Thanks to Eugene’s generosity, I will have access to this space all week to expound what I see as a great moral and practical imperative: to put our new knowledge of what controls crime into use, with the goal of achieving “half and half”: half as much crime and half as many people behind bars in a decade as we have today. (Here’s the a book-length version of the argument.)
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Engineers have a sardonic saying: “When brute force fails, you’re not using enough.” For three decades, in the face of the great crime wave that started in the early 1960s, we have been trying to solve our crime problem with brute force: building more and more prisons and jails. We now keep 2.4 million of our fellow human beings under lock and key at any one time, and that number has continued to grow despite the spectacular drop in crime between 1994 and 2004, which took crime rates to 50% of their peak levels.
Imprisonment at five times the historical level in the United States, and at five times the level of any of the countries with which we would like to compare ourselves, has not been sufficient to fully reverse the growth in crime; current crime rates are still at 2.5 times the level of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even that discouraging number understates how much worse things are now than they were half a century ago; today’s high crime rates persist in the face not only of ferocious punishment but also of greatly enhanced – and very costly – adaptations by potential victims to avoid being victimized. Those adaptations range from buying alarm systems to moving to the suburbs. Most of all, they involve avoiding risky situations. The need to take such precautions leaves all of us less free than Americans were half a century ago.
The burdens of crime, and of punishment, are not evenly spread across the social landscape. Homicide is the leading cause of death among black men between 18 and 30 who did not finish high school, and a black male dropout also has a better than even chance of serving prison time before turning 30. William Stuntz has calculated that the incarceration rate among African-Americans today is higher than the incarceration rate in the Soviet Union the day Stalin died.
Is there an alternative to brute force? There is reason to think so, and pieces of that alternative approach can be seen working in scattered places throughout the world of crime control. But the first step in getting away from brute force is to want to get away from brute force: to care more about reducing crime than about punishing criminals, and to be willing to choose safety over vengeance when the two are in tension.
If for a moment we thought about “crime” as something bad that happens to people, like auto accidents or air pollution or disease, rather than as something horrible that people do to each other—if we thought about it, that is, as an ordinary domestic-policy problem—then we could start to ask how to limit the damage crime does at as little cost as possible in money spent and suffering inflicted.
The answer to that question will not be the only factor that influences, or should influence, crime-control policy. Justice both requires and limits punishment. Laws, customs, and institutional arrangements—including the Constitution and ideas such as “innocent until proven guilty”—limit, and ought to limit, the range of options. Still, thinking about the advantages and disadvantages—what economists quaintly call “benefits” and “costs” —of different approaches to crime control is one place to start the inquiry.
Crime causes damage: directly to victims, and indirectly as people incur costs, and impose costs on others, to avoid victimization. The value of the total damage is hard to reckon, but serious estimates (even excluding “white collar” crime) run as high as $1.4 trillion per year: more than 10 percent of GDP. Furthermore, this damage falls most heavily on the poor and socially marginal people least able to bear it; crime not only concentrates around social disadvantage but also sustains it, increasing costs for consumers and employers alike and thereby driving away resources and opportunities.
One way to frame the general problem of crime-control policy is, “What set of actions would result in the least total harm and cost, from crime and crime-control efforts combined?” Neither across-the-board lenity nor maximum severity offers the right answer to that question. In order to squeeze the maximum crime prevention benefit from every prisoner-day of incarceration, we need to learn to deliver the minimum effective dose of punishment and to make as much use as possible of convincing and clearly communicated threats rather than actual punishments.
The principles of effective deterrence are straightforward, though making actual institutions implement those principles is complex. Punishment should be swift and certain rather than severe; those subject to it should know precisely what actions will lead to punishment; efforts should be concentrated, rather than dispersed, to enjoy the benefit of the positive-feedback process in which reduced offending leads to increased deterrence.
Since punishment is always a cost and not a benefit, we should also be alive to the many possibilities to reduce offending without punishment: everything from a later school day (to shorten the burglary-friendly time period when adolescents are out of school but grown-ups have not returned from work) to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.
Our current crime rates and our current incarceration levels are national disgraces. We know how to fix both halves of that problem, and there is no good excuse for not doing so.
Confused says:
You said there was a great drop in crime recently, so how do we know that it wasn’t the increased incarceration doing its job? Perhaps there is a cause of the increase in crime in the US that is not seen elsewhere?
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October 26, 2009, 12:36 amTim says:
Good topic. Also the topic of a new book by Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day.
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October 26, 2009, 12:41 amroad2serfdom says:
“William Stuntz has calculated that the incarceration rate among African-Americans today is higher than the incarceration rate in the Soviet Union the day Stalin died.”
I don’t know why that is relevent. I am sure the USA toothbrush ownership rate is higher as well. How does our current genocide rate compare to his? That would seem to be a more useful comparision.
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October 26, 2009, 12:51 amCornellian says:
Congrats on getting a mention in The Economist.
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October 26, 2009, 12:51 amCornellian says:
Congrats on getting a mention in The Economist.
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October 26, 2009, 12:51 amCornellian says:
Why does it keep double posting? It didn’t do that under the old system.
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October 26, 2009, 12:52 amAnonymous Coward says:
I agree with you by and large, but we have to be careful in fashioning solutions. For example, say we want to reduce speeding by building speed humps. Certainly this is effective to reduce speeding, but not in vacuum. If fatal traffic accidents are rare but speed humps delay emergency vehicles in situations where seconds mean lives, we end up trading those lives for a reduction in “crime.”
Likewise, a program that generates make-work jobs for the unemployed may keep those people from turning to theft in the short term, but if people become reliant on those programs then the long-term negative effect on the economy of having that much of the nation’s productive capacity tied up in nonproductive endeavors may eclipse any gains generated by the program.
I don’t mean to suggest that there are no solutions, merely that many of the “possibilities to reduce offending without punishment” will cause more harm than good, and we need to be especially careful in choosing them and monitoring their results to discover unexpected consequences.
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October 26, 2009, 1:17 amRandy says:
The book “The Tipping Point” makes a good case that the ‘broken window’ theory of crime has merit. If adopted widely, it may reduce crime from happening in the first place. Another way to reduce crime is to decriminilize MJ, as has been argued elsewhere in at the VC. That should greatly reduce the number of people going through our court system.
Have there been any studies on *why* people commit crimes? Surely there have, and I would imagine the answers are all over the place. But if we can identify a few easy to ways to persuade people to avoid criminal behavior, even if its’ just a small amount, that can have tremendous impact.
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October 26, 2009, 1:43 amDon Pettengill says:
Spare us. The increase in crime starts with “the Great Society”. If your proposed “solutions” include rolling back the elements of those programs which are responsible for our present state, we’re all ears. Start for example with the the destruction of the black family — where single mothers with children are supported (nay, encouraged, even). Few black fathers raise their children. Whites also are affected, and more so than blacks in absolute numbers, though percentages are far lower. But those encouraged habits will take some time to die.
Based on the post I have to say I am not encouraged. I am not much in favor of large-scale incarceration, but I am even less in favor of letting violent criminals out on to the streets.
That said, I have to say that our drug laws are responsible for much needless incarceration. Are you going to go there? Bravo if so, but again it does not sound like it. My own preference would be reserving criminal penalties for those who offend against another. Merely doing that would slash our incarceration rate, and I’ll bet at a far faster clip than this egghead’s ideas will. Pardon the slap :-)
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October 26, 2009, 1:46 amMichael Alexander says:
Thanks for the post — I look forward to reading more. I suspect that most of these posts will take place on the realm of policy discussion, but as a state level prosecutor I am interested anyways. Maybe a few practical tips will trickle down. Of most interest to me is how to reconcile the principles of the Constitution with “swift and certain” punishments. In this brief post, you brush aside all the procedural protections afforded by the Constitution by stating “still ...” Tonight I am working on an appeal for a misdemeanor assault that occurred more than a year ago, the defendant moved to suppress evidence and lost about 10 months ago, was convicted by a jury about six months ago, has now appealled — and has spent only a day or two in jail. In the meantime, his trial for his second assault on the same victim is pending and he is out on “third party release.” When I deal with situations like this frequently, although deep down I am a bleeding heart who likes the concept of your ideas, I am having trouble seeing how they could be put into practice. But, that is why I will read your posts! You have at least one reader who hopes to be persuaded and supplied with concrete methods to achieve your aims!
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October 26, 2009, 2:12 amii says:
If you’re not willing to address the folly of the War on Drugs while you advocate we lower the crime and incarceration rates, your position is about as sensible as an anti-nuclear proliferation activist who is okay with every country on earth having nukes.
“End the drug war” should be the opening statement of anybody that wants to see any significant diminution of the crime and incarceration rates, and, when it isn’t, they almost always are not being serious about what they are saying.
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October 26, 2009, 2:18 amMike McDougal says:
You will never reach the cost/benefit question until you address the political question. Specifically, how do you avoid being portrayed as soft on crime? You don’t love criminals and hate victims, do you?
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October 26, 2009, 2:36 amMike G in Corvallis says:
I don’t necesarily disagree with the rest of your thesis — not yet, at least — but this statement doesn’t help your cause. Let’s turn that sentence around and make a couple of minor changes:
I don’t necessarily believe that this is an adequate and complete statement of the situation either, but at least it has the advantage of having cause and effect on its side rather than being a supposed paradox.
And put me down as another person who believes that the monumentally stupid, counterproductive, and (IMHO, IANAL) unconstitutional “War on Drugs” has been the cause of our astonishing crime and incarceration rates.
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October 26, 2009, 2:57 amMark N. says:
I’m not sure they have to be resolved in that order. Part of the difficulty in politically proposing an alternative to “tough on crime” proposals is a lack of well-researched, well-argued alternative proposals, which this appears to be an attempt to counteract.
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October 26, 2009, 3:22 amChrisHo says:
Violent offenders need to be locked up, those who commit murder, rape, and such, need to be locked up indefinitely.
As for non-violent criminals, as long as they are not serial offenders we need to stop tossing them in jail. This includes means changing the “War on Drugs” to look only at large amounts to separate true dealers from people having a good time at no expense to others.
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October 26, 2009, 6:57 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Sorry, but is there a here here?
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October 26, 2009, 7:05 amPublius says:
Crime rates before the 1960s, you say, were half as much as now.
What changed in the 1960s? Isn’t identifying and undoing that social change the key? If the policies of the 1960s unleashed this anti-social problem, maybe we should reject those policies.
