Good post, but a strange headline. The benefits of reducing crime is mainly less harm to victims and less cost to the public in behavioral changes to avoid crime. Sure it is also a good thing to reduce the ham done to convicted perpetrators, but surely that's a third order consideration.
It's strange when viewed in isolation. But there are many op-eds and activists groups and political stump speeches devoted to reducing incarceration. The headline makes sense as a response to any of those.
I'm aware the reducing incarceration is a "thing," and not a bad thing in itself, especially since it's an issue that attracts some "conservative" support becasue of its cost reducing effect.
But still, THAT seems a pretty niche POV and not the people you need to persuade to get the violent crime prevention measures developed put in place. And SB community is clearly not the prime audience for that take.
Most people I talk to believe the important issue isnt crime but mass incarceration and the racial disparities involved. Theres also a belief that most people in prison are there for nonviolent drug offenses which he does refute in the article. I personally agree that protecting victims is most important but I rarely meet people who see it that way.
If incarceration has only a middling impact on crime, it might make sense to worry more about the former. We can control the level of incarceration much more than we can control the level of crime
I'm with you on deterrence, but I'm less sure wrt incapacitation. Rates of recidivism are shockingly high, and when you combine that with the low likelihood of being caught or convicted for most crimes, there is some real upside to society for longer sentences. There may also downsides, but the ups shouldn't be dismissed.
That ought not to make the difference if they were properly educated. You don’t actually need to experience everything personally to develop empathy and think rationally. I was fortunately never personally a victim of violent crime. Doesn’t mean I don’t get why it’s bad, doesn’t mean I don’t have the moral compass to prioritize innocent victims over the criminals who prey on them, doesn’t mean I don’t get how crim is the most regressive “tax” there is on the poor and disadvantaged both in its direct and indirect damage. You just need to have a minimal interest in the world around you. Read a book. Have some interest in the lives of others. It doesn’t take much. The pro crime people have no excuses.
I would add before that: families and loved ones of victims. Cost of incarceration system to the workers in it. Costs of penal system to state/tax payer. Family and loved one of the incarcerated. *all* of these deserve better consideration than the rightly convicted criminal, and that criminal him or herself deserves consideration first and foremost with a view to minimizing the damage to society from them in future (*that* is the first reason for putting resources into successful rehabilitation of criminals). Their well being really should be the last of all considerations, though a consideration still i agree.
“Fuck criminals” is a fine slogan and a fine idea if you mean serious criminals. The worst thing about the system is the effect it has on minor offenders— an arrest record can be very damaging even if you do little or no time
The notion that everything is so disconnected and criminals well being is totally unimportant is unfortunate and perpetuates the cycle of suffering.
Consider all those actors you mention continue to be effected by reoffenders and might not be if we simply had better systems and regulations that better comported with our humanity and natural tendencies. What exactly is the point of our justice system again? Don’t we just want maximum freedom/justice AND prosperity for all?
Not at all sure what this response addresses. What is “disconnected”? Why do you claim I said criminals well-being is “unimportant” when I explicitly claim the contrary? As to reoffenders , I addressed that in discussing rehabilaiton towards the e end of my comment , didn’t I? As for the last rhetorical question , put like that it willl necessarily be assented to by al parties.* The heavier lift is to actually dare admit the inherent tensions and make a stand as to priorities, which is what I tried to do. Which of my priorities do you object to, and where do yours lie? Put differently, above which of the groups and interests I mentioned would you place the criminals well being per se?
* in fact when one thinks for a second about “freedom/Justice and prosperity for all” literally and critically one realizes it’s nonsensical. Sometimes One man’s prosperity and freedom necessarily entails another not receiving Justice. The whole idea of Justice is everyone receiving their due. If you believe everyone always deserve full freedom and prosperity the concept of Justice becomes superfluous).
Justice works both ways necessarily and Humankind can only attempt to imposes it with our laws. Punishment should be proportional to crimes and should be restorative wherever possible. When something is stolen for example, the proper course of justice is for the property to be returned perhaps along with expense borne to do so. On the receiving end of punishments, the harm endured by punishments should be reasonable or similar in scale to that the criminal inflicted upon others.
Incarceration is a necessary evil. It doesn’t really help to restore anything. And if it serves to facilitate and spread a culture of crime, perhaps we should be thinking about trying some alternative solutions.
