More on the US prison system

One can’t forget that by moving prisoners (who cannot vote) from urban areas to rural areas, one creates malapportionment of legislative districts (to the point of rotten boroughs in the rural areas), where those prisoners are counted in the rural areas, not the urban areas, for determining legislative representation.

Shockingly, most rural areas vote Republican, so this particular form of prison Keynesianism (along with military Keynesianism, the only “good” kind for conservatives) is yet another factor contributing to the overrepresentation of movement conservative insanity in American politics. Naturally, this is a feature, not a bug.

I think it’s interesting that Moskos doesn’t address the issue of rehabilitation in this peice at all. I’m not sure how you could ignore the point when addressing the issue at book length, so maybe it’s lack in WSJ can be blamed on space, but it should be said: at least some of the money saved by this pitched switch to corporal punishment should be spent on enrolling the punished in remedial programs. Plenty has already been said about what sort of programs those should be.

The other question is, if flogging could be considered appropriate payment for an offense, should we even consider that offense a crime? This goes back to the idea that a lot of the people who are in prisons shouldn’t be there in the first place, and so isn’t directly rebuffed by Moskos’ preemptive defense in the second to last graf: “if flogging isn’t harsh enough—if we need to keep people locked up for years precisely because overcrowded prisons are so unbelievable horrific—then we’ve become perhaps a truly evil society.”

Though I’m delighted to see someone point out the enormous economic costs of such massive levels of incarceration, I’m not particularly keen to follow his logic of “Rehabilitation has failed; therefore, bring back public flogging.” Rehabilitation has rarely been seriously tried, especially thanks to those to whom the WSJ editoral pages normally cater. Attempts to make imprisonment more humane and to work towards reintegrating prisoners into society are met with spittle-flecked screeds by the “law-and-order” crowd; just look at the reaction to the recent US Supreme Court decision about California’s overcrowded prisons. And the premise seems to fall down on the fact that we incarcerate at a much higher level than basically anywhere, not just countries that still have corporal punishment. Perhaps we could look at a few more locations for tips before we leap straight to “Indonesia does it; why can’t we?”

More charitably, one could infer that the author’s argument is an exasperated one, along the lines of “Okay, fine. If we’re only really interested in punishment, why not use this cheap method of punishing miscreants and get it over with?” I would fear that this still gives away too much, and we’d end up with a system that, e.g., still incarcerated (certain classes of) people for using (certain) drugs, but flogged people for jaywalking. Remember, prior to that “flawed do-gooder logic” of the 18th century which Moskos sneers at, the British used an extensive corporal punishment system, and it was frequently horrifying to modern sensibilities.

“Jobs Program” is exactly right. Just as great swaths of the military machine seems to be a Socialist jobs program.

The comedy is that even conservative politicians appear to tacitly agree there’s a roll for government in directly creating jobs for people – a Socialistic practice by any other name.

The tragedy is that nothing like a Socialist-type jobs program will ever gain any traction with them unless it is associated with something punitive, like prisons or the military.

“Not too long ago, in 1970, America had 380,000 incarcerated people. That was considered normal. Today, thanks in large part to a misguided war on drugs and get-tough sentencing laws, there are 2.3 million Americans behind bars. Something has gone terribly wrong.”

Stop. Weird. Everyone should know this ->

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

[I spot checked this it seems to be based on FBI Uniform Crime Reports]

I am actually very receptive to the idea that we should experiment with letting out more non violent offenders.

And based on my quick look, after crudely adjusting for pop growth, 1.7 extra million prisoners is worth 500K less violent crimes per year including 15K fewer murders. [Using 1980 as the baseline for crimes and 1970 for prisoners.] Is 1.7 million extra prisoners worth 500K fewer violent crimes? A very fair question.

But everyone should be aware that getting tough on crime very much looks like it has worked. A lot of violent crime has been reduced. 500K fewer violent crimes per year = a huge improvement in the quality of life.

typical WSJ pap. nevermind the human tragedy of incarcerating people who don’t deserve it and most of whom never had a fair shot at life and many of whom (something like half as of 2k6 http://tinyurl.com/3gqpcyr) have mental illnesses…it’s the fact that it smells like (cue strings) SOCIALISM that we should get rid of it. wow. you don’t say. he acts like no one on the left has ever said anything critical of the prison-industrial complex. get with it dude, you’re way behind the times.

Isn’t it more likely that the high employment rate for a large chunk of the more recent crime statistics is a more important factor for the lower crime rates rather than a change in incarceration rates?

