%
Very much a history-never-repeats-itself-but-it-does-often-rhyme observation ... everyone I've talked to seems to think an 80s-90s level hollowing out of the cities is coming. Maybe Chicago is unique or my friend group is (i.e., out of 13 families in the city in 2018 only 2 are left) but it sure feels like we're in a vicious spiral. Office vacancy is at record highs (>20%). I've heard projections as high as 35% with class C property just getting turned in. Tax base is getting smashed. I don't see how a mayor will be able to pull out of this tail spin.
One way would be to repeal as many regulations on the use of property in Chicago as possible. A second way, that would require cooperation from the surrounding suburbs, would be to combine all the public school districts in the Chicagoland area into a single unified public school district.
The best idea I've heard would be to fund the defunct class C office to resi conversations with the [edit: $2B+] war chest the city collects through TIF funds (e.g., up-zoning). But no one is expecting the city to do anything. The layers of corruption are insane.
https://news.wttw.com/2021/09/30/more-1b-chicago-property-tax-revenues-claimed-tif-funds-2020-report
https://gazettechicago.com/2021/11/city-has-2-billion-in-tif-money-slush-fund-but-it-is-not-spending-it-civiclab-charges/
Why would the latter help? Getting away from dysfunctional schools is probably a big part of why people are leaving.
I don't think these are that closely connected. One of the big reasons we have such over incarceration is unduly long prison sentences that neither add much to deterrence nor hold ppl who are likely recidivists (ppl age out of certain kinds of crimes).
Was recently with a group of friends, one of whom is a public defender near DC. He is a fierce advocate for appropriate administration of justice system-wide.
Asked his thoughts on reform, he suggested we first reduce prison terms, specifically by essentially eliminating incarceration past age 65. He noted brain psychology and low recidivism amongst older convicts, and the benefits of easing overcrowded facilities--a step toward rehabilitation vs warehousing.
It was a surprisingly incremental suggestion, but now that I think of it, one that fits well with the Slow Boring ethos--and the point of the article, which offers small examples of a holistic consideration of a societal issue.
2 things on that - 1st is that the 65+ inmate population is already quite small - less than 1%. And sentencing already takes advanced age into account, so many of the most aged criminals are in there despite a reluctance by the system to hold them. In some cases that's because they've committed heinous crimes are are life-long reoffenders with dozens of arrests and convictions. Point being the impact might be very slow and incremental indeed and would be a tiny step towards relieving overcrowding.
The 2nd is that even the over 65+ crowd reoffends at fairly high rates. Within a 5 year timeframe, 13% are re-arrested. That's much less than the 54.4% rearrested across all ages, but still, 13% is a lot over 5 years, especially when you consider that about 25% of 65+ persons will be expected to have passed on over a 5 year span.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/rpr34s125yfup1217.pdf
Great info, thanks.
I wonder though, given a more holistic approach that included many adjustments, whether that 13 percent wouldn’t nosedive in the medium to long term, or whether risking that 13 percent even now might not yet be worth considering such a policy, at least in some form.
More to my overall point, even if my friend’s suggestion isn’t as golden as one would hope, I think finding ways to, if you’ll permit a reach here, “Moneyball” many of our societal pathologies. As in: given limited resources, look to leverage multiple inefficiencies for better results.
For sure - I'm sure there's a hundred ways it could be improved. Many of them may already be being tried in one place or another.
It is challenging though - it's human behavior, not physics. There's no equation we can solve for the "right" answer. We just have to keep trying things and collecting data.
Eliminate seems like strong solution. One of the more tragic situations I ran across was a man who killed his wife when they were in their 70s. Definitely guilty - what would you say should be the appropriate consequences here?
I wouldn’t pretend to know. I guess I would first refer to the reply to your reply, but more importantly I’d humbly defer to my attorney friend.
I’d also turn to those advocates who call for balancing out power between prosecutors, defenders and, most keenly, judges, whom we pay to provide wisdom in these cases yet, as I understand things, hamstring them with mandatory sentencing and the like.
I think that type of case would be the exception behind "essentially"
Yup.
Nice to see a shorter piece with a good deal of citations. Would be interested to see the policy prescriptions expanded upon and deal with the potential pushbacks.
One thing that always sticks out when people write about criminal justice reform lack of focus on gender. Men make up a huge majority of the incarcerated and there are sentencing disparities that sometimes exceed even the racial disparities. Police shooting deaths are about 95% male.
It might be difficult to predict the political usefulness of making criminal justice reform an issue that aims to help men but given the gender divide in the political parties it seems like there might be some ground to gain.