It seems to me that we are actually in agreement though. I’m just skeptical that there is a full alternative to incarceration. In some cases sure but not all. But it don’t think you disagree with me there ?
I didn’t claim you said that!! Sorry for the confusion.
My point is that reduction of incarceration while most directly benefiting the criminals you mention as a 4-5th order effect, is also a benefit to those other groups that bear expense when that suffering is imposed on criminals.
The cost to human suffering is tremendous but if this is not moving, consider the ridiculous expense we bear incarcerating a higher percentage of our population that any other developed nation. How about the ENORMOUS opportunity cost if such incarcerated individuals as compared to functioning more healthily and productively.
Incarceration is not a good thing, its a punishment and a way to keep people safe from criminals. But we can always improve…and we should try
I do not disagree. Punishment has direct and opportunity costs to the perpetrator and I do not claim that reducing those costs are not in themselves good.
But in fact most of the post was about reducing crime and the costs to society of crime committed and prevented are just orders of magnitude greater than the costs of punishing crime. Thus my remark about the rhetorical strategy.
_That_ may not be wholly cost effective. :) Some combination of patrolling for deterrence/rapid response/use of surveillance technology/detective work, etc.
It is often helpful to state and restate the obvious and underlying goal, as this article does, lest it become obscured, and people start to confuse means with ends, which leads to all kinds of cloudy thinking and bad policy.
Here, what should be obvious, but does seem to need regular repeating, is that the prime objective should be elimination of violent and other predatory crime -- building communities where people and their children can go about their lives without fearing, or even thinking about, being victimized by that kind of crime. Everyone should be able to agree on that, wherever else on the political spectrum they fall.
But nobody should get too emotionally attached, or opposed, to any particular means to that end, which is more of an empirical question. Policing and incarceration is only a means, not the end. It has a lot of flaws as a means to that end, but on the other so do all the other proposed means. But this seems like something that should be able to sorted out by well-meaning, empirically and civically minded people, as long as everyone stays on the same page about what the end goal is.
I would amend that to “elimination” or perhaps “minimization” of *all* crime violent or otherwise. If it can justly be ignored it ought not to be a crime ! As for the means, I don’t entirely agree, because that’s not our *only* goal. We also want to adequately *punish* the criminals for the crimes that did occur, not just as a deterence mechanism (subsumed under previous goal) but as its own worthy end, as serving Justice in the most fundamental sense. One has to balance the two in considering the means of punishment.
Positing “elimination of violent and other predatory crime” as a goal is problematic. These behaviors will never be eliminated. seven imagining that they can be eliminated overstates the efficacy of policing and incarceration and suggests that, if we just crank up the law and order dial to 11, the streets will be as safe as in Singapore. That won’t happen, crime is too socially imbedded for policy to have that kind of an effect. The states with low crimes rates today are, overwhelmingly, the states that had low crime rates 50 years ago, eg the “province” of Massachusetts
Also, how does Puerto Rico have a low violent crime rate but high murder rate? Is a lot or violent crime going unreported? Are Puerto Ricans excellent marksmen? Is medical care for gunshots unusually bad in PR?
Rates of reporting and tallying are massively different for non-murder violent crimes.
And certain crimes are categorized differently in different states depending on the details (this can also change over time) - for example, burglary may or may not be violent depending on if the target was residential or commercial, occupied or unoccupied, a weapon was carried or brandished and whether it was night or day.
Even murder has variations in reporting - I've downloaded the FBIs complete homicide data back to 1976 (provided by police) and compared it to the CDC's data on homicide victims collected from coroners. Some states's police homicide totals are 30% lower than the CDCs numbers, other states are 10% higher.
To me this just confirms what is already widely accepted by criminologists and noted by the FBI in their reports on violent crime: violent crime rates should not be directly compared across jurisdictions. The murder rate isn't even perfect or completely trustable, but when in doubt, go with murder rate.
Rates for violent crime other than murder can have more to do with reporting frequency than the frequency of violence. Maybe women who get hit or pushed in MA are more likely to call the cops than elsewhere, that’s what I’d expect in a state with high social trust
I don't know that there's a simple answer to the question "why does MA have a lower crime rate" but it's worth pointing out that MA had a low crime rate 50 years ago, and 100 years ago and 200 years ago and even 300 years ago. Meanwhile the South and Appalachia have. been on the opposite-end of that spectrum for that entire timeframe.