Actually, that doesn’t appear to be the case. U.S. crime rates have dropped even during the recession:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/01/07/us-usa-crime-idUSTRE60613K20100107

HP @ 2

The beauty part is that slaves now count as a whole person for the purposes of apportionment. The Enumeration Clause only gave the bastards 3/5. We’re told by Prisoners of the Census that this didn’t affect any Congressional seats in the 2010 reapportionment, but in intrastate politics of the rural/urban kind, I can’t imagine that it hasn’t been a factor. Either way, it’s the principle of the thing that I find galling.

Incidental rottenness is sometimes even more revealing — and more disgusting — than the intentional kind.

Moskos doesn’t make it as clear here as in a recent piece on this in the Chronicle, but his advocating the return of flogging is, he says, a rhetorical device that aims to shock us into reflecting on the prison system in this country, what its aims are, and whether it is justified in its methods.

I hope this is correct. Because the idea that the “liberal” alternative to mass imprisonment is mass torture, is beyond disgusting.

But how about you, Eszter? Are you for flogging?

I hope this is correct. Because the idea that the “liberal” alternative to mass imprisonment is mass torture, is beyond disgusting.

I think Moskos’s reference to A Modest Proposal suggests that we shouldn’t take his plan at face value.

FWIW, the tendering for more prisons to provide local employment thing is the sub-theme of Lee Child’s _61 Hours_ .

MPAVictoria,

It isn’t the stock market and the Super Bowl winner.

Eat your vegetables they are good for you.

I’ve heard it said (by Kevin Drum among others), that the recent decrease in crime -especially violent crime rates was caused by the reduction in lead exposure. But of course politically the meme that its because we lock up the bad guys will continue to get great mileage.

Blah, blah, Correlation does not equal causation blah blah.

I don’t think this is a case of “correlation does not equal causation”. Surely, if you incarcerate all 100% of the population, the crime (outside) will plummet to zero. Rather, this is a case of treating the symptom. With the treatment, arguably, being worse than the disease, or, at least, exacerbating the disease.

If I recall correctly, when I was working at a federal agency, all of the institution gray steel furniture was coming from a federal prison somewhere.

Every substantial item in my dad’s old office (state govt) was built and (if substantial enough to require several lifters) installed by prisoners who worked harder than I have ever seen any human being work in my life for, if memory serves, $0.18 per hour, the top wage available to them. All the office furniture. The doors. The restroom fixtures. I think even the surveying field equipment.

But how about you, Eszter?

Aww, c’mon, Moskos says “I defend flogging because something radical is needed to reduce the cruelty of incarceration” and approvingly cites Dickens’ description of imprisonment as “torture of the body” and states that if we’re going to torture people, we should at least give them a choice of tortures. Moskos is an ally on our bombthrower flank, he’s as good at being productively provocative as Alan Grayson.

…although my preferred line of semi-trollish argument is that prisons are taking away jobs from law-abiding Americans, because it seems to get more traction.

Appeals to humanity are useless in the face of the profit motive.

…just as they were in the Gilded Age, right?

The worst is the enemy of the bad.

Here’s Moskos:

We should offer criminals the choice between the status quo of prison and being caned, Singapore-style. … I defend flogging because something radical is needed to reduce the cruelty of incarceration.

… Since our only real goal is to punish, we should do so better, more honestly, and much more cheaply than we do now. And flogging avoids all the hogwash about prisons somehow being good for the soul.

Corporal punishment is an effective and comparatively humane way to bring our prison population back in line with human decency. By merely offering the choice of the lash, our prison population would plummet. Not only would this save tens of billions of dollars, it would save prisons for those who truly need to be there. …

Bringing back the lash is one way to destroy prison—if not completely, then at least for the millions of Americans for whom the punishment of prison is far, far worse than the crime they have committed. Would flogging in lieu of prison simply replace one evil with another? Well, yes. But at least it’s the lesser of two evils.

I find it hard to read this as satire. If he really meant it, how would he have written it any differently?

“If you think flogging is too cruel to even consider, what would you do if given the choice between five years in prison and 10 brutal lashes? You’d probably choose the lash. Wouldn’t we all?”

This kind of argument proves too much. The problem with the lash isn’t the amount of harm it inflicts; it’s the kind of harm it inflicts (and the fact that we have to institutionalize that harm, and that a government employee has to administer it in person).

I think most people would choose to perform oral sex on a guard if it would take 5 years off their prison sentence. That doesn’t mean prison is less humane than allowing guards to sexually assault prisoners.