A website that has been cited at least 3 times in this comment section is PrisonPolicy.org and their handling of the gender issues in prison strike me as particularly unhinged: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/expertise.html
Disraeli said there are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics. Yes, Mark Twain quoted Disraeli. The numbers are accurate and correlation between violent crime and incarceration is a no-brainer since some percentage has to result in arrest. However, it overstates a lesser important driver and ignores the primary one. Criminalization of drugs. If you look at the US rates of incarceration, you will see that they greatly exceed all other countiries. The massive increase correlates perfectly with drug criminalization. People minimize the issue by counting only drug arrests but ignore other crimes resulting from criminalization. When you criminalize something, you increase its value and create a criminal enterprise, just like prohibition. All drug criminalization was targeted at specific groups and is selectively enforced. Middle class white kids caught with weed are taken home to their parents. Black and Latinex kids go to jail. Relaxing weed laws alone creates statistically significant changes in incarceration and color disparities. Again, arrests need not be from weed arrests to be the result of weed criminalization. Notice I avoid the word marijuana since it was never in general use but was pushed by the government to make it look like a Mexican thing. Most people called it hemp. Violent crime is a driver and does impact arrests but that does not make it the primary driver of incarceration rates.
"Middle class white kids caught with weed are taken home to their parents. Black and Latinex kids go to jail"
I think that really mischaracterizes how that happens. The vast majority of weed arrests happen as a result of the arrestee doing something else that attracts the attention of law enforcement. Maybe they're arrested for assault or called in for domestic violence. Or maybe their driving erratically and dipping into the next lane. Police aren't generally going around sniffing for marijuana smoke outside bedroom windows or at rap concerts and music festivals.
Middle class kids of any race are clearly more likely to live in low-crime neighborhoods and less likely to be involved in violent crime that attracts police attention. In high-crime neighborhoods teenagers are stopped by police much more frequently because (some) teenagers in those neighborhoods are committing crime. When an arrest is made, MJ possession is tacked on as an additional charge and quite often it remains the most serious charge if a plea bargain is reached on the initial activity of arrest.
It's a little like the illegal immigration situation in some ways. There are 10-12 million more people in this country than our laws have intended to be there. But it's hard to reverse that status quo b/c many people benefit from their labor. If we stepped up deportations we'd suddenly have a labor shortage. Similarly, drug laws on possession of small quantities don't quite work as intended. They currently mostly function as additional charges that DAs can use as plea bargain material. If we removed them, we'd have to deal with a greatly backlogged legal system or much lessor sentences for a wider range of other crimes.
Your arguments are the ones usually made for law enforcement discrepancies, Unfortunately, they sound logical but do not stand up to rigorous analysis. When all else is controlled for, black men particularly are much more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and imprisoned. Your argument that weed arrests are pursuant to something else is generally correct. What you have to look at is why the stop occurred, whether it resulted in a search, and what followed if weed were found. Examples include broken tail light, cop claiming to smell weed, etc. The argument as to who lives in what type of area, has been thoroughly debunked by statistical analysis. There are always excuses and rationalizations but facts are facts. Every argument you make has been controlled for leaving race and gender as the critical factor in the discrepancies.
The number one drug in the United States driving arrests, violence, and incarceration is alcohol. But we apparently don't have the guts to legalize it. SMDH.
One of the links that links to "2020 homicide spike alone is enough to result in sentences that would fill 42 500-bed prisons for a year." seems to be a link to a local file:
file:///C:/Users/knh/Downloads/That%E2%80%99s%20enough%20people%20to%20occupy%20a%20prison%20bed%20for%20nearly%207.7%20million%20days,%20or%20compressed%20into%20a%20single%20year,%20to%20fill%2042%20500-bed%20prisons%20%E2%80%94%20just%20from%20the%20additional%20murders%20in%202020
I think when we talk about mass incarceration in the US I think we underrate being wealthy and able to afford it as a cause.
Poor countries with high violence obviously don’t have the state power or money for high incarceration rates, but incarceration is so expensive I think it’s costs put limits on how much even rich countries can incarcerate.
Some people talk about long American sentences as a cause for mass incarceration, pointing to obviously unjust ones but I don’t think, statistically, the non-violent drug offender serving 20 years is causing our incarceration rate. However, I have heard grumbling in European countries about short sentences for violent offenders--suggesting that short sentences are not universally supported in low-crime Europe. I suspect either extra money or a sudden spike in the crime rate would drive that tolerance down.
On a practical matter: in the US, any criminal reform has to deal with the fact that Americans are less constrained by money, and if enough want violent and sexual offenders locked up for 10+ years , violent and sexual offenders will be locked up for long enough to drive unusually high incarceration rates at current rates of violent crime.
The scary thing is I wonder if that's an unstable equilibrium. I hope if we fall out of it, we fall into the low crime state and not the high corruption state.
I'm in the middle of The New Jim Crow right now and I don't know how much has changed since the book has been written but this post doesn't seem to address the problems it has with mass incarceration.
First, the statistic that 58% of inmates have been convicted of violent crimes. It addresses this by pointing out that violent crimes get longer sentences, so that at any given point, the number of people in prison will be mostly violent offenders, but a big majority of the total people that spend some time in prison are non-violent.
Second, even though sentences tend to be shorter for non-violent offenders, the consequences of having a criminal record can include not being able to vote, not being able to get welfare benefits, jobs, etc.
I read through the linked CCJ report and it looks like disparity in drug arrests have dropped dramatically and imprisonment rate has dropped by 50% for African Americans in the last 20 years (which is great news!) but that's what's going to have an impact on Mass Incarceration, not the murder rate.