That suggests to me that there's some enduring aspects of culture that are very impactful, or at the very least allowing MA to continually have policy that lowers crime.
I think that almost has to be some part of it, but not enough to counter the culture hypothesis.
There's a very clear link between cold winter weather and crime, as the worst weather essentially shuts down most criminal activity for a few weeks each year in a place like Boston.
But that only accounts for (admittedly I'm going to make this number up) 10% of the difference between MA and, let's say Georgia. But the violent crime rate of the latter has been multiples of the former for centuries.
I'm drawing primarily on the book "Albion's Seed" as my source for the differences in crime rates between north and south during colonial times, but from what I've Googled since reading it, it seems entirely correct.
Also it is the second richest state by median household income. It isn't 1-1 but there is a strong negative relationship between income and violent crime rates.
I'd guess the causality there runs more in the direction of crime influences wealth than the other way around.
Crime creates poverty in an almost mechanical and deterministic way that few people would dispute, but academia and the media seldom emphasize. If a burglary or mugging or serious assault happens on your block, the victim could literally be poorer and the offender is incentivized to do it again. There may be injuries that require treatment or prevent work. Neighbors may buy guard dogs or put up a fences or change their schedules to avoid places and times that feel less safe. The local government has to invest more resources in policing or prison to respond. All of the above subtracts from education and investment.
But even given all that, I would still say that the relationship between income and violent crime is even weaker than you're suggesting here. El Paso, for example, is one of the poorest large metros in country but also one of the safest.
And any time I've actually crunched the numbers on this data I've reached the inescapable conclusion that ethnicity explains 60-70% of the geographic variability in homicide rates. Once you control for ethnicity the correlation to income drops from modestly strong to fairly weak.
That was the main thesis of "Albion's Seed" which I read this summer and found fairly convincing. The early colonies were wild experiments in attempting to design utopian societies.
Another point worth mentioning, at least here in Philly, the crime figures after the 2020 protests are ridiculously undercounted. The murders are the only crime obviously rising so quickly because there is no denying them and they are easily tracked by the press.
A progressive friend of mine was disillusioned when he tried to inform PA DA Krasner personally of the sad state of affairs in Philly crime wise. Krasner of course is a one issue politician and as such has enormous blinders. The police answer fewer calls and take way longer. They are simply not recording (or maybe tinkering the data) but there is more violent crime in general. This is the sentiment of nearly everyone I know that lives in Center City - it has become less safe with muggings and so forth as well murder and gun crime.
Still WAY WAY better than the 90s and earlier tho.
There's a theory that after the Black Lives Matter protests, etc., police are less likely to respond to sub-murder crimes. Do you see evidence to support that?
100% Absolutely zero doubt in my mind the police sit on their hands to make Krasner look bad. Their attitude is every bit as problematic as Krasners, who has made zero attempts to stop prosecuting violent crimes as far as I’m aware
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"
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, didn’t Matt just yesterday link to an Asher study that said the murder rate was back down in 2022? This piece seems to make a lot of assumptions. And why was the most recent (slight) peak in concern about crime in 2016? Wasn’t it at an historical low about then?
The 2016 peak is just sourced from a gallup poll the author links to. I can only guess why the poll drew such high numbers right then - maybe the election and follow-up to Ferguson was bringing up a lot of "crime is bad" stories in some news outlets?
I believe the Asher piece was preliminary, only applied to several major cities and showed just a small decline. If it fell as much as 10% we'd still be up more than 20% since 2019.
The time series graph hardly shows a robust relationship between violent crime and incarceration. A scatter plot of state violent crime and incarceration rates probably would have been better. Because of the war on drugs, incarceration rates continued climbing even after violent crime had fallen for a decade. A third of Americans who are behind bars are in jails, not prisons, often for things like driving without a license or failing a drug test while on probation. Far more people have been to jail than prison.
Now that fewer long sentences are for drugs, the correlation between violent crime and incarceration will almost certainly strengthen.
I think we do expect the relationship between crime and incarceration to have a lag. Also, crime is likely more directly connected to the rate of change of incarceration than to incarceration itself, so when crime peaks, we expect incarceration to start curving downwards, but not actually coming down until crime gets below some lower point, which does seem to be what we see.
Per the above article, my understanding is mass incarceration is probably not due to the war on drugs (unfortunately, since that would be an easier fix). Although your claim here seems to be that jails, not prisons, are the real problem? I haven't heard that argued before.