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October 26, 2009, 7:08 amjcm says:
But for murder, the USA crime rate are the same than in most Europe. BUt the UK and Ireland have higher rates than the USA.
What the USA needs its less laws , stop wasting resources incarcerating people for been naked in their own house or for “pain killer abuse” or using steroids or for brooking other silly laws with conducts that only hurt themselves
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October 26, 2009, 7:28 amBill says:
At the risk of revealing my ignorance: “highly criminogenic environmental lead”? What is that all about?
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October 26, 2009, 7:31 amWarren says:
I have a hard time believing that our justice system will perform any sort of justice anymore. It seems more and more apparent that it’s a system designed in favor of the wealthy and to punish the poor. Especially in light of reading this ridiculous post from this other blog: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2009/09/29/justice-is-blind-but-apparently-not-immune-to-jagged-staples/
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October 26, 2009, 7:41 amEric says:
Just curious...if we normalize by race, how do prison and crime stats compare with Europe? That is, how much of the vast difference between the US and, say, Sweden, is related to our different demographics?
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October 26, 2009, 7:43 amAlan C says:
I enjoy reading your blog, and this is a very thought provoking post. Permit me to quibble with a couple of things:
War on Drugs: This has our country in quite a pickle. If we decide to legalize MJ, there are a few issues. First, the MJ of today isn’t your hippie pot smoking father’s dope. Back in the 60’s, most of the MJ contained about 5 — 6 percent THC, but today thanks to those who want to “build a better mousetrap”, THC levels are up near 30%. Big difference in THC concentrations, with no real understanding of the second and third order effects biologically and sociologically. Second, what happens at the US/Mexican border if / when pot gets legalized? How do we prevent money from the sale of perfectly legal pot, which there would be a lot more of, from getting into the hands of those who are devastating Latin America? My point is not that we shouldn’t consider legalizing pot, it’s just that we should all consider not only the first order effects (dramatic increase in sales of munchies) but also the second and third order effects, which we tend to disregard in debates of this kind due to the uncomfortable answers we get.
Stalin: My brother was fond of saying he liked studying the Soviet Union, because Ronald Reagan seemed not to like it very much. I reply to him that yeah, except for those pesky gulags and occasional violent purges of non-kool aid drinkers, I’m sure the Soviet Union was a great place. The point here is that you really don’t do your arguments any favors by casting aspersions on the US, despite all her real faults, by way of Joe Stalin. Joe Stalin, bad. US, not perfect, but not Joe Stalin. Full stop, period, end of sentence.
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October 26, 2009, 7:44 amFantasiaWHT says:
Because so much of crime is recidivist in nature, simply extending prison terms would result in a much larger decrease in commited crimes than the increase in man-hours spent in prison. It doesn’t help that life in prison is often better (and safer) for some than life out on the streets.
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October 26, 2009, 8:06 amAlexia says:
everything from a later school day (to shorten the burglary-friendly time period when adolescents are out of school but grown-ups have not returned from work) to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.
Everything except insisting on personal responsibility, I see. And how much is this crap going to cost me, exactly? After all, government isn’t eve big enough. It certainly makes sense that since our schools can’t actually teach these kids that we should simply relegate them to the role of unionized subsidized babysitters.
My solution is easier and cheaper. Legalize victimless crimes.
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October 26, 2009, 8:14 amPintler says:
I don’t know if they are considered good sources or quackery, but I found these interesting (and would love to hear opinions on them, or other sources):
‘Inside the Criminal Mind’ by Samenow. It’s not too encouraging, basically he says that a lot of crooks just view preying on others as the smart approach to life.
‘Why They Kill’ by Richard Rhodes. This only discusses the worst violent offenders, and argues that their hyper violent approach is largely learned behavior, and holds out the hope that there are effective interventions, esp. reducing domestic violence.
They aren’t as contradictory as those summaries indicate. Samenow is discussing run of the mill burglars etc., Rhodes is talking about hyper violent killers.
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October 26, 2009, 8:37 ampmorem says:
For crimes with victims, there is another potential on-going cost.
People generally like to feel safe and secure. Being a victim of crime or knowing one can reduce that feeling, potentially for the remainder of the person’s life. Seeing the perpetrator harshly punished may help to remedy the sense of loss.
From a system perspective, this matters because people who believe in the system are more likely to contribute to it, while those who do not are more likely to undermine it. I point to the success of COIN under Gen. Petraeus, which applied those principles.
Sure, punishment is a cost. Don’t leave out the cost of insufficient punishment, though.
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October 26, 2009, 8:38 amBlargh says:
Interesting to see that most commenters across the political spectrum agree on the solution: decriminalize victimless crimes. Because it’s such an easy and reasonable solution, of course, it will never happen.
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October 26, 2009, 8:48 amClayton E. Cramer says:
What isn’t being discussed is that a sizeable number of inmates (both jail and prison) are severely mentally ill; Los Angeles County jail now has the largest mental hospital in the country. What happened at the same time as the Great Society was the beginning of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Bernard Harcourt’s work shows quite persuasively that murder rates and total institutionalization rate (prisons + mental hospitals) are statistically significantly correlated in 44 of 50 states over the period from 1930 forward. It is not at all a leap to conclude that other violent crimes are also driven by the well-intentioned but destructive effort to empty out mental hospitals. Because the legal definition of insanity is considerably narrower than the medical definition of insanity, many people who might have been institutionalized in 1960 before committing a serious violent crime, end up in prison instead–a situation that is more expensive to the government, worse for the criminally insane, and worse for their fellow prisoners.
You can read the first few chapters of a book that I have not yet found a publisher for here.
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October 26, 2009, 8:55 amMichael Smith says:
everything from a later school day (to shorten the burglary-friendly time period when adolescents are out of school but grown-ups have not returned from work) to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.
The function of government is to protect our individual rights by punishing those who violate them. What you propose, instead, is that government further violate my rights by: 1)Dictating to me such things as when I send my child to school, and: 2)Taking still more of my money to pay for the removal of alleged environmental causes of crime or to pay for nurses(!) for women who clearly have no business having children in the first place.
No thank you. Criminals — even in our allegedly “crime ridden” society — pose a very small threat to my rights, far smaller than the threat of government, which actively violates my rights on a daily basis. It is absurd, in the face of that fact, to propose that government undertake additional violations of my rights.
As others have already pointed out, the fastest, fairest and most just way to reduce the incarceration rate it so eliminate the hideous evil of laws against “victimless crimes”.
And by the way: the effective incarceration rate under Stalin was nearly 100% — everyone in the U.S.S.R. was a slave to the state, subject to its every whim and dictate. Tens of millions slave-labored in gulags, tens of millions more slave-labored on collective farms and in collective factories, and the whole population lived in constant terror and fear of arbitrary imprisonment or execution for the slightest perceived offense against the state.
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October 26, 2009, 8:56 amClayton E. Cramer says:
The problem with this solution is that there is a quite persuasive body of evidence that alcohol and marijuana play significant roles in increasing psychosis rates. That’s part of why The Lancet reversed a long held support for decriminalization of marijuana some years back–because they concluded that marijuana use increased later psychosis by about 40%; regular users had as much as a 100% increase in psychosis rates later in life. And psychosis leads to an increase in crime.
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October 26, 2009, 8:58 amU.Va. Grad says:
The notion that marijuana potency has increased thirty-fold is only tenuously connected to reliable data. ONDCP took the strongest sample of pot it had ever found — not an average or median one — and compared it to one left over from the 1970s whose THC content had degraded so much that it was physically impossible to get high off of it. Unless ONDCP is claiming that people didn’t get high in the 70s, the thirty-fold number is meaningless. In contrast, University of Mississippi scientists, who have been testing seized marijuana since 1983, recently reported that the average THC content in their samples has gone from just above 3% in 1983 to just above 8% today. A sizable increase, to be sure, but nothing like the ridiculous, alarmist, and ultimately false number ONDCP trumpets. Read more here.
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October 26, 2009, 9:01 amClayton E. Cramer says:
So much so that you won’t see much discussion of it. Crime in the United States 2008 shows that 52.7% of murderers where the murderer is known are black–and blacks are 13% of the U.S. population. About 29.0% of total offenders are not identified–and since much of this is gang-related, it isn’t much of a leap to guess that if we knew about the unknowns, it would be more than 52.7% of murders are committed by blacks.
The FBI did a breakdown back in the 1970s concerning Hispanics (who are usually white), and the numbers were so startling that they have not done it again. (Victims are generally of the same race; blacks murder blacks; Hispanics murder Hispanics; whites murder whites; with relatively little murder across racial boundaries.) Non-Hispanic whites are likely 25% or less of murderers in the U.S.
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October 26, 2009, 9:07 ampireader says:
I won’t defend the “war on drugs”, but look at the big picture. Most people in prison are there for crimes of violence (a majority) or crimes against property (another quarter), not for drugs.
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October 26, 2009, 9:14 amA.C. says:
I don’t want them to decriminalize marijuana because I don’t want the people in my apartment building stinking up the hallways with it. Remember the effects of drug use in close quarters when you say it has no victims. Not everyone has moved to the suburbs... yet.
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October 26, 2009, 9:19 amBlargh says:
My building already reeks of marijuana (it’s illegal here) just about every few days so I’ve got nothing to lose on this front... :)
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October 26, 2009, 9:26 amuh_clem says:
A.C., That’s a stupid reason to oppose decriminalization.
Decriminalization is not the same thing as legalization — under decriminalization, your neighbors could still be cited and fined for stinking up the hallway. The difference is that they wouldn’t face jail time. There are many ways to stink up a hallway; smoking marijuana is one of the few that will land you in jail. If it’s the smell you oppose, concentrate on that.
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October 26, 2009, 9:36 amAlexia says:
I have absolutely no problem with a landlord that decides his tenants aren’t allowed to smoke anything at all on his property. Problem solved.
Besides, it’s been many many years since I even smelled part,but if the young Libertarians I associate with are correct, getting pot isn’t hard at all, so legalizing it wouldn’t have much of an effect on your hallways anyway.
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October 26, 2009, 9:40 amBT says:
If the population of the US is around 300 million, that is less than 1.0% of the population. Is that really an outrageous number? How does it compare on a percentage basis with similarly industrialized countries? What percentage are illegal aliens? And as Clayton Cramer suggests, what percentage are mentally ill and should be in a different type of facility altogether?
Hey I am all for some of the suggestions above regarding decriminalizing drugs, keeping recidivists in jail, etc. But the 2.4 million number does not strike me as excessive, at least at this point.