Of course, reducing violence and therefore violent crimes is a great goal and one that we've taken a step backwards on in the past couple years, but my point is that using statistics about murder rates, or the number of current inmates in for violent crimes is not addressing the problems that the term Mass Incarceration was coined to address.
Is the idea that non-violent crimes should be deterred and punished by something that isn't prison? And if so, what? Or is it that they shouldn't be crimes?
The major categories of non-violent crime I'm seeing from this link
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#myths
are burglary, drug trafficking and weapons violations. It's not clear to me how we deter those behaviors without something like prison.
Fwiw, and New Jim Crow might have addressed this, sometimes the crime someone is imprisoned for is not the activity they were arrested for as a result of plea bargains. So a fair few of the imprisoned nonviolent offenders have been arrested for a more serious violent crime, ie arrested for assault and drugs were found when arrest was made, pled guilty to drugs and assault charges dropped.
The big thing I've taken away from the book so far isn't about the number of people who are currently locked up. It's about treating people better once they've been released from prison. Having a "criminal record" shouldn't make it so you can't live a normal life.
From your link:
"Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. 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."
Ok, thanks.
Fwiw, I think that links mischaracterizes WHY people are arrested for drug possession. The vast majority of those are arrested for drug charges were actually stopped and / or arrested for another reason, and then drugs were found on their person, ie they were driving erratically, had committed an assault, fled from a traffic stop, etc.. Drug charges were slapped on in addition to the whatever else. Another important minority were transporting large quantities of drugs. They do discuss the problem of properly characterizing arrests in another section of the link.
House arrest with a tracking bracelet/anklet for (at least some) nonviolent offenders?
I wish I knew more about how much that's been tried already.
But probation and parole are similar programs, in that the person lives free but under certain restrictions. And they are widely used for all types of crimes already to reduce prison sentences and modify behavior..
As a longtime RBC reader I was very happy to read a Prof Humphreys post here! I seem to remember from that site that there was good criminological evidence that the key way punishment reduced drug crime was by being likely and rapid, rather than severe or brutal. Is this also true for violent crime?
I assume that likely and rapid has some impact on nearly all crime, but it might be a little less impactful wrt violent ones. When it comes to assault or homicide, there is already a likely and rapid deterrent - the victim or their friends and relatives may violently respond or retaliate!
But in any case - the distinction between violent and non-violent is not nearly as clear as its often assumed to be. Burglaries and thefts often start out non-violent but suddenly become violent when a victim or witnesses defend themselves, for example.
Beyond that, the legal categorizations are often fuzzy. Burglary is usually classified as non-violent, but many states and countries classify it as violent depending on whether it was a residential or commercial property, whether the burglar carried a weapon, whether the property was empty and even if it was a night or day. In some jurisdiction simple assault is not always considered a violent crime.
There are many more example, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's not a clear dividing line between "the violent criminals" and "the non-violent criminals". Certainly some people tend towards one extreme or the other, but more often violent and non-violent crimes are entertwined.
Someone breaks into my house at night when I am sleeping--that’s a threat to me no matter what they are armed with, so I understand that ruling.
Some states agree, others don't. I mostly agree.
I say mostly because I think it also matters "why" we need to categorize it as violent or not. And I don't actually know the answer. The only obvious reason I can think of is as a sound-bite categorization for debates like we're having in this comment section, ie, to be able to say "58% of prisoners are in for violent crimes" or "non-violent offenders should wear ankle bracelets w/o prison"
And if that's the only reason then it's an almost useless categorization. I think SBF and Bernie Madoff should be in prison for their non-violent crimes. The burglar who enters houses unarmed is very much potentially violent and threatening, but not as violent as the one who enters with a gun or a serial killer.
So it all comes down to the details and I don't find the violent / non-violent characterization all that useful. Maybe it has some important legal distinction I'm not aware of.
I mean, this all seems correct to me, but the premise seems weird. Why do we need justification to convince us that reducing violence is a desirable good? Why even mention it will disproportionately help black Americans, or reduce incarceration? Shouldn’t reducing violent crime be an end of itself, if anything is? Again, while all the suggestions here are sensible, the framing seems to speak to a presumed “woke” audience whose worldview has gone totally bizarro so that it required this kind of roundabout apologetics to justify what ought to be totally obvious. Protecting the life, liberty and property of of the citizenry is the first duty of the modern state. Its raison d’être. The how is worth debating, saddens me that we should spend time now on the why.
I think this article is aimed at a "woke" audience (which isn't really the SB reader base), and aimed at dealing with a woke audience.
I've never really thought about how long the "tail" of incarceration is, but the COVID increase is something we will be addressing for a long time even if the US can get crime rates back down.
The author also works at Stanford, where "the state imprisons people" may also be viewed as a more serious problem than "citizens are killing each other"
I have an observation on this that I am legally enjoined from expressing.
Now it can be revealed!
We should, in general, spend much more on prosecutors, public defense attorneys, judges, and support personnel for all of those.
Again, this is just an observation, based on my job this week: A juror sending a man to prison for a good long while. That in and of itself is unremarkable. What surprised me was that this was for a crime committed more than 39 months ago.