But otherwise I agree with you - the graph doesn’t really seem to support the central claim.
Sure, but my understanding is that the causal claim "Because of the war on drugs, incarceration rates continued climbing even after violent crime had fallen for a decade" isn't really true.
The article above says that at the time it was written, 16% of state prisoners were serving time on drug charges, about 6% of which were both low level and nonviolent. On the other hand, rising prosecution of low-level (not just drug) crimes raised incarceration by as much as 25% in one state. These are just single data points, but my understanding is that they're characteristic of a larger trend: prosecutors, not the war on drugs, driving mass incarceration.
I just harp on this because it seems important to correctly understand what causes mass incarceration if we want to end it.
The time series data show that incarceration rates continued climbing even as violent crime rates were falling. Many states abolished or restricted parole in the nineties and aughts. That increased prison populations but had little to do with prosecutors.
The Trump era fall in incarceration rates was absolutely due to shorter drug sentences-- violent crime was stable from 2016-19.
This viewpoint fails to consider how those incarcerated on nonviolent drug offenses are often initiated into a life of violent crime in oir prison systems.
Its a tough one to measure - but you can see it in recidivism studies whoch show the amazingly high rates this occurs after incarceration…and where original crime is nonviolent and subsequent ones are violent and in individual case studies, these dynamics become quite obvious.
I see the mirror image in that several of my friends and aquientenances with adequate resources to afford the best lawyers and all the roght skin tones and suits to impress the prosecutors and judges got to go to rehab instead of prison and now run legitmate successful businesses rather than illicit ones.
Nonviolent offenders (including repeat drunk drivers) are a significant portion of jail populations. The thing about criminal justice is there are always three or four trends that affect any metric and it’s hard to tease them out.
Drunk-diving kills about 10,000 people per year. I'm completely fine with effective alternatives to prison to correct and deter drunk-driving - but someone has to explain what those effective alternatives are. It feels like there's a lot of hand-waving towards "alternatives to prison"
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.
It seems like restricting access to guns for people under active domestic violence restraining orders would be a good idea, some states already do this but I don’t think all do. A man who beats his wife is just a coward and a terrorist, why give him a gun?
Yes indeed, BETTER policing is needed. REFORM the police, not defund the police was the appropriate protest mantra for the summer of 2020 but few wanted to listen to that at the time, sadly.
Too few want to pay for better policing or actually do better policing is the problem. Policing is hard and we have intractable problems as do all nations. Given that we’ve made it nearly impossible to regulate weapons of death while impossible to procure soothing substances not called alcohol legally, we’ve created a soulless meat grinder most would rather not consider, especially by those with the means and position to easily escape it. But if you were born into a ghetto without a father and with a mother working several jobs, with poor access to education, healthcare even food, our system is unfair, merciless and cruel. As I’m well aware, drugs and alcohol are used at levels among elites as they are among the poor, its just these are sorted out far differently in our society when they become problematic. Glamorous rehab facilities have sprouted about the same as our expanded prison system since the epically stupid War on Drugs began 50 years ago.
Everyone wants less violence except the goons that benefit from it. And absolutely right that increased violence necessarily leads to increased incarceration. One enormous problem we have is that culture of crime and stigma seems to spread in our prison system. So incarceration paradoxically can result in snowballing dysfunction despair and violence.
I don’t have the easy answers. Better policing today. But for tomorrow...Education is key, culture is key, mythology/religion is key. Society must evolve away from this stuff, it can only be guided with better regulation and better ideas.
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.
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%
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.
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..
Good post, but a strange headline. The benefits of reducing crime is mainly less harm to victims and less cost to the public in behavioral changes to avoid crime. Sure it is also a good thing to reduce the ham done to convicted perpetrators, but surely that's a third order consideration.
It's strange when viewed in isolation. But there are many op-eds and activists groups and political stump speeches devoted to reducing incarceration. The headline makes sense as a response to any of those.
I'm aware the reducing incarceration is a "thing," and not a bad thing in itself, especially since it's an issue that attracts some "conservative" support becasue of its cost reducing effect.
But still, THAT seems a pretty niche POV and not the people you need to persuade to get the violent crime prevention measures developed put in place. And SB community is clearly not the prime audience for that take.