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October 26, 2009, 9:56 amOren says:
The same argument applies to cigarettes.
How do we manage to control the rampant cigarette smoke in our apartment buildings?
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October 26, 2009, 10:05 amOren says:
There is no dispute that exposure to lead early in life decreases cognitive function.
In the end, it’s many times cheaper to delead (a one time cost) than to deal with generation after generation of children with damage to their impulse control.
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October 26, 2009, 10:10 amA.C. says:
Well, in my experience we don’t do enough to combat rampant cigarette smoking in apartment buildings. Smoking is legal, so smokers stand on some alleged “right to smoke.” I don’t particularly want them to have a corresponding “right to smoke weed,” because that would just compound the problem.
I have no trouble with the idea of a short jail term for obvious drug abuse that impinges on other people’s quality of life. Fines and community service would be more appropriate for lesser offenses. I think the right comparison, considering potential severity, is with vandalism. That can range from very serious or nearly trivial as well, and it gets punishes on a sliding scale.
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October 26, 2009, 10:19 amTim McDonald says:
I find myself mostly in agreement with the commenters. I suspect the drop in crime rates has something to do with large number of people behind bars.
I also think we should just legalize all drugs, and destroy the drug cartels by defunding them. If you want to destroy yourself with (name your poison) then have at it, just don’t endanger anyone else with your actions.
But before we make any changes, remember that President Johnson started with the premise that nobody should go to bed hungry in this great country, and who the hell could argue with that? The Great Society was NOT intended as a war on poor black and white families, but that is sure enough how it worked out isn’t it?
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October 26, 2009, 10:19 amuh_clem says:
Google is your friend.
“[The US] has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population....
“The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html
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October 26, 2009, 10:21 amAllan Walstad says:
Alan C:
I think it’s the other way around. Before criminalizing pot and other drugs, people should have thought about more than just the hoped-for first-order effect (less use of pot and other drugs)–they should have thought about higher-order effects (organized crime, switching to more potent and more concealable variants, vast prison populations for non-violent “crimes,” etc). Yes, breaking government’s destructive addiction to drug prohibition will be harder than it would have been simply not to take the first hit of that Kool-Aid; nevertheless, he first step to correcting mistakes is to admit mistakes. Drug prohibition was a big mistake. Admit that; then decide how to move on.
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October 26, 2009, 10:29 amMissing Reagan says:
I’ll second the comments regarding the possible correlation with reduced crime due to keeping the criminals in jail.
If you look at the demographics of the prison population two things stand out. One, the high percentage of inmates who were not raised by two parents living at home. Second, the high level of drug and alcohol addiction.
One the first point, I know of no realistic govermental solution that would reduce the percentage of single parent households.
On the second point, treatment for drug and alcohol addiction is very expensive and comes with a high failure rate. Increasing treatment options could reduce recidivism but at a high cost. Politicians aren’t going to put that kind of money into the system partially because they see areas of higher needs but also because the public doesn’t demand it.
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October 26, 2009, 10:34 amAllan Walstad says:
So–more incarceration in government schools as the solution to incarceration in government prisons? Spare me. Let the adolescents themselves work. Eliminate ridiculous age restrictions and minimum wage laws. More and more government control over everything is a large source of our problems, not the solution.
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October 26, 2009, 10:34 amHey says:
What is neglected here is to try to decrease the cost of punishment.
Reduce the access to the courts by convicts. Reduce the costs to imprison felons (partly through union busting, partly through thoroughly spartan accommodation). Speed up executions so that the time from conviction (no not final appeal, initial conviction) to execution is less than 2 years. Drastically increase capital crimes, so the vast majority of life sentences are 2 years and a needle sentences.
Also, reduce the number of violent convicts. Discourage techniques that lead to capture of suspects and encourage techniques that lead to suspects being shot during a pursuit. There should be a presumption to kill hostage takers, for one.
Of course drugs should be legalized, the mentally ill should be reinstitutionalized, and all Great Society programs rolled back, but leftists like Kleiman don’t look at all the options until coming to the “let 1000 felons free to kill again” answer that they always offer. Perhaps the most effective way to cut the costs of crime would be to vigourously pursue those groups that have done the most ot increase the costs of policing and imprisonment. Stop the ACLU et al and you’ve stopped the major cost of punishment.
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October 26, 2009, 10:42 amRowerinVA says:
This is a provocative but crucial post, and needs discussing.
Mark Kleiman’s article begins with statement that in the 50’s and 60’s, there was less force, and yet less crime. That statement is spectacularly false. There was lots of force, albeit a different kind of force.
In the 50’s and 60’s, force was used constantly against the underclass. Poor whites, particularly immigrants, routinely were harassed by police if they left their enclaves and ventured into middle and upper class areas. Minorities, particularly blacks, were oppressed, and in many areas of the country (not just the South) mixed with the dominant racial group using an exaggerated formalism (dress, manners, seating arrangements; see, e.g., Rosa Parks) from which they departed only at real physical peril. Gang violence based on neighborhood affiliations, even among peoples of the same racial and economic status, was common, and police statistics don’t reflect it only because they ignored or minimized it. Fonzie on Happy Days is a revisionist fiction.
Yes, the Great Society caused part of today’s social disaster, but let’s not pretend that it’s solely responsible. And here’s the problem: does anyone want to return to the oppression of the poor and minorities, and the police intimidation policies of that era, merely in the name of lower crime? I don’t.
The challenge ahead of us is MUCH more difficult than Mr. Kleiman suggests. There has never been a period in the US when we had low force, low crime, high demographic mixing, and high population density all at the same time. I’m an optimist and believe that we can indeed acheive that — and we have a moral duty to get on it — but looking back to 50’s and 60’s as “low force,” when in fact they were the fullest development of Jim Crow laws and the like, isn’t the academically honest way for us to get there.
Note to trolls: NO, I AM NOT ADVOCATING OPPRESSION. I’m pointing out that Mr. Kleiman is forgetting oppression, and perhaps playing into the hands of those who would bring it back.
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October 26, 2009, 10:42 amAlexia says:
One the first point, I know of no realistic govermental solution that would reduce the percentage of single parent households.
Welfare destroyed the American family. It’s that simple.
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October 26, 2009, 10:47 amdan28 says:
You might be headed in this direction, but I don’t see how you can even begin to talk about the problem of over-incarceration without identifying the obvious culprit: the utter failure that is the war on drugs. From the direct (lots of people who get incarcerated do so because of drugs) to indirect (the illegality of drugs ensures that there will be widespread and profitable illegal enterprises that can only maintain their existance and profit through violence) to more abstract (the war on drugs alienates people in inner-city communities from the police and therefore makes lawless behavior more common and harder to prosecute), the war on drugs is at the center of the problems in our criminal justice system. Trying to solve the problem of over-incarceration without dealing with that root cause is like treating cancer with painkillers; it might dull the symptoms, and there’s nothing wrong with dulling the symptoms, but it won’t solve the underlying problem.
I don’t want them to decriminalize marijuana because I don’t want the people in my apartment building stinking up the hallways with it.
This comment clearly comes from somebody who doesn’t understand the difference between a minor annoyance and a criminal act. We should not be using the criminal justice system to prevent your hallway from smelling bad. Frankly, I don’t like it when my neighbors get so drunk that they puke in my hallway, which happens from time to time, but I don’t want everyone who drinks thrown in prison as a result.
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October 26, 2009, 10:50 amIchthyophagous says:
The author notes the extremely high rate of violent crime among young black male dropouts, but doesn’t say much about it. At the risk of being labeled a racist, may I suggest that some cultural factor is involved? Is there something about “African American culture” that encourages unconsidered, “spontaneous” but thoughtless reactions? There seems to be something to this if we consider the prominence of sports, music, and drama as paths to the big time among blacks. Consider that since the civil rights revolution there has been a vast increase in respect (and even veneration) for “African American culture” which may have legitimized forms of behavior formerly denigrated, but are dangerous for the average person to assume.
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October 26, 2009, 10:50 amdan28 says:
Welfare destroyed the American family. It’s that simple.
Statements that are that simple are almost always false. Seriously, at the maximum high point, what percentage of Americans were on welfare? I doubt it was more than a few percentage points. How could that possibly have “destroyed” the American family? What a dogmatic joke of an argument.
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October 26, 2009, 10:52 amdarelf says:
All you have to do is look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see the following information:
Incarceration and drug arrests have gone up.
Violent crime has gone down.
Seems to me, we have a classic cause and effect. If you want to discuss ways of reducing the crime rate among a certain demographic ( say, young black males ) then you might have something worth talking about.
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October 26, 2009, 10:59 amIan Argent says:
War on Drugs: We did that experiment with Prohibition, it failed. The second time around, it failed. Why continue?
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October 26, 2009, 11:10 amdan28 says:
This has our country in quite a pickle. If we decide to legalize MJ, there are a few issues. First, the MJ of today isn’t your hippie pot smoking father’s dope. Back in the 60’s, most of the MJ contained about 5 — 6 percent THC, but today thanks to those who want to “build a better mousetrap”, THC levels are up near 30%. Big difference in THC concentrations, with no real understanding of the second and third order effects biologically and sociologically.
This is a red herring. The implication is that marijuana is a different drug because of higher concentrations. That is like saying that whiskey is a different drug than beer. It isn’t. You don’t choose to smoke X amount of a drug, you smoke until you get high. There is a limit to how high you can get off of THC, which is due to the way the compound is stored in the brain. That limit has not changed with higher concentrations of THC in the drug. In the past, you needed to smoke more to get high; today you can smoke less and get the same high quicker and more efficiently. That’s the only difference.
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October 26, 2009, 11:10 amRowerinVA says:
Depends on your definitions of “a few percentage points” and “welfare.” Before 1996, about 15% of US children received Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and additional children, parents, and childless adults received other aid (state or federal), bringing the total population over 20% for people who received some welfare assistance. I couldn’t find the statistics by “family” (what constitutes a family for these purposes?). Welfare reform post-1996 has cut that figure by a little more than half, by most estimates. This doesn’t count Medicaid, which drives the numbers slightly higher. It also doesn’t count unemployment insurance, or Medicare and Social Security.
Welfare, by whatever definition, remains quite localized. 80% in one zip code will receive it, while 1% in another zip code do.
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October 26, 2009, 11:14 amRandy says:
The South has the highest rate of violent crime. What are they doing down there that causes them to be so violent? Must be all that religion.
