Do the time, lower the crime

Too many people behind bars? The statistics suggest otherwise.

By James Q. Wilson
March 30, 2008

Do we have too many people in prison?

If you read a recent report by the Pew Center on the States, you would think so. As its title proclaimed, more than one in 100 American adults is in jail or prison. For young black males, the number is one in nine.

The report's authors contend that the incarceration rate represents a problem because the number of felons serving time does not have a "clear impact" on crime rates -- and that all those inmates are costing taxpayers too much money to house. But nowhere in the report is there any discussion of the effect of prison on crime, and the argument about costs seems based on the false assumption that we are locking people up at high rates for the wrong reasons.

In the last 10 years, the effect of prison on crime rates has been studied by many scholars. The Pew report doesn't mention any of them. Among them is Steven Levitt, coauthor of "Freakonomics." He and others have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways (poverty, urbanization and the proportion of young men in the population) that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.


Rest of editorial.

Thank you to "Mr. Broken Windows" for pointing out one of the primary fallacies underlying this overincarceration campaign -- namely, that there is no scientifically verifiable "correct" incarceration rate. People are certainly entitled to "feel" that we incarcerate too many people, but that's about the extent of the weight behind it -- a feeling.

It's also a feeling that was very popular in the 1960s and '70s, much to America's later regret (see, e.g., the 1980s).

Let me say it once again, with feeling: choosing between incarceration and rehabilitation is a false choice. The correct answer is "both". The only reason policymakers don't select that correct answer is that they have other, higher priorities (education, healthcare, immigration, etc.). Until those priorities change, their answer won't change, and the criminal justice system will have to continue fighting against itself for the scraps left over after education and health care take their 75% of the pie.

quote:

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Originally posted by Shannon Edmonds:

Let me say it once again, with feeling: choosing between incarceration and rehabilitation is a false choice. The correct answer is "both".

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That is, of course, unless you are conducting voir dire.

Actually, in multi-count cases in which the judge can stack sentences, we are seeing a growing number of recommendations for pen time and probation, leaving it to the judge to stack the probation. So, even in voir dire, the answer might be "both."

[This message was edited by JB on 04-01-08 at .]

The debate continues ...

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
August 5, 2009

OF THE 2.3 million people incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States, roughly 140,000, or 6 percent, are serving life sentences. Of that number, about 41,000 -- i.e., 29 percent of the lifers, or 1.8 percent of all inmates -- were sentenced to life without parole. Both numbers are at an all-time high.

Should Americans be troubled by this? The Sentencing Project thinks so. In a new report, the liberal advocacy group -- which describes itself as a promoter of "alternatives to incarceration" -- complains that the growth in life sentences has been costly and unjust. It "challenges the supposition that all life sentences are necessary to keep the public safe." It particularly disapproves of life-without-parole sentences, which, it claims "often represent a misuse of limited correctional resources and discount the capacity for personal growth and rehabilitation that comes with the passage of time."

As a matter of policy, the Sentencing Project supports abolition of both the death penalty and life without parole. In its view, even a vicious mass murderer deserves a chance at parole. That is an eccentric position that most Americans clearly don't share. Nevertheless, the group's new report -- "No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America" -- has drawn media attention; stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Agence France-Presse, among other outlets.

But good PR is not a substitute for sound analysis ...

Imprisonment up, crime down