I think this is aimed at a subset of progressives rather than at the median voter
Most people I talk to believe the important issue isnt crime but mass incarceration and the racial disparities involved. Theres also a belief that most people in prison are there for nonviolent drug offenses which he does refute in the article. I personally agree that protecting victims is most important but I rarely meet people who see it that way.
Wow! We really talk to different people. :)
I'll second that. Being more concerned with incarceration than actual crime seems truly bizarre to me.
If incarceration has only a middling impact on crime, it might make sense to worry more about the former. We can control the level of incarceration much more than we can control the level of crime
I'm with you on deterrence, but I'm less sure wrt incapacitation. Rates of recidivism are shockingly high, and when you combine that with the low likelihood of being caught or convicted for most crimes, there is some real upside to society for longer sentences. There may also downsides, but the ups shouldn't be dismissed.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/18upr9yfup0514.pdf
True, but the POST didn't even do that. The incarceration angle was kind of a head feint. :)
Incarceration feels like more of a direct policy issue than violent crime is, so it’s often talked about more in policy discussions.
That ought not to make the difference if they were properly educated. You don’t actually need to experience everything personally to develop empathy and think rationally. I was fortunately never personally a victim of violent crime. Doesn’t mean I don’t get why it’s bad, doesn’t mean I don’t have the moral compass to prioritize innocent victims over the criminals who prey on them, doesn’t mean I don’t get how crim is the most regressive “tax” there is on the poor and disadvantaged both in its direct and indirect damage. You just need to have a minimal interest in the world around you. Read a book. Have some interest in the lives of others. It doesn’t take much. The pro crime people have no excuses.
Probably fourth or fifth order.
I would add before that: families and loved ones of victims. Cost of incarceration system to the workers in it. Costs of penal system to state/tax payer. Family and loved one of the incarcerated. *all* of these deserve better consideration than the rightly convicted criminal, and that criminal him or herself deserves consideration first and foremost with a view to minimizing the damage to society from them in future (*that* is the first reason for putting resources into successful rehabilitation of criminals). Their well being really should be the last of all considerations, though a consideration still i agree.
“Fuck criminals” is a fine slogan and a fine idea if you mean serious criminals. The worst thing about the system is the effect it has on minor offenders— an arrest record can be very damaging even if you do little or no time
The notion that everything is so disconnected and criminals well being is totally unimportant is unfortunate and perpetuates the cycle of suffering.
Consider all those actors you mention continue to be effected by reoffenders and might not be if we simply had better systems and regulations that better comported with our humanity and natural tendencies. What exactly is the point of our justice system again? Don’t we just want maximum freedom/justice AND prosperity for all?
Not at all sure what this response addresses. What is “disconnected”? Why do you claim I said criminals well-being is “unimportant” when I explicitly claim the contrary? As to reoffenders , I addressed that in discussing rehabilaiton towards the e end of my comment , didn’t I? As for the last rhetorical question , put like that it willl necessarily be assented to by al parties.* The heavier lift is to actually dare admit the inherent tensions and make a stand as to priorities, which is what I tried to do. Which of my priorities do you object to, and where do yours lie? Put differently, above which of the groups and interests I mentioned would you place the criminals well being per se?
P.S.
* in fact when one thinks for a second about “freedom/Justice and prosperity for all” literally and critically one realizes it’s nonsensical. Sometimes One man’s prosperity and freedom necessarily entails another not receiving Justice. The whole idea of Justice is everyone receiving their due. If you believe everyone always deserve full freedom and prosperity the concept of Justice becomes superfluous).
I disagree here.
Justice works both ways necessarily and Humankind can only attempt to imposes it with our laws. Punishment should be proportional to crimes and should be restorative wherever possible. When something is stolen for example, the proper course of justice is for the property to be returned perhaps along with expense borne to do so. On the receiving end of punishments, the harm endured by punishments should be reasonable or similar in scale to that the criminal inflicted upon others.
Incarceration is a necessary evil. It doesn’t really help to restore anything. And if it serves to facilitate and spread a culture of crime, perhaps we should be thinking about trying some alternative solutions.
It seems to me that we are actually in agreement though. I’m just skeptical that there is a full alternative to incarceration. In some cases sure but not all. But it don’t think you disagree with me there ?
I didn’t claim you said that!! Sorry for the confusion.
My point is that reduction of incarceration while most directly benefiting the criminals you mention as a 4-5th order effect, is also a benefit to those other groups that bear expense when that suffering is imposed on criminals.