Martinson’s essay has gone down in history as the death knell of rehabilitation – he argued that we had no evidence that any approach to rehabilitation actually worked. (He retracted this a few years later, for what it’s worth.) What got lost in the noise was Martinson’s conclusion that we should stick with (non-custodial) rehabilitation in any case, since it cost a lot less than than incarceration and, at worst, didn’t do any more harm.

I suspect that – to paraphrase a famous quote – it’s not that rehabilition has been tried and found wanting, it’s that rehabilition has been found to be hard and therefore not tried :-(

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/jan/08/overcrowded-and-expensive-governor-addresses-calif/

GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: 30 years ago, 10% of the general fund went to higher education and only 3% went to prisons. Today, almost 11% goes to prisons and only 7.5% goes to higher education. Spending 45% more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. So I will submit to you a constitutional amendment so that never again do we spend a greater percentage of our money on prisons than on higher education. (Applause)

Neel Krishnaswami 06.03.11 at 9:10 pm

” @Lemuel: I don’t think it’s satire, but I do think that Moskos is so infuriated by the cruelty and injustice of the prison system that he constructed a serious argument that flogging was less cruel, to see if he could make the absurdum visible by a reductio. What makes me think this is the following:”

What part of Wall Street Journal editorial page do you not understand? For as long as I can remember it, their job has been to launder right-wing ideas, and to get them implemented if possible, even if it takes decades. And that was *before* Murdoch.

These are the guys whose fiscal lies and econo-BS helped bring us to our present condition in the USA.

Now, flogging *them*, that I’d support.

“And the comment about ‘poor unemployed rural whites” being employed to guard “poor unemployed urban blacks’ is frankly obnoxious.”

Oh? And how would you describe the situation at the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate NY? Or this situation: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134850972/town-relies-on-troubled-youth-prison-for-profits. Granted, Walnut Grove is 40 percent black, so there are likely a healthy number of African American guards there as well (many more than at, say, Auburn), but I’m willing to bet that the proportion of African-American inmates there is significantly higher, and I think Moskos’ formulation nicely captures the racism of the system in general.

“What part of Wall Street Journal editorial page do you not understand? For as long as I can remember it, their job has been to launder right-wing ideas, and to get them implemented if possible, even if it takes decades. And that was before Murdoch.”

There is the possibility that the WSJ and the author were motivated by different motives.

… or, if chain gangs attract you, consider a conservative option from Ontario

Peter Moskos notes: Ironically, once people think about it, they often say flogging isn’t harsh enough. …[I]f flogging isn’t harsh enough—if we need to keep people locked up for years precisely because overcrowded prisons are so unbelievable horrific—then we’ve become perhaps a truly evil society.

Correct-a-mundo.

Evil exists.

It’s real.

I see it when I look around me. America has gone over to the dark side. Something grotesque and hideous has happened to this country. Americans have become evil: we love torture, we dote on prison rape, we adore the prospect of murdering innocent children and women with remote-control drones.

The people in this country had better get down on their knees and pray for mercy rather than justice, because if America really gets what it deserves when the karma comes back around, it’s going to be so horrific it’ll make strong men gag and puke to watch.

The crime rate is also falling in countries that don’t lock up nearly so many of their citizens, like, say, Canada.

someguy, looking very briefly at that youth crime website you linked to, there seems to be compelling evidence of a cohort effect. That is, the generation of kids who committed crime in the 10-17 age group in the 60s have matured through the age groups and taken their crime with them. Under 18 crime has dropped but over 18 crime has increased, and the largest increases in 2005 relative to 1960 were in the 2005 age groups that were aged 10-17 in the 1960s.

i.e. the baby boomers were arseholes.

The drop in 10-17 age group crime is entirely consistent with higher school age retention. For your argument to work, you’d have to show a reduction in crime rates across the life cycle, and that hasn’t happened, as is clear from Table 2. The overall drop in crime since the 1960s appears to have been driven entirely by those aged under 25. Now what, besides imprisonment rates, has changed for that group during the last 50 years? Pretty much everything.

So your argument doesn’t work.

“the largest increases in 2005 relative to 1960 were in the 2005 age groups that were aged 10-17 in the 1960s.”

False.

sg, the page says the greatest increase by quite a margin is in the 35-49 group, as of 2005. That’s born in 1956-1970. Most of those would be below 10 for the entirety of the 1960’s, and all would be below 10 for most of the 60’s. Strauss and Howe place the children of the early 60s in with Gen X, because that’s what is shown in their attitudes and behaviors, which would make this group mostly Gen X. Otherwise, it’s an even split. Worth noting the the second biggest increase is the next group down in age, not the next group up, which would the rest of Gen X. Furthermore, per capita youth crime levels (both minors and those below 25) peaked in the early 90s. Those were not boomers.