Snark aside, we have some places where crime is lower than other places. And BTW, suburbs don’t necessarily have lower crime rates than cities, although that is often the perception.
Many people like to blame the 60s for the high crime rate, and indeed, rates have risen dramatically since then. But there are many factors, of which the ‘Great Society” may be only one. For instance, here in Washington, DC, there were poor black slummy parts in the Southeast. Poor as they were, the neighborhoods were tightly networked and date back to the Civil War. They had their own social network, and a mix of poor and middle class, people who owned barber shops, butchers, etc. Then our genius urban planners decided that this wasn’t good, and wiped out the entire area for urban renewal. The blacks were dispersed throughout the city, thereby permanently destroyed that strong social network that had sustained them to good times and bad. So some theorize that breakdown in social structure contributed to the breakdown of families throughout the 70s and 80s, leading directly to criminal behavior.
If so, that had little to do with welfare or other goverment grants to the poor. Rather, it was the planned systematic destruction of certain neighborhoods, for their own good, of course.
One of the worst legacies of the 50s and 60s on our cities was urban renewal. It devastated our cities and worsened the lot of the poor.
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October 26, 2009, 11:15 amA.C. says:
dan28... Is everyone in your building under 25? I can’t recall the last time I was around people who considered that kind of behavior acceptable, but it has to have been around that age. I definitely think people who do that sort of thing should be fined, and almost certainly evicted. If they cause actual structural damage during their carousing, or if they are so consistently drunk that their housekeeping suffers enough to create health hazards, then stiffer penalties are warranted. How stiff depends on how much damage, how much misery for the neighbors, and so on, but I don’t think jail is out of line for the least controlled drunks.
Of course, that means far less punishment for a drunk who can drink without tormenting anyone else. None at all if the behavior is discreet enough. Wanting to have the option of jail out there doesn’t mean wanting to throw everyone in a cell.
Regarding pot smoke, a small amount on rare occasions is no big deal (assuming no asthma, allergies, etc., which of course you can’t assume). But if a pilot or nuclear power plant employee breathes in enough of it, he could fail the drug test at work and lose his livelihood. I presume we would still have drug testing for safety reasons even if drugs were decriminalized for people with nothing better to do. We want the responsible people in society to be in their right minds most of the time.
My point is to challenge the notion that drug use has no victims. When it gets beyond trivial, it has victims. Inherently, not just because of the crimes people commit to feed a drug habit.
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October 26, 2009, 11:21 amdan28 says:
My point is to challenge the notion that drug use has no victims. When it gets beyond trivial, it has victims. Inherently, not just because of the crimes people commit to feed a drug habit.
So the random guy smoking a joint who gets picked up by police should be thrown in jail on the grounds that he might exhale near a person who needs to take a drug test and screw up their results? It seems to me like you’re really reaching there. There are lots of things that do not create a harm in it of themselves but could, through some chain of events, negatively affect someone else. Some of those things we use the tort system to deal with, some of those things we just chalk up to the accidents of life. But for something to be criminal, I’d say you need a lot more than that as the interest you’re trying to protect.
And I think the argument for alcohol creating problems for non-users is generally much stronger than weed. Not just the roommate throwing up in my hallway (I actually live in a better place now) but the connection to violence and impulsive behavior, car accidents, other stupid decisions leading to people getting hurt, etc.
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October 26, 2009, 11:30 amMike McDougal says:
That’s a possibility, but it’s not one I would put much stock in. Voters are — and remain — ignorant of research on just about every policy topic. To add another problem to the mix, the prison-industrial complex would throw up fierce opposition based on soft-on-crime rhetoric. Prison companies, guard unions, and little town in the middle of nowhere that live off prisons will not go quietly into the night.
I don’t think the research is worthless. But I think its effect will be negligible until something forces the public to reconsider its fondness for tough-on-crime policies. Maybe something like the current recession will do it.
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October 26, 2009, 11:31 amPatHMV says:
One of the several fundamental problems with Klieman’s proposals is that you have to expend significant funding today in order to, in theory, reduce the problems ten or twenty years from now. Sending nurses to first-time mothers to coach them in child rearing is a lovely idea, and it would probably work, if we devoted sufficient resources to it. But those kids won’t be in prime criminal age for another 15 to 20 years. We can’t just suddenly switch from paying for incarceration to paying for the preventative measures; the current crop of criminals mostly need to remain locked up.
Thus, any major reforms along the lines Klieman suggests will require significant expenditure of new funds for about 15 to 20 years before we see any tax savings from reduced expenditures for incarceration. Leaving aside all other philosophical issues and debates over what the real “root causes” of crime are, the implacable political problem is finding the cash in the budget to pay for these new programs many, many years before any budget savings are realized.
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October 26, 2009, 11:35 amPatHMV says:
Mike McDougal... with some individual exceptions, that’s largely not true, about the “prison-industrial complex.” I live in Louisiana, which has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the country. Our prisons are stuffed to the gills, and one of our former heads of the corrections department regularly lobbied for measures which would give him more flexibility to release criminals who his department no longer felt were dangerous. Because of limited state budgets, the only way he could make his budget balance was to reduce costs, and the only way to reduce costs was to reduce the prison population. The “tough on crime” folks in our state are most assuredly NOT the “prison-industrial complex.”
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October 26, 2009, 11:38 amClayton E. Cramer says:
I think that lead removal is one of the best bargains that we have available to us. But the increase in violent crime in the period 1965–80 can’t be explained by lead exposure. Lead was removed from paint in the late 1960s; it has been a common part of house paint for decades. The hazards of lead were so apparent that the Reagan Administration accelerated the removal of lead from gasoline.
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October 26, 2009, 11:42 amToby says:
This is part of the essential silliness of the war on drugs and zero tolerance. Sure, no one wants nuclear plant operators to come to work stoned every day. But eating a poppyseed bagel a few days before one of these tests can indicate to some of these tests that you are a heroin user.
I have no problem if a nuclear plant engineer takes a 4 week vacation, uses drugs in week 1, and then hikes in fresh air and an abundance of exercise and virtue for three weeks until he returns. That he has a detectable level of that first week’s partying means that we have amzingly sensitive tests, not that he is any danger to himself or others.
I have even less concern if my WallMart bagger got high last weekend.
If one of them comes to work intoxicated, fine. If someone can determine a cognitive test that people fail if they have partied too hard — fine. But let’s apply that cognitive test to those staying up with a sick infant, or hassling with a teenager out after curfew as well.
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October 26, 2009, 11:44 amPatHMV says:
Randy, good points regarding the unintended side effects of “urban planning” and “urban renewal.” Unfortunately, the people who lived in those poorer neighborhoods were often moved into “affordable housing,” which in the 60s and 70s meant large, government-funded, poorly constructed apartment blocks.
In New Orleans, as in other places undoubtedly, these places came to have high concentrations of crime, and rather than a functional, tight-knit community, they became isolated islands of multi-generational poverty and ignorance. When you’re a kid and neither your parents’ nor your grandparents’ generation received any kind of decent education or did much besides take government assistance while working minimum wage jobs or engaging in the drug trade, then there’s not a lot of hope for you, as you are far removed from any good positive role model for your life.
But when those complexes were built, the plan was that by centrally locating the people in need of assistance, the welfare agencies could work efficiently and effectively at providing necessary services to them to get them out of poverty.
Bottom line? As always, the best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. The government should generally stay out of planning peoples’ lives.
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October 26, 2009, 11:46 amASlyJD says:
I’m surprised no one has brought up the finding documented in the first Freakonomics book that crime rates dramatically go down 15–20 years after the legalization of abortion. This correlation has been documented in nearly every jurisdiction that has legalized abortion, though it is ignored because it is uncomfortable to both the left and the right. (Message from both sides: “Killing criminals before they’re born is bad!” Leftists don’t like the “killing” bit, and rightists don’t like the “before they’re born” bit.)
Regarding reducing crime through non-punitive measures, I’m reminded of the finding in psychology that frequency of getting caught is a more powerful deterrent than the severity of the punishment. E.g. the NJ Turnpike. A speeding ticket can cost $1000, but people still speed constantly because the odds of getting a ticket are in “winning the lottery” range. If, however, the tollbooths calculated an average speed on the turnpike and levied a fine for every time someone exceeded it as demonstrated by their toll stub, losing even $20 for every infraction would rapidly create more compliance with the speed limit. Likewise, improving the “solved crime” rates would probably go farther to reduce crime than doubling sentences.
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October 26, 2009, 11:46 amClayton E. Cramer says:
I agree that the statement is oversimplified. However, it seems clear to me that the absence of fathers creates a serious problem for young men, who tend to look for male role models. Not every father is a great example, but certainly better than the older teens who head up many street gangs.
Remember also that it only takes a few percent of families sucked into welfare dependency to create an enormous violent crime problem, if that is the connection. Only a few percent of any population ends up as criminals.
There is a strong case that expansion of the welfare state aggravated what was already a problem of illegitimacy (more severe among blacks than whites, but not terribly severe in either). The welfare state broke any sort of connection between a father’s ability or obligation to care for his children and producing children–in much the same way that slavery disconnected an individual male slave’s work output from how well his children were fed, clothed, or cared for. It didn’t matter how hard he worked; master was going to give his kids the same amount, either way.
But doubtless a larger factor in the destruction of the family was making divorce really, really easy. I won’t claim that every marriage was happy before hand, and I know that there were kids growing up in really unhappy homes. But even a lot of only so-so fathers seem to do a better job of raising boys than no father.
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October 26, 2009, 11:56 amClayton E. Cramer says:
One problem with the claim is that even in states where abortion was theoretically quite restricted before Roe v. Wade (1973), there were a lot of abortions. Oregon, for example, prohibited abortion except to save the life or health of the mother–and yet still had 199 abortions for every 1000 live births in 1970. (See the table on page 31.) Does anyone seriously believe that 1/6th of all pregnancies required an abortion to save the life or health of the mother?
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October 26, 2009, 12:01 pmLN says:
Welfare destroyed the American family. It’s that simple.
This is actually an empirical question that has been thoroughly investigated. It turns out to be not simple at all.
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October 26, 2009, 12:06 pmA. Zarkov says:
No discussion about crime is complete without an analysis of who commits the crime. The crime rate in the US is principally driven by the high crime rate among blacks and Hispanics who constitute nearly 1/3 of the population. White and Asian crime rates in the US are both low and fairly stable. The incarceration rates reflect these disparities.