Peace bruh
The cost to human suffering is tremendous but if this is not moving, consider the ridiculous expense we bear incarcerating a higher percentage of our population that any other developed nation. How about the ENORMOUS opportunity cost if such incarcerated individuals as compared to functioning more healthily and productively.
Incarceration is not a good thing, its a punishment and a way to keep people safe from criminals. But we can always improve…and we should try
I do not disagree. Punishment has direct and opportunity costs to the perpetrator and I do not claim that reducing those costs are not in themselves good.
But in fact most of the post was about reducing crime and the costs to society of crime committed and prevented are just orders of magnitude greater than the costs of punishing crime. Thus my remark about the rhetorical strategy.
_That_ may not be wholly cost effective. :) Some combination of patrolling for deterrence/rapid response/use of surveillance technology/detective work, etc.
It is often helpful to state and restate the obvious and underlying goal, as this article does, lest it become obscured, and people start to confuse means with ends, which leads to all kinds of cloudy thinking and bad policy.
Here, what should be obvious, but does seem to need regular repeating, is that the prime objective should be elimination of violent and other predatory crime -- building communities where people and their children can go about their lives without fearing, or even thinking about, being victimized by that kind of crime. Everyone should be able to agree on that, wherever else on the political spectrum they fall.
But nobody should get too emotionally attached, or opposed, to any particular means to that end, which is more of an empirical question. Policing and incarceration is only a means, not the end. It has a lot of flaws as a means to that end, but on the other so do all the other proposed means. But this seems like something that should be able to sorted out by well-meaning, empirically and civically minded people, as long as everyone stays on the same page about what the end goal is.
I would amend that to “elimination” or perhaps “minimization” of *all* crime violent or otherwise. If it can justly be ignored it ought not to be a crime ! As for the means, I don’t entirely agree, because that’s not our *only* goal. We also want to adequately *punish* the criminals for the crimes that did occur, not just as a deterence mechanism (subsumed under previous goal) but as its own worthy end, as serving Justice in the most fundamental sense. One has to balance the two in considering the means of punishment.
Positing “elimination of violent and other predatory crime” as a goal is problematic. These behaviors will never be eliminated. seven imagining that they can be eliminated overstates the efficacy of policing and incarceration and suggests that, if we just crank up the law and order dial to 11, the streets will be as safe as in Singapore. That won’t happen, crime is too socially imbedded for policy to have that kind of an effect. The states with low crimes rates today are, overwhelmingly, the states that had low crime rates 50 years ago, eg the “province” of Massachusetts
Interestingly, Massachusetts doesn't have an unusually low violent crime rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate
MA fares much better on murders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Also, how does Puerto Rico have a low violent crime rate but high murder rate? Is a lot or violent crime going unreported? Are Puerto Ricans excellent marksmen? Is medical care for gunshots unusually bad in PR?
Rates of reporting and tallying are massively different for non-murder violent crimes.
And certain crimes are categorized differently in different states depending on the details (this can also change over time) - for example, burglary may or may not be violent depending on if the target was residential or commercial, occupied or unoccupied, a weapon was carried or brandished and whether it was night or day.
Even murder has variations in reporting - I've downloaded the FBIs complete homicide data back to 1976 (provided by police) and compared it to the CDC's data on homicide victims collected from coroners. Some states's police homicide totals are 30% lower than the CDCs numbers, other states are 10% higher.
To me this just confirms what is already widely accepted by criminologists and noted by the FBI in their reports on violent crime: violent crime rates should not be directly compared across jurisdictions. The murder rate isn't even perfect or completely trustable, but when in doubt, go with murder rate.
Rates for violent crime other than murder can have more to do with reporting frequency than the frequency of violence. Maybe women who get hit or pushed in MA are more likely to call the cops than elsewhere, that’s what I’d expect in a state with high social trust
"overstates the efficacy of policing and incarceration"
Only if you assume those are the only means to that end.
I don't know that there's a simple answer to the question "why does MA have a lower crime rate" but it's worth pointing out that MA had a low crime rate 50 years ago, and 100 years ago and 200 years ago and even 300 years ago. Meanwhile the South and Appalachia have. been on the opposite-end of that spectrum for that entire timeframe.
That suggests to me that there's some enduring aspects of culture that are very impactful, or at the very least allowing MA to continually have policy that lowers crime.