Andrew, I think there is no such consensus, either inside the US or outside it. The US is one of the most dangerous and violent societies in the developed world. Locking up whole cities worth of people just makes it worse.

Regarding prison labor I was aware of Prison Blues jeans. But, the examples given do not answer my question which I probably did not make clear enough. I was looking for a quantification of the value of prison produced goods in the US versus the cost of maintaining the prisons. That is what is the net profit of these goods after you pay the wages and benefits of the guards and administrators, not to mention deduct the cost of feeding the prisoners? My guess is that the compensation for free employees in the prison system is high enough that there is a substantial net negative profit from prisons. Most of the money is coming from taxpayers.

Emma in Sydney,

“The US is one of the most dangerous and violent societies in the developed world. Locking up whole cities worth of people just makes it worse.”

No, it doesn’t make it worse.

Here is one link

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/crimedata.html

Comparing between countries is tricky but crime is strongly trending down in the US.

You are more likely to be murdered in the US. The US murder rate is half of what it was in 1980 but is still very high compared to rest of the developed world.

But you are more likely to be robbed or raped in Sweden.

Overall the crime rate is higher in Europe than the US. You are more likely to be the victim of rape or murder in the US.

But the trend is very strongly down in the US. The US is catching up to, narrowing the gap, or in some classifications over taking Europe.

US crime policy is greatly reducing crime.

I would very much like us to see if we could reduce the rate further and at the same time let out more non violent offenders. More time for rapists and less or no time for pot dealers.

But I realize that current policies have greatly reduced crime.

” So?”

So, it could simultaneously be a case of the WSJ being up to their usual level of nastiness, and the author engaging in satire (which is what you were quick to discount).

@65, now, this is perhaps a case where the correlation/causation thing is relevant. Is there any evidence that this is a deliberate policy designed to benefit rural whites, for being white? Not to mention that less than a half of those incarcerated are blacks.

##66: anyone with the slightest acquaintance with upstate NY politics would find this question laughably naive.

HV @ 66

Evidence, you say. For whose eyes? The way I see it, we bring people from Africa by force. For 200 years, give or take, we hold them as slaves. For another 150 years, we deny them equal participation in the dominant culture. To the extent that we can, we refuse to hire them for any but menial jobs, or provide more than a pittance for their education. Despite this, many of them prosper. Those who don’t develop subcultures of their own. Not bothering to understand any of this, we define participants in these subcultures as urban predators, and lock them up.

Since, despite our best efforts, this proves to be more expensive than we’d hoped, we decide to lighten our tax burden by delivering them to the tender mercies of purpose-built corporations which are willing, for a seeming pittance, to take them off their hands. These corporations can make money even at the price agreed upon in part because they build their prisons in rural, white, non-union towns where the help is reliable, and no one will ask them any questions about what goes on inside the walls. This we call justice, and claim that the burden of proof that it’s anything else rests with those liberal crybabies who’re always whining about something, no matter what we do.

No causal connection. Yeah, right….

Some high-flying rhetoric there, William. “We bring people from Africa by force?” I did not know that. You should stop doing it.

“Not bothering to understand any of this, we define participants in these subcultures as urban predators, and lock them up.”

You may define participants in subcultures as anything you want, but if their cases are heard by juries of their peers, i.e. of the same subculture, as it should be, then the culture is not a problem. Poverty sure is, regardless of the race; culture is secondary.

“because they build their prisons in rural, white, non-union towns”

What’s the significance of these towns being white? Are you implying that non-whites can’t be reliable guards? Why, what are you saying?

In reality there is correlation. There are convincing explanations of why this correlation exists; you cited some of them. What I don’t see is evidence that people are sent to jails for being black and/or that guards are hired for being white.

I recommend that everyone interested in this topic read Mark Kleiman’s book, When Brute Force Fails. As I wrote elsewhere,

Kleiman’s book [is] a model for applying science to social policy. There is a theory, there is a great deal of (summarized) empirical data, there is a fair-minded discussion of many opposing points of view, and — wonderfully — there is an incisive discussion of how and why he might be wrong.

Martin Bento, good point! But I think my paragraph two still stands: the changes in crime rates since the 1970s haven’t been consistent across the life cycle, there are cohort effects and the biggest reduction has been amongst the 10-17 year olds (-20%), with the smallest increase in the group most likely to commit crime (18-24 year olds, at +40%). But these groups are also those that experienced the largest changes outside of law enforcement, particularly in school retention, university admissions, and non-law enforcement forms of child protection.