Most discussions about crime omit the all important race variable except to whine about the fact that so many young blacks in jail. Imagine trying to understand chemical reaction rates without reference to the temperature variable because people are just too uncomfortable talking about temperature. If we want to understand why crime rates change both in time and place, we cannot omit demography.
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October 26, 2009, 12:33 pmJames T. Carrington says:
Personal Responsibility? Well if you do something bad, you go to jail. That about covers it. Unless you have a useful blanket education/indoctrination program to teach a nebulous concept that has been the role of parents since parents were invented.
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October 26, 2009, 12:45 pmVader says:
So we increase the number of incarcerated “fellow human beings”, and the crime rate drop is “spectacular.” It strikes me that this is a feature, not a bug.
Now if you want to ask why we have so many criminals that need to be incarcerated for the safety of the rest of us, the we may have a reasonable topic for discussion.
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October 26, 2009, 1:21 pmBC says:
I’m not particularly interested in suspending my critical thinking skills to indulge the “reality-based” fantasy that crime is this thing that just sort of happens, like the weather.
I see my inclination to avoid the Conspiracy as long as Kleiman is guest-posting is entirely justified. Good Lord.
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October 26, 2009, 2:24 pmmarkkleiman says:
BC wrote:
BC, I’m sorry that your “critical thinking skills” don’t embrace the notion of hypothetical reasoning. No doubt you think that Galileo had suspended his critical thinking skills when he started his analysis of free fall by ignoring air resistance. But I’m glad that your ignorance will be protected against any knowledge my writing might otherwise inflict on it.
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October 26, 2009, 2:40 pmMark Buehner says:
And no discussion is complete without an analysis of the effect of generations raised without fathers. Which ties back into the prison population in some (certainly not all) respects.
There are no silver bullet solutions, but the closest thing to it is a legalization of drugs. If we eliminate drug trafficking, we will eliminate a huge portion of the crime in this nation– including the gang activity that results in a big portion of our murders. Gangs will wither on the vine without drug profits.
If we begin to empty of prisons of violators of drug crimes, we can raise the penalties for violent crimes substantially, especially fire arms crimes. I think there is an overwhelming majority that will agree that using a gun in commission of a crime should be treated with at least the level of punishment we currently reserve for drug traffickers.
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October 26, 2009, 2:52 pmOren says:
Easily.
My father served on a termination committee that had to
approverubber stamp all abortions performed at his hospital. As it turns out, health can mean mental health and “would be depressed if she had to carry to term” can mean “pregnancy is harmful to mental health”.Without getting into it too much, I just wanted to point out “health of the mother” means entirely different things to abortion opponents than it does to abortion supporters.
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October 26, 2009, 2:52 pmmischief says:
Because the crime rate decrease is exactly in those cohorts that didn’t get culled?
If you read Freakonomics looking for it, you will see they never mention that while you can commit crimes over decades, you can only be aborted over less than a year. And so we would expect crimes to decrease first among juveniles, then 18-year-olds, etc. They don’t cite that because it didn’t happen.
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October 26, 2009, 2:58 pmmischief says:
Very true. And true to this day for third-trimester abortions.
Is there any evidence that abortions are healthier than childbirth? Heck no. Is there any follow-up treatment for the women whose mental health problems are so severe as to require an abortion? Heck no.
Actually I would say that the informed people on both side know what a farce it is, and those who would say they support or oppose if surveyed are ignorant and think it means something serious.
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October 26, 2009, 3:01 pmSeaDrive says:
Goodness gracious, what a huge quantity of untested assumption! Did OTB end the numbers racket? Are gangs unable to find alternate sources of income? Will gangs fight less when the stakes are smaller, or will they fight harder for a share of the smaller pot?
Gangs don’t seem like the withering sort of organizations to me.
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October 26, 2009, 3:04 pmHarry Schell says:
Haven’t read all the posts but I haven’t seen anyone talking about the impact of “shall issue” concealed carry laws. John Lott and others have shown a clear reduction in criminality when criminals don’t know who is armed. Decades of information is available to back this up.
Deterrance is a case of making crinminal life less comfortable. Concealed carry is one means to do this which clearly has positive results.
Swift capture and punishment are not so possible to improve without massive changes in attitude, law and expenditures. “Shall issue” is quite easy by comparison, and those who elect not to carry still benefit.
Another advantage of “shall issue” over swift and certain punishment is that “shall issue” may be a more certain pre-crime deterrant than punishment, which is post-crime.
From my personal experience, a gun in the hand beats a cop on the phone. I understand very clearly the limits of “police protection”. with all repsect to LEO’s everywhere, I am my first line of defense, unless I am incredibly lucky, when seconds count they will be minutes away, if I am around to get a call for help out. Those odds are not good enough for my taste.
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October 26, 2009, 3:10 pmAssistant Village Idiot says:
Kleinman at #73 — you asked us to imagine lemons without citric acid, or thermometers without markings. BC’s complaint that this is a pointless exercise unless you first show why it’s useful is apposite.
Well, Mr. Kleinman is going to be thin-skinned, which should be expected from anyone who characterises the other approaches as “brute force.” Nice closed moral universe you’ve got there. Not that there aren’t worthwhile suggestions among your comments, but I fear we aren’t going to get far with comparisons with Stalin (who didn’t have to incarcerate all those dead people, remember?) and countries which do not have the ethnic and racial diversity we have. Where those countries do have other ethnic groups rubbing up against each other, they have strikingly similar crime rates (see Malmo, Amsterdam, Lyons, Glasgow, and Manchester just for openers). We’re talking about countries where the Irish and English, or the Serbs and Croats, cannot get along without violence, never mind such distant tolerances as Jews, Gypsies, and now Muslims.
Everyone should scroll back up and reread RowerinVA’s excellent comment.
Randy, an initial answer to your cultural question can be found in David Hackett Fischer’s fine Albion’s Seed. I can tell you’d love it.
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October 26, 2009, 3:40 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
You know, an awful lot of commenters really do prefer punishing people to reducing crime.
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October 26, 2009, 3:42 pmAnatid says:
Recall the mantra of the social sciences. Correlation does not indicate causation. (A rectangle is not a square.)
Well, we have a whole bunch of correlates:
- low socioeconomic status
- poor SES-triggered epigenetics
- poor education
- decreased activity in the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices
- decreased cortical thickness
- low IQ
- mental illness
- insecurely attachment or raised by insecure caregiver
- presence of domestic violence or abuse (including verbal abuse)
etc
Of course, if you examine a lot of the environmental factors — especially family and community environment during childhood and adolescence — then you see how many of them are activated and aggravated by situations of high stress. And in a population, who experiences and is the most vulnerable to stress? The poor and the low-ranking.
In order to fix this, you really need to solve the problems of poverty and the transmission vectors of violence in a single go, and there’s simply no way to do that. These are fascinating and depressing times to be studying intergenerational developmental psychology.
Just to confirm, you are saying that the extent to which it is okay to punish a person depends on how much better it will make the victim feel?
Certain genes have been correlated with psychosis and doubtless more will as studies progress. Let any individual who cares seek genetic screening (or if you want to be paternalistic, have the government offer them) to see whether he carries these genes. If he does, then he should absolutely avoid marijuana or any hallucinogen, as well as high levels of environmental stress (if possible).
If he doesn’t, then he’s probably not going to develop psychosis, so he should feel free to spark up.
There is something about “coming from a horrible SES where you know your life expectancy is 25 so you have nothing left to lose” that produces impulsive behavior.
I suspect that when you were growing up, college and a bright career were in your future. Come down to the local high school sometime. A lot of these kids simply don’t see any future for themselves at all.
Perhaps you refer to the works of John Ogbu?
It’s already illegal — and considered a firing offense — to show up intoxicated for work. Why should it matter what form of intoxication you’re under?
Note that sleep deprivation causes comparable levels of errors and reaction timing slowing to alcohol. If you want to do some “good”, administer fatigue tests. Although they’d be about as arbitrary as a poppyseed bagel.
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October 26, 2009, 3:42 pmCato The Elder says:
Imagine the leftist response if someone made the following argument: Because the gross amount of pollution committed by corporations is less than ever before, quite rare by historical standards, that means we should gut the EPA’s budget and enforcement mechanisms as they are an affront to the libertarian principle of property ownership. Of course they’d laugh in our faces, because they would regard that very same vigorous enforcement as a primary factor that helped enable our current quality-of-life. The most able of them might even glean the heart of the matter — basically, who cares? They should say: So what that, for entirely hedonic reasons only, we are moving down our environmental Kuznets curve, if that’s what we want to purchase with our GDP? Similarly, what does it matter that other generations before us had greater tolerance of crime in their vicinity and everyday lives? Does that fact diminish the moral injustice committed when some hoodlum now gets caught for something he might well have escaped punishment for years previous? It’s been well argued here that criminalizing drug possession and sale is of dubious morality, but you’re going to have to convince us that more serious violent crime has followed the same trajectory you claim. No one cares if the “tough on crime” stance is a bit hysterical when compared to old attitudes; I have seen it nowhere held in the Constitution that Joe Schmoe, Susie Q, and their toddler are required to live in fear within their neighborhoods and municipalities to satisfy comfortable ultra-rationalists quite removed from their sitatution.
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October 26, 2009, 3:47 pmMark Buehner says:
If they could wouldn’t they diversify? I’d say no, no they can’t by and large. Organized crime never looked anything like it did during prohibition. Ending prohibition didn’t kill organized crime but we don’t see anything close to that level of influence anymore... and that’s considering that drugs were perhaps the biggest ‘alternate source’ of organized crime income.
By that logic we should be buying more drugs to grow the illicit market and reduce crime. If we bought enough meth we could end crime as we know it. There would likely be a period of surging violence before an equilibrium was found, but without that ready source of income there really isn’t anything to replace it. And this is a generational thing– it will undoubtedly take years before getting an entry level job becomes more economically viable and socially acceptable than selling rocks on the corner.
Al Capone would beg to differ.
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October 26, 2009, 3:53 pmPatHMV says:
Mr. Klieman, I encourage you, if you’re going to participate in the comments at all, to ignore those who proclaim that they will pay no attention to you at all, and instead engage those who provide more substantive critiques of your posts. My own assumption is always that those who respond only against trolls do so because they don’t have the answers to respond to thoughtful criticisms. I give you the benefit of the doubt here because you are a guest blogger here and may not be familiar with the quality of the commentariat (compared to that of the commentariat throughout most of the rest of the blogosphere), but I urge you to ignore those best ignored.