Maybe literal climate ?
I think that almost has to be some part of it, but not enough to counter the culture hypothesis.
There's a very clear link between cold winter weather and crime, as the worst weather essentially shuts down most criminal activity for a few weeks each year in a place like Boston.
But that only accounts for (admittedly I'm going to make this number up) 10% of the difference between MA and, let's say Georgia. But the violent crime rate of the latter has been multiples of the former for centuries.
I'm drawing primarily on the book "Albion's Seed" as my source for the differences in crime rates between north and south during colonial times, but from what I've Googled since reading it, it seems entirely correct.
Also it is the second richest state by median household income. It isn't 1-1 but there is a strong negative relationship between income and violent crime rates.
I'd guess the causality there runs more in the direction of crime influences wealth than the other way around.
Crime creates poverty in an almost mechanical and deterministic way that few people would dispute, but academia and the media seldom emphasize. If a burglary or mugging or serious assault happens on your block, the victim could literally be poorer and the offender is incentivized to do it again. There may be injuries that require treatment or prevent work. Neighbors may buy guard dogs or put up a fences or change their schedules to avoid places and times that feel less safe. The local government has to invest more resources in policing or prison to respond. All of the above subtracts from education and investment.
But even given all that, I would still say that the relationship between income and violent crime is even weaker than you're suggesting here. El Paso, for example, is one of the poorest large metros in country but also one of the safest.
And any time I've actually crunched the numbers on this data I've reached the inescapable conclusion that ethnicity explains 60-70% of the geographic variability in homicide rates. Once you control for ethnicity the correlation to income drops from modestly strong to fairly weak.
Puritanism
That was the main thesis of "Albion's Seed" which I read this summer and found fairly convincing. The early colonies were wild experiments in attempting to design utopian societies.
Another point worth mentioning, at least here in Philly, the crime figures after the 2020 protests are ridiculously undercounted. The murders are the only crime obviously rising so quickly because there is no denying them and they are easily tracked by the press.
A progressive friend of mine was disillusioned when he tried to inform PA DA Krasner personally of the sad state of affairs in Philly crime wise. Krasner of course is a one issue politician and as such has enormous blinders. The police answer fewer calls and take way longer. They are simply not recording (or maybe tinkering the data) but there is more violent crime in general. This is the sentiment of nearly everyone I know that lives in Center City - it has become less safe with muggings and so forth as well murder and gun crime.
Still WAY WAY better than the 90s and earlier tho.
There's a theory that after the Black Lives Matter protests, etc., police are less likely to respond to sub-murder crimes. Do you see evidence to support that?
100% Absolutely zero doubt in my mind the police sit on their hands to make Krasner look bad. Their attitude is every bit as problematic as Krasners, who has made zero attempts to stop prosecuting violent crimes as far as I’m aware
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"
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.
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 think that type of case would be the exception behind "essentially"
Yup.
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 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.
Sorry, didn’t Matt just yesterday link to an Asher study that said the murder rate was back down in 2022? This piece seems to make a lot of assumptions. And why was the most recent (slight) peak in concern about crime in 2016? Wasn’t it at an historical low about then?
The 2016 peak is just sourced from a gallup poll the author links to. I can only guess why the poll drew such high numbers right then - maybe the election and follow-up to Ferguson was bringing up a lot of "crime is bad" stories in some news outlets?
I believe the Asher piece was preliminary, only applied to several major cities and showed just a small decline. If it fell as much as 10% we'd still be up more than 20% since 2019.
The time series graph hardly shows a robust relationship between violent crime and incarceration. A scatter plot of state violent crime and incarceration rates probably would have been better. Because of the war on drugs, incarceration rates continued climbing even after violent crime had fallen for a decade. A third of Americans who are behind bars are in jails, not prisons, often for things like driving without a license or failing a drug test while on probation. Far more people have been to jail than prison.
Now that fewer long sentences are for drugs, the correlation between violent crime and incarceration will almost certainly strengthen.
I think we do expect the relationship between crime and incarceration to have a lag. Also, crime is likely more directly connected to the rate of change of incarceration than to incarceration itself, so when crime peaks, we expect incarceration to start curving downwards, but not actually coming down until crime gets below some lower point, which does seem to be what we see.