You would also think, if someguy’s theory is true, that you wouldn’t see an explosion of crime amongst cohorts with already low crime rates (e.g. the 35-49 year age group).

Flogging should stay in the S&M clubs , where it belongs; any attempt to reintroduce it into the penal system is likely to result in the infliction of physical punishment becoming yet one more perk for a depraved prison workforce.

sg,

Actually the drop among teenagers is even more amazing when we consider the proliferation of single parent families.

No someguy, the drop in crime among teenagers is completely explicable when we consider the increase in rates of education amongst teenagers. Basically, they’re staying in school and committing less crime. Your “oh, that’s excusable because you’re poor” line is just a bullshit stereotype. And your “now it’s 20 to life” line applies equally to older criminals, yet crime rates in these groups are sky-rocketing. And note we’re talking rates, so if the people who “became habituated” to high crime in the 60s learnt a lesson from these “lax high crime periods ” lax high crime periods we would expect their crime rates to remain unchanged. But they skyrocketed.

So tell me, why is it that the “preventative” 20 to life regimes of modern US law enforcement have resulted in huge increases in crime amongst those aged over 25?

I note, as no-one else seems to have done, that he describes the US prison system as a peculiar institution.

Instead of incarceration or corporal punishment, we should try the sequence of fines, jobs programs, forebearance and finally, if all else fails, capital punishment.

Obviously, if fines, even fines adjusted for earnings potential, are going to be your first line punishment, then you’re going to have to work huge amounts of forebearance into the system. People who commit crimes will often not be the sort of people with jobs, or likely to keep at the jobs made available by the jobs program.

But society could well afford a lot of forebearance if the crime were, say, check-kiting. The criminal would have to kite thousands of checks over decades, consistently refusing to work at an honest job to make good on his or her thefts, and refusing after hundreds of convictions to abstain from further check-kiting, before capital punishment would be applied. We would probably never reach an end of forebearance for check-kiting.

As the crimes in question grew more damaging, you would show less forebearance, you would tolerate less recidivism before giving up on the criminal’s ability to stop preying off others for his or her livelihood. But at no point would you do anything but help the criminal pay his fine and get on with a non-predatory life. Well, at no point until the end, when you give up and execute the hopeless recidivist.

The problem with incarceration is that it is retributive damage to the criminal, and as such, I don’t think you ever reach a point that you can brand someone as a hopelessly unreclaimable sociopath. Our prisons seem designed to produce sociopaths, to turn people who might otherwise eventually adjust quite well to a non-predatory life, instead into conscienseless sociopaths, or worse, people who feel quite reasonably justified in preying off a society that brutalized them so pointlessly and without conscience by throwingf them in prison. The only way to reach moral certainty that capital punishment is the only solutuion, that a given individual can’t be reached, that the only thing to be done is to get rid of them, is to first try reaching them, and try over and over again as often as the cost of their offenses, the danger to the innocent, allows.

Corporal punishment seems to me to be, while arguably less damaging to the criminal, still a sort of damaging retribution that does no help, and only harm, in guiding someone to a non-predatory life. I’m not even sure it is less damaging than incarceration, as violating someone’s person is exactly what constitutes what we consider to be the most serious crimes. What would our criminal justice system do to someone convicted of “merely” flogging another person? (Of course, you have to ask what sort of punishment would be appropriate for the crime of incarcerating another person for decades, I would grant Moskos that, but only that.)

You would only refuse to commute the initial death sentence in cases where even the first crime makes it clear that the criminal lacks a conscience. Pre-meditated murder for profit, pre-meditated multiple murders for any reason, the murder of a child under any but extraordinary circumstances, murder in connnection with rape, are examples of actions you could argue make it obvious that the criminal is not reachable, at least not with any reasonable prospect of success, and therefore should not be given the opportunity to offend again even once. Of course, for such cases, we would need to insist on higher levels of certainty of guilt than we now tolerate. Such a conviction in which there would be no commutation to a fine, no forebearance, but an outright death sentence; should require conviction without any reliance on witnesses whose testimony comes as a result of a plea bargain, or who otherwise stand in any way to gain from false witness. Conviction without that level of certainty would require commutation of the death penalty to the usual fine.

Pohl 60: “I was looking for a quantification of the value of prison produced goods in the US versus the cost of maintaining the prisons.”

