If you want to show that crime is just determined by whether people think they will get caught, you have to show that these other factors make no difference to the crime rate, and it is only affected by incarceration rates.

If, on the other hand, you think incarceration rates change according to peoples’ response to crime, you need to accept that the crime came first, and you need to explain what drives that crime. This is an interesting conversation to have, consistent with the statistical history of crime in the US (why did it drop in the ‘50s? Was it really demographic change? How important was the Vietnam war and its aftermath?) But you don’t seem to want that conversation.

I told you he believes it’s genetic, in a vulgar Steven-Pinkerish sort of way. He’s just too chicken to come out and say it. You’re suppose to come to the ‘obvious’ conclusion yourself.

There is no contradiction at all in saying that the rise in imprisonment saved many lives and had positive effects while at the same time being a massively inefficient dragnet approach to reducing crime, that could be much better targeted. Even though there is no factual implausibility in saying that—indeed, it seems plausible enough—there’s an emotional contradiction, since the pro and anti-incarceration sides are so politically entrenched. Both sides could be right at the same time.

Politically, though, the majority of the population sees little benefit from reducing imprisonment, and much benefit from the reduction in crime that has accompanied it. The cost of the incarceration increase is low on the scale of American spending—tens, not hundreds of billions a year, less than one-half of one percentage point of GDP. And the human costs of the increase are heavily, heavily concentrated among minority high school dropouts and their families.

I’m afraid my epidemiology isn’t sharp enough to figure out the perfect analogy to the relationship between crime and punishment. The closest comparison I can think of is to epidemic pathogens and biologically costly forms of immunity to them. As the pathogen flourishes, it creates an environment that selects for a strong immune response. The prevalence of this response suppresses the pathogen, shifting the environment in turn towards one that selects for weak immunity.

you have yet to explain why countries with lower incarceration rates historically have had lower crime rates.

Are you sure this is true? After all, once you start comparing different countries, the confounding factors multiply enormously. That means you really can’t just throw away inconvenient data, and, say, compare the US with an agglomerated Europe. How does Japan compare, for instance? What about differences within Europe? Where do, say, Middle Eastern countries, or sub-Saharan African ones, fit on the scale? (I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’d be amazed if anyone could get any convincing signal out of such noisy data.)

Parsimony is only useful if it leads to meaningful tests of the hypotheses thereby generated. In 1996 you see curtailment of welfare and a drop in crime. Similarly, an expansion of welfare in the mid-60’s correlates with an increase in crime. You thereby argue , parsimonioulsy that welfare does not effect crime rates.

So then we begin testing our hypothesis. International comparisons. Intranational comparisons in which we control for other factors: unemployment, (as mentioned by Barry 7/20 12:10) number of males age 15-25, increase or decrease in drug markets, etc…

BTW, there’s nothing “miraculous” about any of these explanations. The ad hominem is duly noted.

First; Great Post Kieran, concisely put together with an excellent take down of the tough on crime initiative that started in the 80’s with Reagan. A tangential but I think supporting point to your post is an argument I always may to colleagues and friends who dislike the high cost of education (especially teachers pay); I always say either you pay the teachers today or you’ll pay the cops tomorrow. If you stint on education when that student reaches a certain age and they fell they have no chance at life, believe me they will turn turn to crime.

Also, I was wondering how soon the first post was going to be on what I call the “Cult of Giuliani” (in your case it was the first post). The claim that the mass imprisonments of the 80s and 90s resulted in lower crime during the 90’s with references to Giuliani and the awesome job he did in NYC. What the people posting that crap never do is give credit to the Clinton economy of the 90s that gave jobs to everyone who wanted one. My grandmother had a saying “if you were working you weren’t stealing, because you were too damm tired to steal”.

Once again, great Post Kieran.

Dan, this already sounds a lot like a parody, but just to make it a bit funnier, maybe you could start using terms like “the Ministry of Love”?

You have elaborated on this, to suggest that your upbringing protected you. My upbringing did too, but not in the way you might think. My family are poor lower middle class British, my Father a typesetter and my Mother unemployed. For the 10 years before his retirement my Father was on welfare. We lived in relatively poor suburbs in ordinary towns, though most of my childhood was (fortunately) in the countryside. As a consequence, my brother fell into a criminal subculture at the age of about 10, and was taken from us by the State at about 13. I was younger, too young to be following him around, and seeing the trouble it caused us and him I didn’t follow. Also interestingly my brother intervened to stop me associating with people like his peers – he would tell my parents if I did. So I got an object lesson in how crime doesn’t pay at about the age when I would have started, had I followed in my brother’s footsteps. I was in essence protected by an immediate object lesson.