Yes -- any policy effect is lagged in prison, because the stock at any given moment largely reflects decisions made years ago.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in
Per the above article, my understanding is mass incarceration is probably not due to the war on drugs (unfortunately, since that would be an easier fix). Although your claim here seems to be that jails, not prisons, are the real problem? I haven't heard that argued before.
But otherwise I agree with you - the graph doesn’t really seem to support the central claim.
In the aughts, the war on drugs put a large number of nonviolent offenders in prison. That number has come down.
Sure, but my understanding is that the causal claim "Because of the war on drugs, incarceration rates continued climbing even after violent crime had fallen for a decade" isn't really true.
The article above says that at the time it was written, 16% of state prisoners were serving time on drug charges, about 6% of which were both low level and nonviolent. On the other hand, rising prosecution of low-level (not just drug) crimes raised incarceration by as much as 25% in one state. These are just single data points, but my understanding is that they're characteristic of a larger trend: prosecutors, not the war on drugs, driving mass incarceration.
I just harp on this because it seems important to correctly understand what causes mass incarceration if we want to end it.
The time series data show that incarceration rates continued climbing even as violent crime rates were falling. Many states abolished or restricted parole in the nineties and aughts. That increased prison populations but had little to do with prosecutors.
The Trump era fall in incarceration rates was absolutely due to shorter drug sentences-- violent crime was stable from 2016-19.
This viewpoint fails to consider how those incarcerated on nonviolent drug offenses are often initiated into a life of violent crime in oir prison systems.
Do you have numbers on that? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it would be a major driving force.
It's something people say and believe without any particular evidence or contact with people who are imprisoned or living lives of violent crime.
Its a tough one to measure - but you can see it in recidivism studies whoch show the amazingly high rates this occurs after incarceration…and where original crime is nonviolent and subsequent ones are violent and in individual case studies, these dynamics become quite obvious.
I see the mirror image in that several of my friends and aquientenances with adequate resources to afford the best lawyers and all the roght skin tones and suits to impress the prosecutors and judges got to go to rehab instead of prison and now run legitmate successful businesses rather than illicit ones.
Nonviolent offenders (including repeat drunk drivers) are a significant portion of jail populations. The thing about criminal justice is there are always three or four trends that affect any metric and it’s hard to tease them out.
Drunk drivers are violent offenders.
"In a violent crime, a victim is harmed by or threatened with violence."
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/crimes/violent-crime
That link shows 18,000 DUI offenders locked up, which is about 1% of the incarcerated population.
Drunk-diving kills about 10,000 people per year. I'm completely fine with effective alternatives to prison to correct and deter drunk-driving - but someone has to explain what those effective alternatives are. It feels like there's a lot of hand-waving towards "alternatives to prison"
Fair enough, but there are over 120k people in jail for drug crimes
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.
It seems like restricting access to guns for people under active domestic violence restraining orders would be a good idea, some states already do this but I don’t think all do. A man who beats his wife is just a coward and a terrorist, why give him a gun?
Just processing DV criminal cases rapidly would have this effect due to the Lautenberg Amendment.
Awesome piece.
Yes indeed, BETTER policing is needed. REFORM the police, not defund the police was the appropriate protest mantra for the summer of 2020 but few wanted to listen to that at the time, sadly.
Too few want to pay for better policing or actually do better policing is the problem. Policing is hard and we have intractable problems as do all nations. Given that we’ve made it nearly impossible to regulate weapons of death while impossible to procure soothing substances not called alcohol legally, we’ve created a soulless meat grinder most would rather not consider, especially by those with the means and position to easily escape it. But if you were born into a ghetto without a father and with a mother working several jobs, with poor access to education, healthcare even food, our system is unfair, merciless and cruel. As I’m well aware, drugs and alcohol are used at levels among elites as they are among the poor, its just these are sorted out far differently in our society when they become problematic. Glamorous rehab facilities have sprouted about the same as our expanded prison system since the epically stupid War on Drugs began 50 years ago.
Everyone wants less violence except the goons that benefit from it. And absolutely right that increased violence necessarily leads to increased incarceration. One enormous problem we have is that culture of crime and stigma seems to spread in our prison system. So incarceration paradoxically can result in snowballing dysfunction despair and violence.
I don’t have the easy answers. Better policing today. But for tomorrow...Education is key, culture is key, mythology/religion is key. Society must evolve away from this stuff, it can only be guided with better regulation and better ideas.
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.
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%
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
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..