Compare my post at 40. The high cost of the prison system is the one consideration that has forced states in recent years to slightly change their approach, allow probation for more nonviolent offenders, shorten some prison sentences. It is for that reason that the growth in the prison population has come to a stop: building more prisons is just not affordable anymore. To the extent that profits are made from prison labor, they aren’t substantial enough to change the equation (at least for the tax-payer; privately run prisons seem to be profitable.)

People are not older at the end of [corporal] punishment

Doesn’t the idea that this is an advantage cut against the idea that crime rates are down because the high-crime demographic grew up? If crime is fundamentally not a rational cost-benefit decision (which is what all these incentive schemes are grounded on, whether they admit it or not) but a failure of impulse control, then incarceration has one advantage: eventually, the criminal’s hormone levels will change with age, even if we don’t actually do anything to rehabilitate him/her.

Different crimes may have different causes, but ISTM that unless we understand and attack the reasons that people actually commit crimes, we won’t have any success at convincing them not to.

lemuel,

Your argument seems to depend in part on something I never proposed: that corporeal punishment should be a public spectacle. Possibly, it would be a more effective deterrent if it were, but punishment as spectacle does not bring out the best in the spectators, so I would rather do without it. Flogging specifically would resonate with some ugly American history, so I would particularly avoid doing that one publicly. I also would specify that no one could be subject both to CP and imprisonment for the same offense, forcing a tradeoff. If you’re a proponent, you get to specify the parameters of what you advocate.

Your objection that flogging would not reduce incarceration because the public appetite for punishment is essentially bottomless means you would evaluate this proposal by what you regard as its likely real world consequences, given a highly cynical appraisal of the electorate. But , given those premises, advocating shorter prison sentences on the simple basis of compassion is a non-starter. Such advocacy you seem to evaluate by some other standard than likely consequences, which are nil. Put another way, if you advocate shorter sentences, which seems more likely to gain traction with the bloodthirsty electorate: simply advocating shorter sentences or advocating them accompanied by an alternative method of punishment?

There is one force pushing towards less incarceration: the public, particularly the well-off, have no appetite to pay for it. This is what has hit California: it will gladly impose the penalties, but it will not pony up the taxes. However, largely because of media sensationalism, people are scared sh1tless of crime and are not going to tolerate lower sentences unless they are convinced that there is still a strong deterrent in place. CP can fill that bill with much less destruction to the prisoner’s life than incarceration.

Chris, sure, but I haven’t argued that long incarceration reduces crime simply by isolating the criminals (or forcing them to confine their crimes to one another, as piglet suggests). I’ve no doubt this effect is present, but doubt it is of great significance. If corporeal punishment opponents believe otherwise, then they should argue that, and defend incarceration as preventative detention, rather than claiming that CP is somehow less humane than long imprisonment.

someguy, in comment 45, you stated that the crime rate peaked “1980ish”. At that time, you said nothing about expecting a 9 year or so lag, and, if you had, it would have presented a problem for your theory, as the lock-em-up period clearly did not begin in the early 70s. Now you have looked at the data a little more closely and find the peak in 1991. All of a sudden, there had to be a lag! How could anyone expect anything different? There is no intellectual integrity in this. It doesn’t even matter whether your initial assertion or your later one or neither is correct. You don’t get to do without a lag if your theory requires it, and then toss a lag in when the data doesn’t fall where you thought it would.

As for alternative theories, I mentioned at least three and implied another. To recap:
1)sg’s theory that declining crime rates among young people, which always shift aggregate statistics, have declined with high-school dropout rates, following a long-established, lifelong, correlation. I elaborated that post-secondary education has also increased, which also has such a correlation. Now, to discount this theory, what you should do is look up the education statistics, run a regression, and see if anything remains of the correlation you want to claim. So go run off and do that, and let us know if you still think you have anything.
2)There is also the theory, propounded by Richard Nevin and others that lead poisoning, primarily from gasoline, had increased criminal activity through brain damage, primarily affecting children, but affecting them permanently, until pollution controls reduced lead levels. See:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701073.html
3)There is the Levitt theory that legalized abortion reduced the number of unwanted children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect This one is very controversial. Obviously, it steps on a lot of political toes on both sides, but there have also been a lot of detailed methodological critiques. Haven’t followed it all myself, so I have no opinion, but it is another hypothesis that some find compelling.
4)I also mentioned that we seem to be getting better at catching criminals. This makes sense, given the new technology developed for this purpose (video cams, DNA tests, etc.). The risk/benefit calculation of a crime would have to include likelihood of getting caught as least as much as perceived likely sentence (the difference between 10 and 15 years is likely to seem pretty abstract; the difference between getting caught and getting away with it, not so much)
Now if you can take apart these theories, go ahead. I’m skeptical of any monocausal explanation anyway. Longer sentences may even have been a factor too. But none of this is handwaving.