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October 26, 2009, 3:54 pmFederale says:
I am with the engineers on this one, our feroucious punishments are not quite that. Back in the 50s I bet we were executing a greater percentage of murderers. Why don’t we actually try imposing the death penalty on more people. How about mandatory life in prison for drug smuggling and dealing? How about no more parole? We need more brute force.
But in reality, the punishment for crime back in the 50s and early 60s was good old fashioned beat down from the cops on the street and the guards in the prison.
A real problem is federal civil rights investigations. How about limiting that to only those civil rights crimes committed by federal agents? That would help.
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October 26, 2009, 5:00 pmAllan Walstad says:
Is there a statistical analysis to determine what fraction (perhaps all) of the disparity stems from age demographics? Crime is highest among adolescents and young adults. My recollection is that black and hispanic populations are younger than white, and much younger than Asian or, say, Jewish.
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October 26, 2009, 5:07 pmBC says:
Hypothetical reasoning is the process of proposing a testable explanation for an observed phenomenon. Inviting readers to pretend that crime is something that simply happens to people is not an example of hypothetical reasoning. It is, at best, a dorm-room BS session caliber counterfactual: “Imagine if the moon were made of cheese; how might we adapt our national space policy accordingly?”
Reality — the moon is made of rock, and crime is actually perpetrated upon victims by actors possessed of moral agency — stubbornly refuses to yield.
Says the guy who’s not too proud to implicitly compare himself to Galileo. No worries, Mark: if the quality of your “reasoning” in your post above is any indication, there’s no risk of you imparting “knowledge” to anyone.
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October 26, 2009, 5:24 pmAnderson says:
Everything except insisting on personal responsibility, I see. And how much is this crap going to cost me, exactly?
A-lexia’s moniker is well chosen indeed.
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October 26, 2009, 5:35 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Return? We’re still there in the city.
Mr. Kleiman, I’m glad to see that you are reading these comments. If there’s one thing you should get from them, one thing at all, one thing above all other things, it is the thing that many of us are repeating and will repeat until we are blue in the face: Victimless crime isn’t crime. End it. All of it. Prohibition is ruining lives, spawning real crime and violence. It is the oppression of the lower-classes. You decry the millions of souls in jail...yet...
What are your views on this? Do you agree? Do you disagree and support/encourage the “war on drugs”? Or is this clear as day observation too much of a political hot-topic for you to take up and risk your academic career? You have a platform, sir, and you should use it wisely and courageously.
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October 26, 2009, 6:06 pmPatHMV says:
Anatid, quite a number of those correlates have a great deal to do with cultural norms which can be quite independent of socio-economic status. There are a LOT of poor people, with low economic status, who do not commit crimes, seek a good education, take care of their children, etc. Opposition to marriage, refusal by men to adequately care for their children (just to pick one factor) has got nothing to do with being born into poverty. It has everything to do with being born into a culture which does not enforce social norms providing for such things. Other countries have much higher poverty than we do while having less crime, and they also tend to have greater income disparities than we do, while still having less crime.
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October 26, 2009, 6:14 pmAnatid says:
A. Zarkov, crime is highest among low-SES folks. Blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate amount of the low-income population, and whites and Asians make up a disproportionate amount of the high-income population.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, there’s tons of gang activity, and plenty of it drug-related, but none of it marijuana-related. The supply is prevalent. Why would you deal with a sketchy gangster who charges high prices for Mexican gutterweed when you can just call up your buddy who knows a guy who’s heading to Mendocino or Humboldt soon?
Unsure how much external validity this has to other drugs. Especially methamphetamine. Prolonged use of meth can result in psychosis, including violent psychosis, even in people who no predisposition towards psychosis.
The data from Zurich and Vancouver on how the decriminalized safe zones for heroin use are still too young to indicate rigorously whether a steady supply of opiates reduces related violent crime.
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October 26, 2009, 6:24 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
1. We’re still quite a ways from being to predict who is at risk from smoking pot. There are about 10,000–15,000 mutations that collectively seem to produce schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (and why you end up with one instead of the other is unknown).
2. Unfortunately, a fair number of people aren’t going to make a sensible decision, even if they know that they are unusual risk. See how many people take up smoking, even today.
3. The social costs of schizophrenia are huge on this–easily $100 billion a year in direct costs (disability payment, health care), and indirect costs (increased crime, homelessness, cleaning up the bodies from exposure, cleaning the carpets in public libraries). Short of saying, “Let them die, and reduce the excess population,” the costs are simply too high to afford.
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October 26, 2009, 6:26 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
This is true, but even age-adjusted fails to explain the problem. I’ve seen a breakdown of murder rates by age, and black men under 24 had about ten times the murder rate of white men under 24. On the other hand, white men that age had about twice the suicide rate of black men that age. (There were similar parallels between white and black females, although the overall murder rates were far lower.)
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October 26, 2009, 6:30 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Agreed. A black man doesn’t have a chance at getting any decent job in this country, much less become President.
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October 26, 2009, 6:42 pmRosooki says:
Dead cops. A lot of them. Dead witnesses. Dead informants. Dead anyone who gets in my way. If I’m going to jail for life with no possibility of parole (or think I am) for trying to sell the dime bag in my pocket...
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October 26, 2009, 6:52 pmSteve Clay says:
Reasons why Kleiman’s argument is worth considering:
1) It’s proven to work w/ data showing less crime and less punishment rendered.
2) It doesn’t require higher budgets to try.
3) Where it works it will save taxpayers money, reduce citizen harms, and unclug the CJS to put away the folks that really need to be.
4) It doesn’t require moving the Earth (e.g. ending drug prohibition) so it’s actually possible to reap benefits in months/years vs. decades/never.
5) ...but it doesn’t prevent moving the Earth, either.
It seems like one of those ideas that works quietly in the background, and we could look up in ten years and see less crime, fewer prisoners, less abusive prisons, and a more sensible drug policy in place.
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October 26, 2009, 7:01 pmAllan Walstad says:
Clayton Cramer: Thanks for the info.
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October 26, 2009, 7:23 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Governor Rockefeller did something similar in the 1960s: making heroin sales into a life sentence. So if you suddenly figured out (or suspected) that the guy you were selling to was a cop, it made perfect sense to kill him. The worst that you were going to get was a life sentence for murder–the same as you would get for selling heroin.
I think that we need to substantially reduce the amount of consumption of marijuana, meth, and alcohol–with an emphasis in the case of alcohol on reducing the abusive consumption. (Heroin and cocaine, as troublesome as they are, don’t seem to produce the enormous social costs of marijuana, meth, and alcohol.) But trying to do it with strict law enforcement is not very effective; working on the demand side of the equation makes way more sense.
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October 26, 2009, 7:48 pmOren says:
With respect to mental health, I don’t think you can make that judgment in generality. For some women, an abortion might be less traumatic than carrying to term, for others not.
If the mental health problem is “I’m freaking out because I cannot take care of a child”, then there’s clearly no need for any further treatment. That is, the problem is quite specifically that the pregnancy is overwhelming, an abortion is the entirety of the solution (probably combined with a contraceptive).
Two people can both correctly accuse each other of being farcical if they don’t reconcile their language first.
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October 26, 2009, 7:50 pmCareless says:
So you’re saying that would reduce the prison population
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October 26, 2009, 8:26 pmmariner says:
Clayton:
I believe the actual situation is much worse than the statistics indicate.
Males are ~50% of the population, and most murders are committed by males. So about half of murders are committed by ~6.5% of the population.
But of that 6.5%, some are children (say pre-teens) and some are elderly and they probably don’t commit many murders.
I suspect the reality is that about 3% of our population commits half of all murders (where the murderer is known).
But you’re right of course — there will never be an honest discussion about this.
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October 26, 2009, 8:27 pmPatHMV says:
Steve Clay... your point 2 is not at all established. To the contrary, most of them are prophylactic measures aimed at preventing young people from becoming hardened criminals 5 or 10 or more years from now. Those measures cost money which we are not currently spending for those purposes. They may result in savings from reduced incarceration many years down the road, but TODAY they require additional funding.
As to your point 1, I’m not sure that there are any studies showing long-term success with a variety of programs along the types described by Kleiman, mostly because it’s very difficult to obtain long-term funding for such.
Let’s make a note here, by the way, about the economics of prevention. Certainly the costs of, say, well-educating one teenager, no matter how expensive in terms of special tutors, etc., is cheaper than incarcerating that young man for 20 or 30 years after he’s robbed, hurt, or killed someone. BUT, the economic question to ask is how much it would cost to provide the same educational treatment to ALL of the kids in the “at-risk” population in order to prevent that one teenager from becoming a criminal. Accepting that perhaps 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated or serving probation or parole, that means that 8 out of 9 black men in the prime criminal age range are not criminals. Now let’s just hypothesize that it costs $5,000 in extra attention (education, coaching of new mothers, etc.) to prevent one potential criminal from becoming an actual criminal, while the costs of incarcerating that potential criminal would be $30,000. That’s a savings of $25,000 from the preventative medicine, right? Except it’s not. Because we don’t know which 1 of the 9 black men is going to turn out to be the criminal and which 8 would not become criminals anyway. So let’s say we can narrow the young black kids who have some risk of becoming criminals from 9 to 7. That means, that to prevent 1 criminal from emerging, we need to provide the preventative measures to 7 kids. At $5,000 per kid, that’s $35,000... which turns out to be more than our hypothetical incarceration cost of $30,000.
There’s more to the analysis than money, of course. We can’t measure lives, neither of the young man who could, with better parenting and better schooling could be kept from a life crime, nor of the innocent person who that criminal might harm or kill, in money. More effective education and improved parenting of these young kids would also result in additional economic benefits, by making more taxpayers rather than tax takers, as they say. I’m in no way saying that we shouldn’t consider implementing a number of Kleiman’s proposals. But it is not accurate to say that they come at no extra charge or can be done within existing budgets.
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October 26, 2009, 8:42 pmmariner says:
Randy:
Where do you get that idea?
America’s Safest and Most Dangerous Cities
I notice that the very Southern Detroit, MI leads the list.
Agreed. And urban renewal was one of the Great Society programs.
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October 26, 2009, 8:42 pmIcepilot says:
How about adjusting the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony for inflation? Should a property damage crime of $250 cause you to lose basic constitutional rights?
