And no, this is not about
that fantasy.
It's about the New York Times's latest
editorial pushing softer treatment for criminals (a/k/a "sentencing reform"). There are a number of howlers in the piece, but I want to start with this one:
Mr. Grassley [Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee], for reasons that defy basic fairness and empirical data, has remained an opponent of almost any reduction of [federal] sentences. In a speech from the Senate floor this month, he called the bills "lenient and, frankly, dangerous," and he raised the specter of high-level drug traffickers spilling onto the streets.
Mr. Grassley is as mistaken as he is powerful. Mandatory minimums have, in fact, been used to punish many lower-level offenders who were not their intended targets. Meanwhile, the persistent fantasy that locking up more people leads to less crime continues to be debunked. States from California to New York to Texas have reduced prison populations and crime rates at the same time. A report released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since 2000 putting more people behind bars has had essentially no effect on the national crime rate.
The Times's claim about the "persistent fantasy" that increased incarceration produces less crime is stupid, dishonest and false.
As to stupid: Unless increased incarceration alone accounts for 100% of the decrease in crime over the last generation (a claim no one makes, as the Times knows), it follows that crime would continue to decrease in the face of slightly lower prison populations
so long as the other factors that produced less crime continue in place.
This is exactly what has happened (as the Times also knows). For example, there is wide agreement (even among such liberal stalwarts as the Brennan Center, which the Times cites), that other factors -- including more police, more targeted policing, improved private security and the aging of the most crime-prone segment of the population -- have also contributed to the reduction in crime. Thus, unless de-incarcerating criminals has begun on a scale that overtakes everything else (which it has not, yet), it's a matter of simple logic that crime would continue to decrease (albeit at a slower rate). But to say that is a far cry from saying what the Times wants us to believe -- that incarcerating the people who commit crime has no or next to no effect on crime.
Which leads me to the dishonest part: The Times refers to last week's report by the Brennan Center without ever hinting that the Center is a major advocacy group for inmates. The Times also never hints that the Center's supposed "findings" are, in addition to their gross facial implausibility, a dead-end outlier among studies of this kind.
As I explained
here, the Heritage Foundation, which takes the same robust pro-"reform" position as the Brennan Center and the Times but is considerably more honest, recently noted, through its Senior Legal Fellow, John G. Malcolm, that increased incarceration could be credited with between 25 and 35 percent of the last generation's crime reduction. See Mr. Malcolm's observations starting at 7:35 of
this tape of his talk at the Federalist Society's National Convention last November.
Those numbers -- reflecting a very significant contribution from increased incarceration -- are more in line with what has been found by neutral scholars, such as Prof. Steve Levitt of the University of Chicago and the late Prof. James Q. Wilson of UCLA. See my entries
here and
here. The Times's idea that incarcerating criminals has essentially no effect on crime thus is not merely counter-intuitive but counter-scholarship.
There is one point about which sentencing "reform" advocates are correct, however: Incarceration has diminishing marginal returns to scale. This is not much of an insight, however, since practically everything human beings do has diminishing marginal returns to scale. It would appear that sentencing reformers have mistaken a truism for a revelation.
Well, fine, it that's what they want to do. But sentencing reformers, and the rest of us, should remember some facts considerably more germane to the debate. Returns are still returns. When we incarcerate more criminals, we become safer, and this is true not just over the last few decades but year-by-year in quite recent times, as the overall national prison population has begun to fluctuate slightly in one direction or the other. As I explained in last September's
entry:
As incarceration increased dramatically for 20 straight years, 1989 to 2009 (figures here courtesy of...the Sentencing Project), crime decreased by roughly 50% (figures here). In 2010, the prison population dropped for the first time in more than a generation. The very next year -- it didn't take the thugs long to get back in business -- crime increased for the first time in more than 20 years. It increased again in 2012 as the prison population continued to drop. [In 2013], however, incarceration rose and -- lo and behold -- the BJS figures...show that crime did the same thing it did for the all the other years in the last generation in which we increased imprisonment, i.e., it went down.
At this stage, our pro-defense friends are beyond the point of silliness in insisting on the general bromide that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. That's typically true, sure. But this is not the typical case. We're talking about more than 50 years of evidence. When incarceration remains stable or increases only marginally for two decades in the Sixties and Seventies as crime skyrockets; then increases dramatically in the Nineties and the Two Thousands as crime plummets; then falls slightly for two or three years as crime rises slightly; then rises in 2013 as once again crime falls -- when the correlation is that precise and that big for that long, you have your answer: Incarcerating felons produces more safety, releasing them produces less, and the question is not close.
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