Martin Bento,

BS. I haven’t changed anything. I could very clear see that crime peaked in mid 80s 90 region the first time I looked at the numbers.

1980ish would give me plenty of room. 1989 is 1980ish.

But instead of playing debating games ,I took the time to look at the numbers, and see that the crime rate to incaceration numbers first jump in 1982. I then had the courtsey to inform you of those numbers and concede that this was a pretty big lag.

High school drop out rates

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779196.html

Very weak.

Lead? Please.

Levitt. There is probably a decent amount of truth is his assertion. What happens if you adjust for single parent families? His assertion is still true but the crime rate percentage decrease due to abortion would be much less.

You are throwing stuff against the wall and not even bothering to see if something sticks. You couldn’t be bothered to even take 5 seconds and look at high school drop rates.

I have never claimed and that increased incarceration was the monocasaul of decreased crime rates.

People behind bars mug less. The people who want to let out muggers need to prove they don’t. End of story.

That should be:

what has been won, has been won through a combination of rational argument on the basis of justice and humanity, and political organizing by the victims of the system.

Martin Bento,

I would never propose anything with the idea that it has anything so grand as a moral basis behind it. When I hear such propositions, I reflexively check to make sure my wallet is secure.

I just think we should always try to be bit less stupid than the last century, show a bit more enlightened self-interest, and I wouldn’t aim at trying to get society to adapt any new way of treating crime and criminals on the basis of any moral theories more ambitious than that. That’s the sort of idealistic approach that got us doing penitentiaries a century and a half ago, and I think that hasn’t turned out at all well, it hasn’t been even a modest and gradual move away from stupid and blind retribution.

We didn’t start doing any sort of intervention as a society to respond to private thefts and murders and so forth out of any idea of imposing moral order. We had this very practical problem that if wider society did nothing when one person killed another, that person’s friends and family would do something about it, and that something would set off a cycle of retribution that could be counted on to escalate, and the resulting feud would do far more damage all around than the original wrong. So wider society started providing an orderly substitute for private retribution. Yes, there would be more damage spread around by this criminal justice system to add to the original crime, but it would hopefully be less in amount and more proportional (Only a tooth for tooth, just one eye for one eye! That was an advance in its day.) than what private justice would exact, and would definitely tend to limit any damage to one initial round, because the state would take responsibility for whatever damage had to be done to the criminal, it wouldn’t be the doing of the victim’s family.

The most we can aim for is a system that tries, as much as possible, to make the consequences that have to be imposed on the criminal to keep victims satisfied that they don’t have to undertake private retribution, not damage the criminal’s ability to get on with a life that does not depend on repeating and continuing the crimes for which they were convicted. That’s just enlightened self-interest. The level of fines should not be vindictive, or retributive in the sense of done to exact retribution or revenge, designed to make it impossible to be paid without privation, or even “merely” demeaning limitations in the life of the criminal. I can’t conceive of any sort of penalty to make a criminal pay, that would achieve the end of obtaining an acknowledgement that he or she has done something whose repetition will not be tolerated, that could be done with less damage to that person than merely making them fork over some money. That’s no more “theft” than making people pay taxes, which we do when there is not even a question of retribution except in the minds of Randroids.

And if there is no cooperation from the criminal with this sort of penalty, if he or she does not honor the promise to not offend again that society should make them give upon conviction in exchange for commuting the death sentence we would have for all felonies, I don’t see any alternative to the death penalty. Again, society should forebear over and over again, to and beyond the point of endangering the rest of us, to avoid doing this to even the worst criminal. It should try every other remedy likely to avoid the final necessity (and I object to incarceration and corporal punishment because I think they tend to bring that final necessity nearer, rather than help reform and reconstruct a potential sociopath). I don’t object to you calling that murder, any more than I object to calling all the killing in war “murder”. No one should feel a clean conscience about killing under any circumstance. It should only be done if it pretty clearly is the alternative that will result in less killing overall. I don’t think that capital punishment as currently practiced in this country meets that standard, but that doesn’t mean that capital punishment could never meet that standard.

You don’t get to do without a lag if your theory requires it, and then toss a lag in when the data doesn’t fall where you thought it would.