Seems to me that it ought to take 5 — 10 thousand dollars worth of damage before you spend a year plus in prison, lose your right to vote and to bear arms. Not to mention the job implications, etc.
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October 26, 2009, 8:46 pmpmorem says:
Anatid wrote:
No. I’m saying that a sense of vengeance is necessary to many people. If it is not addressed, there will be a cost. Kleiman misses that cost. I have experienced it first hand.
I have no mouth.
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October 26, 2009, 9:04 pmA. Zarkov says:
We have a lot more men in prison than women, and for a good reason– men commit more crime. Is this because men come from more single parent families? Or from lower SES groups? Are women younger than men? I think not. Clearly crime is sex linked. Is it simply that we raise girls differently than boys that accounts for the disparity? That one is harder to deal with because we don’t do controlled experiments in child raising. However the Israeli (failed) kubbutzim experience comes close. Children were raised communally, spending only 3 hours per day with their parents. Girls and boys were dressed alike and raised alike. Nevertheless the innate male-female differences blasted through. Of course the proponents of the socialization argument will claim that we can never really raise girls and boys the same. As such they have a non-falsifiable assertion– a dead end. Thus we are left with the high likelihood that men are just more aggressive and violence prone than women. Prior generations had no trouble dealing with this obvious fact of nature, but it seems that today we do, or demand a more compelling argument than “that’s just the way nature works.” The biological determinants of crime is still an open research area.
The book (which has a liberal tilt) Ethnicity, Race and Crime, Hawkings, editor, provides a collection of research reports on crime and race. The various chapters provide a wealth of crime data. In particular look at Fig. 8.1 (page 177) which displays murder arrest rate for blacks and whites from 1946 to 1990. The white and black curves track each other pretty well, with a ratio that varies between 8 and 10. We see that in 1946 the murder rates for both groups were higher than in 1990. This seemingly contradicts Kleiman’s assertion of a golden age of low crime in the past.
Local peaks in the black-white murder arrest rate occurred in 1956 (ratio= 16), and 1971 (ratio= 13.6). After 1975, the ratio remains nearly constant at about 8. Nineteen seventy one also corresponds to a near peak in the overall arrest rate for both groups, but still less than 1946. I suspect returning veterans from WWII had a lot to do with the increases we see after the war ended.
This data in this book (published in 1995) goes up to 1992, so it misses the significant declines over the last ten years. I think the reduced crime has a lot to do with putting criminals in jail and keeping them there. While it’s true that many people are in jail for drug offenses, I don’t think we should conclude that drug offenders are otherwise law abiding. Getting a conviction for a drug offense is pretty easy compared to other crimes. If we do away with our drug laws we will still have a lot of people in prison unless we just decide to go soft on crime again.
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October 26, 2009, 9:09 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
You are assuming that providing those educational opportunities will prevent an at-risk teenager from becoming a criminal. The correlation doesn’t necessarily have a causal connection. I remember being quite surprised at how many convicted felons were elementary school dropouts. We have mandatory public schooling in the U.S.–and while some states (like Idaho) only require to attend until 16, I’m not aware that there are any that allow you to dropout so early.
There are probably family structure issues involved with such kids that no amount of educational opportunity is going to fix. My daughter is a social worker. She was very disappointed at how many teenage girls she was seeing in the mental hospital who attempted suicide because they were being pimped out by their parents to buy meth. And these are white kids with all the enormous advantages that being a member of the master race implies!
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October 26, 2009, 9:14 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Bernard Harcourt’s work argues that even a better fit for explaining the 1990s murder rate drop is the enormous increase in total institutionalization, as “get tough” policies sent mentally ill offenders to prison.
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October 26, 2009, 9:31 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Bernard Harcourt’s work argues that even a better fit for explaining the 1990s murder rate drop is the enormous increase in total institutionalization, as “get tough” policies sent mentally ill offenders to prison. Many of these offenders had long histories of relatively unsevere crimes.
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October 26, 2009, 9:32 pmPatHMV says:
Clayton, I was merely assuming the effectiveness of the program for the sake of argument, not asserting it myself. That said, the reality is that there’s a range out there. Some “families” are so f’ed up that no amount of government-funded intervention is likely to help. Research on fundamental anatomy of the human mind indicates that kids who spend their first few years in an environment where they are not regularly hugged and touched have permanent atrophy of the brain; their brains are simply not normal at all.
But there are in fact also a lot of kids on the cusp of either a life of crime or a life of relative productivity. There are proven, effective programs, alternatives to incarceration, which dramatically reduce the rate of recidivism compared to simple incarceration. They’re not 100% of course, and some kids are going to become sociopaths anyway, but they’re nevertheless very effective. But they’re not cheap and, as I noted in my earlier comment, you have to spend a lot of money treating people who wouldn’t actually have become serious criminals in the end, anyway.
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October 26, 2009, 9:38 pmmischief says:
“Freaking out” is not a mental health problem. Especially since she does not need to take care of a child and can place the child for adoption.
If she is suffering actually mental illness over it, there is absolutely no reason to believe that she will instantly recover. Especially since a woman who is that stressed out by pregnancy will be stressed out by other events, even if she manages to avoid getting pregnant again.
If she’s mentally ill, there’s no reason to believe that she would take a contraceptive. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe she could go on getting pregnant again and again and again and again. . . . I have myself read women’s accounts of their lives where they did exactly that.
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October 26, 2009, 9:41 pmmischief says:
You do all realize that when they say people are in jail for “drug crimes”, it means that was the most serious charge brought against them?
Here’s a discussion by a man who’s actually worked with a lot of those prisoners. (Albeit in England.)
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October 26, 2009, 9:45 pmPerseus says:
Inject some male proponents of the socialization argument with lots of estrogen and some female proponents of the socialization argument with lots of testosterone and see what happens.
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October 26, 2009, 9:50 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I was quite surprised, back in the 1990s, to see that unlike progressive California, those Neanderthals in Georgia were making extensive use of home arrest for first-time burglary convicts, to keep them integrated into the community, and employed. I’m one of those right-wing crazies that thinks that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, or those non-violent criminals who simply refuse to abide by the terms of non-prison supervision.
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October 26, 2009, 9:58 pmOren says:
I assumed you understood that I was speaking colloquially. If you insist on being technical, the easiest fit is probably one of the Adjustment Disorders, code 309.X in your handy DSM, depending on the manifestation.
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October 26, 2009, 10:07 pmPerseus says:
Agreed, but it’s not surprising that a modern social engineer would denigrate those costs and ask us to think “about “crime” as something bad that happens to people, like auto accidents or air pollution or disease, rather than as something horrible that people do to each other.”
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October 26, 2009, 10:14 pmjccamp says:
With all due respect to the OP, at least some of the suggestions are, frankly, impossible to implement as a practical matter. Such as
“Punishment should be swift and certain rather than severe; those subject to it should know precisely what actions will lead to punishment...”
As another poster noted, civil liberties in this country pretty much guarantee that this will never happen. Convicting persons accused of crimes is a long and messy process, and usually far from conclusive to any number of observers, even after a conviction. Witness the threads on this blog alone.
As for specific actions leading to specific sanctions, sentencing guidelines are an idea on the way out. Specific actions have and will continue to lead to a variety of penalties, depending on where in this country you might be located, whom you hired as your attorney, and any number of other variables including race, gender, and economic status. So offenders will always have the sentencing lottery working for them.
Anatid @ 3:42 lists a number of correlates which ring true for those with personal experience. I’d only add “a complete lack of empathy for anyone or anything” and “poor to no impulse control.” Most of the criminals I knew, even the very successful ones, would shoplift a pack of gum at the same time they might have a thousand dollars in their pocket. By the time they were adults, they preferred being outlaws, even when the effort in being a crook exceeded that of being straight.
It has been suggested that the welfare programs started in the ’60’s, which rewarded single parents and added a bonus for multiple children contributed to the breakdown of the family group among populations traditionally at or below the poverty level. Another person noted that beginning about the same time, persons with mental and/or emotional disabilities — including substance abusers — began to be treated as medical problems, and no longer an issue for civil law. I suspect both theories are guilty as charged. But I don’t see a return to the days of alcoholics and the homeless being locked up, or of the mentally ill spending an adult lifetime inside an institution.
I agree with the many posters who think decriminalizing drugs would be a good start. if for no other reason than removing the huge cost of the drug for the user — who typically resorts to crime to sustain the habit — by having the government give drugs away for free might reduce crime by large numbers. There’s a huge and complex problem with drug enforcement, far too tough to simplify here, but taking the profit motive out of drug sales and the cost out of addiction/dependency would be a splendid beginning.
Long term solutions which seek to address living conditions, school opportunity and the like are very nice, and certainly can’t hurt, but one should be prepared to spend a ton of money and never know whether the initiative worked. The horizon is, as Pat pointed out, perhaps two decades. And, since one cannot isolate the effect of the school/lead removal/whatever, you’d be guessing even after 20 years, regardless of numbers that looked successful or not.
I’m with those who think crime is down because prison population is up. If we took all of the money and man-hours dedicated to chasing down drug dealers, users, etc and instead, concentrated on, say, robbery or burglary, we could appreciably reduce Part I crime. And have plenty of cash left over for those visiting nurses.
So, I suppose I think we have a bifurcated solution. Trying to address Anatid’s correlates while the susceptible pool is still very young is a great idea. Just don’t expect immediate, quantifiable results, and do expect to spend money. Once the offender population reaches some age, the likelihood of altering the aberrant behavior declines to nearly nil. At that point, public resources should be tasked at identifying, convicting and imprisoning those who break the law.
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October 26, 2009, 10:50 pmFormer Chicagoan says:
I think that lead removal is one of the best bargains that we have available to us.
Nonsense! The building I lived in from when I was born until age 14 had a lead pipe supplying the water to the building. I drank the water every day for 14 years. I have a high IQ and got a law degree. Lead is a bogus boogey man.
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October 26, 2009, 11:03 pmSurveyguy84 says:
“You said there was a great drop in crime recently, so how do we know that it wasn’t the increased incarceration doing its job? Perhaps there is a cause of the increase in crime in the US that is not seen elsewhere”
Link please. Prove there is or is not a drop in crime. Does anyone prove anything?
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October 27, 2009, 12:36 amSteve Clay says:
Sorry, I wasn’t referring to his more rambling background intro contained in this post. The actual implementation is Hawaii’s H.O.P.E. project, a straightforward probation/parole policy that doesn’t require any outside prevention/paternalism efforts.
