I have not been shy about criticizing editorial stands in the New York Times, most recently its decision to label as "self-pitying" the NYPD's attitude of disgust with the dalliance between Mayor de Blasio and vitriolic enemies of the police, including but hardly limited to Al Sharpton. The Times used the adjective "self-pitying" to describe the NYPD before the second murdered officer, Wenjian Liu, was even buried. At that time and under those circumstances, I considered, and still consider, applying the label "self-pitying" to Liu's brothers on the force somewhere between callous and vile.
But credit must be given where due. Yesterday, Erik Eckholm published a piece in that self-same NY Times noting that, with crime down so much over the last generation, some prominent people in both parties have started to think about reducing prison costs. Not surprisingly, the piece gives most of its attention to those who favor incarceration and sentencing reforms. Still, when Mr. Eckholm spoke with me in preparing the story, I found him fair and patient, and he correctly quotes me in the article as saying, "When people are incarcerated, they're not out on the street to ransack your home or sell drugs to your high school kid." I thought that was an apt quotation, summarizing the intuitive reason most people understand that more incarceration means less crime -- something that has been reliably true for at least the last 50 years.
One quite useful item in the article is a sidebar graph showing the staggering crime decreases since the peak year, 1991. It was, of course, the early Nineties when the determinate (and tougher) federal sentencing system of the Reagan era -- copied in many states -- started to kick in. More criminals stayed in jail longer.
For those who want to believe that there's only an ineffably mysterious relationship between the amount of crime we get on the street and the number of criminals we take off the street -- hey, go for it. There is nothing I'll be able to do to change your mind.
Do you think we ever hit a point of diminishing returns? If we want serious crime still further reduced, which I do, do you think we should even now be aspiring to again double or triple the current (high) US incarceration rate?
I don't know that there is a specific "point" of diminishing returns. Diminishing MARGINAL returns start immediately, i.e., we get less utility out of incarcerating the second worst criminal than we got out of incarceration the first. The more "X" you get (whether X is incarceration or apples), the less utility is produced by each further addition to "X." Unfortunately, this fact does not tell you where to stop doing "X."
According to the UCR, we still have about 10,000,000 serious crimes per year, not including drug offenses. And according to a Gallup poll late in 2014, one in every four American families was a victim of crime within the last year.
That is too much crime. Let me repeat: That is too much crime. We have made progress, but there is considerably more to do.
My interest is not primarily in the incarceration rate, first because it is extremely low (seven-tenths of one percent of the population) and, more importantly, because it is a by-product, not a product. No one is trying to increase the number of inmates per se. What the country is trying to do is DECREASE the amount of crime, and one way of doing that is to employ the incapacitating and deterrent effects of prison. The last generation of statistics tells us this is working. It's not the only thing that's working, but it is working.
Yet we need to make more progress against crime. With nearly 15,000 murders a year, 84,000 forcible rapes, 750,000 aggravated assaults, it is hardly time to declare victory.
Simply fixating on the costs of incarceration is like simply fixating on the costs of hospitalization. Talking JUST about the costs of X tells us nothing. It is analytically vacant to talk about costs without devoting equal, and equally serious and detailed, attention to benefits -- and that is what I never see from FAMM, the Sentencing Project, Rand Paul, Pat Leahy, etc., etc.
And there's this too: Both in the analytical and contingent senses, you're putting up a straw man. You (and I) know perfectly well that the incarceration rate is not going to double or triple -- isn't that just a boogeyman? It has been pretty much level for five years. What realistic evidence is there that it's going to increase at all, much less multiply?
The realistic danger is the opposite -- that we're going to become complacent. The other danger -- the ideological danger -- is that, as the hand maiden of complacency, we're going to start looking upon criminals as victims, rather than the victimizers they choose to be.
Actual crime victims don't have a choice. Criminals have plenty of choice. They know they should behave more honestly/less violently. The problem is not that the United States is the Great Racist Satan. The problem is that criminals want a quick buck instead of a job. That's the reality I never see spoken out loud.
So I guess my last point is this: Since criminals have a choice and crime victims don't, who, as between the two, should have to bear the risk of error -- too much or not enough -- in decisions society makes about the extent of our use of incarceration? The criminal? Or the next crime victim?
Bill, I hope you are right that the incarceration will not double or triple again given that the exponential growth we saw in the 1980s and 1990s has recently leveled off. But that is because, maybe because of budget concerns, most politicians now are worried that incarceration is very high/costly and crime is very low.
But your response here provides an effective way to look at the data to assert/conclude, as you do, that incarceration is still very low and crime remains very high/costly. In light of that perspective, I am asking YOU whether YOU think it would be good policy to seek to continue to increase incarceration levels --- at least, say, by another 50% if not double or triple. Notably, in Louisiana, the incarceration rate is already over 1,000 persons per million in the population (though this is still just over 1%), and I genuinely want to know if you believe we could and would get valuable and needed further serious crime reductions if/when we got the incarceration rate for the whole nation up to that level?
As I hope you know, I want to use more advanced technologies, rather than more deprivations of basic liberty, to try to drive down crime more. That is why I generally support red light cameras and ignition locks and GPS tracking and smart guns: http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2015/01/smart-guns-save-lives-so-where-are-they.html
Do you disagree that greater use of modern technology could and should help us continue to drive down crime likely at a lower economic and human cost that increased incarceration? If so, we likely are on the same basic crime control page, we just have different views on how best to "run the numbers."