Hmm, this sounds a bit like “no fair adjusting your theory to fit the facts”. But of course that’s exactly what you *should* do — you just shouldn’t claim that the adjusted theory’s fit to the facts is a vindication of the original theory.

the country as a whole largely eliminated involuntary commitment to mental hospitals—a quasi-carceral system that was of the same order of magnitude as the prison system itself

Incidentally: how much evidence is their for or against the theory that lots of people just flowed from one system to the other? Obviously if a lot of our “criminal” class is actually mentally ill, the prospect of changing their behavior through rational incentive structures is dim. Maybe some mostly-rational people are too quick to assume that others think like they do? Criminals, practically by definition, act differently from the majority. It sometimes seems to me that not enough attention is paid to the possibility that they also think differently.

One hundred comments into the debate and no one is willing to concede that a population with the widest access to abortion is least likely to raise unwanted children?

An invisible factor in the whole incarcerama cess pool is the massive proliferation of CCTV cam/interface. Specially the interface. Lots of eyeballs everywhere now, and most of them all sub rosaish.
The lower depths of society are no longer operating in the dark.
All is illuminated. By real reality tv. Thus causing major subsidences in certain kinds of criminal activities.
While the crime of the prison system – supported by a depraved and constantly degrading public morality, which is almost entirely mediated now – chugs along on its merry way.

lemuel, yes, there have been some victories, but there have been many campaigns going the other way, and that is clearly and strongly where the net victories have been in recent decades, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. In any struggle, you are unlikely to lose every battle; that does not mean you are winning the war or can win it using the same means that have failed you, on average, heretofore. Marijuana may be an exception. Despite a level of elite hostility that itself bears examining, the momentum on that seems to be moving towards decriminalization. This is not conclusive. At one time, momentum was on the side of the ERA. We still have no ERA, and it is no longer an active issue (though arguably its important effects have been achieved by other means). More recently, momentum was on the side of cap and trade. Not now, though it could change again. Nonetheless, at this point, it looks like continued weakening of the marijuana laws is the way to bet. Weakening of criminal law in general is quite another story. And I think we need to go quite a ways here. We cannot be socializing people to become hardened criminals, so I think the reductions in incarceration we need are pretty dramatic, for all but the most dangerous and irredeemable criminals. I don’t see simple advocacy getting us there for the foreseeable.

Chris, if the main evidence you’re citing for your position is a correlation in time, being able to adjust that liberally to fit the actual data leaves no real test of your position. And you notice he didn’t say “I am adjusting my position because the data invalidated my previous one, and I can justify the change within my framework thus”. Rather, he claimed he was not changing his position, and that a decade more or less made no difference. Note he did the same thing when sg claimed that certain cohorts increased their crime relative to previous cohorts at the same age, even in the face of increased incarceration. First he said, of course, they did, which is exactly what you’d expect: they got socialized to high levels of tolerance when young and the effects of that were sustained despite changing conditions. Then he looked at the data and concluded that sg’s assertion was wrong. So then he claimed all the cohorts moved together and seemed to somehow find this, too, consistent with his position. It seems to me he’s adjusting his claims and standards so that the data will fit them no matter what.

Martin Bento,

I said that instead of disproving my assertion sg’s idea actually supported it and explained how. But that doesn’t mean if sg’s idea was wrong it would disprove my assertion. Again here I too the time to re-examine sg’s claim, to look at the data, and see what it said.

That I didn’t immediately scream I expect a lag doesn’t mean I changed my mind and inserted a lag as a prerequisite after I looked at the data. It just means I didn’t mention.

A 9 year lag is a long lag.

So, I have actually found some ok data and I am hoping to expand my horizons with it. Maybe I am wrong. I hope to look at the data and see. You couldn’t be bothered to take the 5 seconds to look up high school drop out rates.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/08/freakonomics-quorum-why-during-a-bad-economy-does-crime-continue-to-fall/

“We spent an entire chapter in Freakonomics exploring the factors that do and do not seem to have brought down the rate of violent crime in the U.S. In short, factors that matter include: number of police; number of prisoners; changes in drug markets; and the availability of abortion. And those that don’t seem to much matter: the economy; innovative policing strategies; most gun laws; capital punishment; and demographics.”

That is from an authority you cited.

Rapists, for example. What should we do about them?

I wish I knew. But if they really are an example of compulsive behavior, then that seems like a pretty good case for keeping them locked up (and away from other prisoners except for supervised interactions, too, I guess).

At the time when the offender has an actual opportunity to reoffend, the prospect of arrest, let alone conviction and sentence, is surely going to be too remote to affect the decision.

A more promising approach IMO is going to be trying to prevent the conditions where they think they can get away with it.