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October 27, 2009, 12:38 amMark Kleiman, guest-blogging says:
Note to Perseus and pmorem:
I posted this note on my own blog yesterday.
More generally, may I suggest that people who haven’t read anything more than a single blog post not leap to the conclusion that they can fill in my thoughts based on their stereotypes about pointy-headed liberal social engineers?
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October 27, 2009, 1:01 amBrett Bellmore says:
But it’s a, “Somebody inconvenient to me must die, or I’ll freak out” sort of trauma, so that’s definitely something that needs treatment. Sooner or later, they might find somebody a little bit older inconvenient.
More realistically, it’s a, “I got this doctor to claim I’d freak out if I had the kid, because putting it up for adoption would be kind of inconvenient.” sort of thing, much of the time.
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October 27, 2009, 7:42 amliamascorcaigh says:
Most Recent Murder Rate per 100,000 of population:
USA 5.8 Ireland 1.59 United Kingdom 2.03
‘Nuff said!
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October 27, 2009, 10:53 ammischief says:
In other words, they really are mentally ill and really do need treatment. They do not just need an abortion.
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October 27, 2009, 11:51 amMinnesota Skeptic says:
I’ve been working in the criminal justice system for 30 years, so I have some knowledge in the area of drug crimes/incarceration. Most people who are imprisoned for drug crimes either have a lengthy criminal record or were involved in heavy dealing. Many of the numbers and “facts” claimed by those who support legalizing all drugs are myths. See:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:RMweYX509ZEJ:www.sarnia.com/GROUPS/ANTIDRUG/experts/tufdrgen.html+%22actually+incarcerated%22+myth&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
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October 27, 2009, 2:33 pmmariner says:
Mark Kleiman,
One of the reasons that crimes against black people are underpunished, is that those crimes are committed mostly by black people.
When the black community demands that black criminals be punished more harshly, they will be. (Fat chance of that.)
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October 27, 2009, 5:18 pmPerseus says:
Your additional comment does little to alter my assessment, particularly when you write: “Reducing crime (and crime avoidance costs) is the primary benefit to be sought from criminal-justice programs, but not the only one.” Claiming that retribution or justice is “a benefit” to be sought from criminal justice programs may shock the consciences of many law professors and moral philosophers in the rarefied atmosphere of academia, but it doesn’t impress me. Even that claim is cheapened by your crassly utilitarian definition of benefit: “A “benefit” is simply a desired consequence, measured by someone’s willingness to pay for that consequence.”
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October 27, 2009, 6:47 pmvaluethinker says:
Bill
There is a wealth of scientific evidence that early exposure to lead causes hyperactivity as well as retards cognitive development.
The first work was done in the 1940s by an Australian doctor looking at children’s exposure to lead paint.
This work was ignored by medical science until basically the 1970s, when elevated blood levels in American inner city schoolchildren and mounting evidence finally led to restrictions on leaded paint, and a banning of lead as an automotive octane enhancer
This change coincides nicely with the drop in the US crime rate in the early 1990s ie 18 years after lead was phased out as an automotive octane enhancer.
In essence, we may have bred a generation of brain-damaged kids. Studies of young juvenille delinquents and prisoners shows a high incidence of ADHD and cognitive impairments of various forms.
The inventor of leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley, Chief Scientist at GM, was alsoo the inventor of the Freon CFC, which was shown to have devastating effects on th ozone layer, which are still manifest, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.
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October 28, 2009, 1:21 pmvaluethinker says:
Bill
Americans are 8 times more likely to murder each other than English are.
And 4 times more likely to murder each other than most European countries. Even Finland, say, where gun ownership is as universal as the US.
White Americans are still at least 4 times as likely to kill each other as white Europeans.
The ‘murder belt’ in the US runs largely below the Mason-Dixon line and out into Arizona. The prevalence of murder there is something like 2:1 over the rest of the US, amongst white Americans.
The reason is unclear but is hypothesised to be something about the indentured-servant aristocrat culture that was imported from 17th and 18th century England (a place with crime rates far above current levels) and solidified in the ‘Scotch Irish’ culture of the Appalacians. Also perhaps in the inherent brutality of the slaveowning society, and then the Segregation Society and Jim Crow laws.
However one study I saw (Scientific American) suggested that murder amongst unrelated individuals is *not* higher in the South than in other parts of the US (presumably outside notoriously crime ridden cities like Phoenix– murder capital of the USA at one point).
So it is about a different cultural language. They showed some tests where experrimenters ‘brushed against’ southern white males and non-white males in the corridor. The southern white males were far more likely to take umbrage.
If you look at countries and murder rates, then AFAIK there is no other developed country with an American level of murder. You have to go to places like Brasil and South Africa (and Russia) to get to American levels.
Murder, along with road deaths, are the modern American plagues.
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October 28, 2009, 1:27 pmvaluethinker says:
Hi
Britain (1/5th the population) has about 84,000 prisoners I believe.
http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/assets/documents/1000490A23102009_web_report.doc
So that would mean if the US was Britain, you would have 420,000 prisoners.
(all prisoners are prisoners of the same custodial service ie there is no state and federal distinction)
Britain has the highest incarceration rate in western Europe.
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October 28, 2009, 1:33 pmvaluethinker says:
Last time I checked, auto accidents and air pollution were bad things that people do to other people.
You know cars have drivers and air pollution is created by human activity.
Last I checked.
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October 28, 2009, 1:34 pmvaluethinker says:
Did ‘Urban Renewal’ devastate the cities or did Civil Rights and desegregation?
Civil Rights allowed middle class blacks to move out to the suburbs.
you also had the Civil Rights riots, associated with outright violence against blacks by police, and by the assassination of Martin Luther King.
I think what happened to the American city in the 60s and 70s was the lid came off. You had formerly stuff that was kept in the ghetto by police state tactics spill over into the streets generally. It was no longer acceptable for urban police forces to treat blacks as they had.
You had soaring unemployment especially amongst working class men. ‘Life without Work’ is a pretty seering book.
You had floods of cheap guns. And South East Asian drugs. And returning Vets.
A big factor was probably the change in production technology for weapons. The rise and rise of the Saturday Night Special, and the ability to make cheap weapons like the MAC10 (consider the effort to make an Armalite out of stamped metal, vs. the craftsmanship of a Lee Enfield .303). Big fall in the costs of weaponry and the availability.
And you had heroin coming back with the vets from SE Asia, right into the inner city (think Frank Lucas and ‘American Gangster’). And behind it, in the late 80s, crack cocaine.
And of course most US cities built highways right through old neighbourhoods in the core, which both sucked middle class people out into the commuter belt, and crippled the local environment in the fragmented neighbourhoods left behind.
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October 28, 2009, 1:42 pmvaluethinker says:
However trials in Liverpool in the early 90s (shut down under pressure from the US state department) and Brighton most recently have been judged stunning successes in reducing street crime.
The estimate of the reduction in crime in Brighton (south of London on the coast) is that the average addict has reduced theft by 90%.
Costs £15,000 a year to maintain a heroin habit at street prices, which means stealing goods on the order of £45,000-£150,000. For heroin addicts on maintained doses, that has almost dropped to zero (being kicked off the programme is a major disincentive).
And the number of addicts who died during the trial was zero. Whereas normally you would have expected something like 15–20 (out of 1000).
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October 28, 2009, 1:48 pmPurple Koolaid says:
everything from a later school day (to shorten the burglary-friendly time period when adolescents are out of school but grown-ups have not returned from work)
Teens need LESS time w/ their peers...they need to be w/ adults. Teens raising teens is not good.
Also, didn’t they try this w/ “midnight basketball” and crime rates went up??
to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead
Encouraging testing vitamin d levels for every youth would be good too. vitamindcouncil.org has studies that show the low rates of vitamin d in African American children (adults too) that lead to a wide range of behavioral and health problems.
to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.
I’ve not seen where the state knows how to raise babies. Half of all formula in this country is paid for by taxpayers. How about eliminating state subsidies for formula and watch these moms breastfeed and how their parenting skills increase?
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October 28, 2009, 8:06 pmfreefall says:
I think there is something serious missing in this analysis about crime and maybe even about what makes a person a criminal. How many banksters are doing time? How about the notorious 21st century torture revivalists, are they doing any time for all the murder and mayhem they have inflicted? The point is that crime and corruption are endemic within our government and wall street and the corporate halls. Cheating is just another tactic for getting ahead. Look around you and the message many people see is not only that crime pays but it pays damn good. I, for one, would like to see the equation between perp and victim stop favoring the perp. Like for murder the victum recieves the death penalty but the purp gets life. What kind of a message is that? How can our society put the wealthy on a pedestal if they got rich by lying and stealing and keeping their fellow man beaten down? Why do we allow corporations to commit crimes that would incarcerate an individual? How can a handful of lawless business men steal the hard-earned assets of millions of people and then recieve multi million dollar bonuses instead of multi year prison terms? When our so-called leaders lie to congress or have memory lapses or if convicted recieve pardons can anybody not see the message it sends our children? When a certain segment of the population is above the law, and our politicians lie and cheat and steal and are never held accountable for their crimes is it any wonder there are so many crimminals?
To begin with, a person in pursuit of happiness, like getting high is not commiting any crime according to the constitution. It is the ridiculous moralists behind the war on drugs who have some how revived the prohibition mentality that are responsible for the skyrocketing prison population and tainted the data regarding crime and crimminals. If drugs were not illegal so that users could buy them over the counter much of the abuse would likely disappear. Smoking pot does not make a person prone to crimminal activity, in fact it probably does the opposite. Legalization would stimulate the economy, bolster tax revenues, and eventually cause the cartels to invest elsewhere. This is not speculation but fact. Morality should not be allowed to be the underpinning of legislation. Yes drug abuse is a problem, a social problem, a personal problem. Let individuals persue their percieved happiness and not make it into a major crimminal problem. You can’t win a war on a noun. Besides the real drug problem actually lies with big pharma and the crap they are pushing on our t.v. to the most vulnerable members of society. But the war on drugs is highly profitable to a few.
Next is the privatization of the prison system. And of course it is not the unions at the heart of the problem, but management or mismanagement, which is always at the heart of the problem. Allowing privateers to become involved in the crimminal justice system guaranteers an ever increasing prison population. If you can not see that then you are blind.
And finally if the percieved road to success continues to be exemplified by people whose conduct is obviously crimminal yet suffer no consequences, how can you expect the crime rate or prison population to reverse?
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November 1, 2009, 2:10 am