So I do think that imprisonment works, but only under very strict conditions, and I think that incarceration rates follow crime rates. If you look at the crime rates of the 50s, they are actually historically exceptional (since about 1925 US murder rates have been at about 1990 levels, but for 10 years in the 50s). Those 10 years in the 50s correspond with a period with an unusually low number of young men, particularly working class young men (due to the war), and full employment which began to wind down in the 60s. They were exceptional, and it may be the case that the decision to follow more gentle criminal justice practice in the 60s (if indeed that is what happened – I doubt it) was a response to a belief that the post-war era would be crime free.

As for my work and living experiences and how they inform my view of criminal justice – most modern crime is drug-related, and the most effective way of preventing drug-related crime is drug treatment and welfare. Sadly the US is yet to learn that lesson, and is paying the price.

No doubt low postwar crime rates played a major role, lulling people into believing that preventing crime was no longer a priority. Advocates of milder punishments, broader rights for the accused, and so on thus had a receptive public audience, and met little political resistance until crime began skyrocketing.

Wow—the snobbish disdain fairly drips from your postings. Well, I’ll thank you to leave me out of it—I do not consider the American Public to be contemptibly inferior to either of us, as you apparently do.

It would also be consistent with the apparent focus in implementation of these laws on black communities.

Really? Do you have any evidence to back that up? My impression is that black communities generally have (at least until recently) been denied the benefit of the kind of assiduous law enforcement that’s the norm in white suburbs. A comparison of crime report/case resolution rates for different neighborhoods should answer this question, although I don’t know where to find those.

Either 60% of your youth is criminal, and you have to look at the root causes of that; or your laws are designed to persecute a minority rather than catch criminals.

I believe the figure was 60 percent of uneducated youth. If that means, say, adults without a high school diploma, then it wouldn’t surprise me if the figure for uneducated white youth is also very high (although perhaps not 60 percent).

And you can’t tell me that soft sentencing alone is the cause of that 60% crime wave

I don’t know if I can’t, but I haven’t, and I certainly won’t. I’ve already made it clear that I suspect multiple causes, of which soft sentencing was only one. However, the latter was by far the most easily addressable via public policy. (Culling excess young males from the population, for example, wasn’t likely to fly as a strategy.)

I am interested in American’s explanations of why America is relatively violent.

Sorry—you’ll have to ask an American. As a foreigner, though, I do subjectively detect a disturbing violent streak in American culture—as well as the whole gun fetish thing, which also creeps me out a bit.

I am not particularly sympathetic to that jibe, and I think it’s a cheap attempt at a particularly juvenile and nasty form of ad hominem, best reserved for the pages of conservative tabloid media.

Fair enough—I don’t really understand why you hold the positions you do, under those circumstances, but I’ll accept them as sincere.

Why don’t you commit crime?

Hard to say—I can think of multiple possible explanations. I’m a generally risk-averse person by nature. My parents taught their children, both directly and by example, to follow society’s rules to the letter. As a smaller-than-average child, I experienced violence and rule-breaking overwhelmingly from the victim’s end. No doubt there are other factors as well. But I don’t recall my or my family’s economic prospects ever entering into my thinking, although the thought of getting arrested certainly has, in moments of idle imagining.

I also know a couple of people who have committed crimes, and I’m quite confident that economic desperation didn’t drive them. On the contrary, if anything, it was the other way around—their crimes had a serious negative impact on their economic circumstances. As they say, crime doesn’t pay.

Now allow me, if I may, to turn the question around: do you avoid crime (assuming you do) because of your economic condition? Does fear of arrest and conviction play no part in your thinking? What about those you know who have committed crimes? Are they driven by economic need, or by other factors?

Dan, you also haven’t given an explanation for why incarceration rates were lowered in the 60s. Was it, perchance, in response to (peoples’ response to) low crime rates? If so, what made those crime rates go down in the 60s and up later? If incarceration rates didn’t drop in response to crime, then why should we believe your theory that they increased in response to (peoples’ response to) high crime in the 90s?

This argument might have a good effect, it might get one’s debate partner to stop and think.

But it’s an inverted form of “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?”.

People aren’t all the same, and also some of us are luckier than others. In a game of musical chairs, it isn’t tremendously useful to argue about why one person got a seat when another did not. Maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. Maybe he was better at grabbing a seat. But the game is designed so there will be losers.

Do we have something like that? If we have a labor surplus, there have to be losers who can’t get legitimate jobs. Many of them will break laws, they will become drug dealers or whatever else because they lack better opportunities. And if it wasn’t them it would be somebody else. And over time they will accept the idea that going to jail is just an occupational hazard of being chronicly unemployed. If you have the qualifications to get into the army during wartime you might be killed or maimed. If you have to take whatever opportunities arise you might spend some jailtime. Just something you have to accept.