Crime and punishment (long)
The US has less than 5% of the world's population, and nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners. Warning: this is long.
This estimate excludes China's political prisoners.
Article here, NYT, but I'll quote some relevant chunks.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
That is not quite fair, as the US prison population includes political prisoners who are falsely accused of committing crimes. Although perhaps not so many as China has. Nonetheless, even including those, the numbers are still shocking.
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
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.
Maybe we have too many laws?
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges - many of whom are elected, another American anomaly - yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Or -
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
That was 170 years ago.
Now?
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research.
More -
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s.
And a possible reason, though I disagree -
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
(although from 1925 to 1975, it was easier to get guns here, so the logic of that idea falls apart under scrutiny)
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
That's the problem. We have moved certain actions from the "civil" justice arena into the "criminal" justice arena. Since criminal justice is characterized by prison terms, and civil justice is characterized by fines and confiscation and other activities, a higher incarceration rate is expectable when we do this.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
This accounts for a great deal of the separation. If we took out .5 million from the 2.3 million, we'd be left with 1.8 million, competing with China. Hmm. At 4 times the population, you'd think it would work out better.
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Right. Twice the sentence equals twice the population expected. Still doesn't work out, I don't think. England's per capita prison population is low.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
Interesting.
The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.
True. We are that way, and we expect others to be - but not excessively so.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
That's quite interesting, too.
Bigger question is, does it work?
“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”
Perhaps it seems to work, but some other cause is responsible for the rises and falls of crime rates?
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
In the responses to the article online (responses), there are some interesting ideas presented:
There may be a reason other than "democracy" to explain high incarceration rates in the US: profit. Along with the increase in convict populations, America has experienced a rapid rise in the number of corporate-owned (privatized) prisons across the country. Prisoners in these institutions work for their owners, often at far less than minimum wage and with no access to collective bargaining or benefits for their families. According to a recent comment by Paul Handford in the UK's Guardian (21 March), 18 corporations now control inmates in 27 states, and state officials have been luring other corporations to these areas so that they might benefit from the "local competitive labour scene". Thus a significant profit motive might also be a factor in the incarceration of 1 percent of the US population, many for trivial and/or essentially victimless crimes. Handford observed rightly that in this situation "the opportunity for corruption is clear and substantial". What is happening in these prisons is tantamount to slave labour, and deserves a good hard look by the media, labour organizations, and defenders of civil liberties.
Surely we haven't reinvented slavery?
We should study ancient Israel where there were no prisons. Criminals paid off their debt by the courts forcing them to working for the people they stole from for a maximum of seven years. In some cases they were given stripes-a lot better than being cooped up like an animal.
There are times when I think that public flogging would be a really good punishment for many crimes. At other times, I'm struck by the brutality of such punishments, but it occurs to me that for brutal actions, brutal punishments are often appropriate. It seems to me that the "cruel and unusual punishment" mentioned in the Constitution of the U.S. did not mean flogging, executions, or hard labor. What it meant instead, well, read this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/rightsof/punish.htm
Justice Thurgood Marshall, in Furman v. Georgia (1972)
Whether the English Bill of Rights' prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments is properly read as a response to excessive or illegal punishments, as a reaction to barbaric and objectionable modes of punishment, or both, there is no doubt whatever that in borrowing the language and including it in the Eighth Amendment, our Founding Fathers intended to outlaw torture and other cruel punishments.
There are some interesting notes:
Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, declared that "capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments." Even a conservative like Alexander Hamilton believed that "the idea of cruelty inspires disgust," and that the death penalty undermined republican values and behavior.
Another:
Representative Samuel Livermore on cruel and unusual punishment (1789)
The clause seems to express a great deal of humanity, on which account I have no objection to it; but, as it seems to have no meaning in it, I do not think it necessary. . . . No cruel and unusual punishment is to be inflicted; it is sometimes necessary to hang a man, villains often deserve whipping, and perhaps having their ears cut off; but are we in the future to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel? If a more lenient mode of correcting vice and deterring others from the commission of it could be invented, it would be very prudent in the Legislature to adopt it; but until we have some security that this will be done, we ought not to be restrained from making necessary laws by any declaration of this kind.
And another:
We have nothing to guide us in defining what is cruel and unusual apart from our own consciences. A punishment which is considered fair today may be considered cruel tomorrow. And so we are not dealing with a set of absolutes. Our decision must necessarily spring from the mosaic of our beliefs, our backgrounds and the degree of our faith in the dignity of the human personality.
Still another question is whether incarceration prevents crime.
Does the Death Penalty? Many claimants on both sides of this debate. See here and here (warning: that's a highly biased site!) and here (lots of comparative stats on murder, along with data showing the relationship between executions and murder rates). This person (PDF) argues that the death penalty has no effect, but the high prison population does.
Back to the comments on the Times article:
For example, in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, its not safe for tourists to leave their compound after dark, and criminals go in and out of jail like a revolving door. In the British Virgin Islands, where they are really tough on crime, once can walk in Road Town at 3AM and not be concerned about safety. My hat's off the the government of the BVI's. That's where I go spend my money - I avoid St. Thomas like the plague.
So there may be some measurable effect. But do increased prison sentences actually work?
Maybe. There are people I know who claim to know ex-inmates with a "second strike" already who still commit felonies. In their cases, the only thing prison did was make them much more careful about what they take and where. But it doesn't stop drug dealing - without a usable skill or an employable personality, how shall they live?
A summary of Lott's work on concealed carry:
http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae7_3_6.pdf
One of his points is that statistics lie - statistics can be forced to tell any story you want; they cannot speak for themselves (this is why I don't trust studies where the raw data are not available for examination).
For cross-sectional
data, journalists not trained in statistics quickly find themselves in over their heads. The New York Times conducted a cross-sectional study of states with and without the death penalty, and concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. It overlooked the fact that many states without the death penalty already had low murder rates. Miranda warnings have no doubt made it more difficult for police to get confessions from lawbreakers, but such a contention is impossible to conclusively prove since other factors could be influencing changes in the variables.
Even then, the exploration of other causes is paramount; it is difficult to imagine something like "crime rate" being related to only one affecting variable (like prison population).
One author points out that an increase in the consumption of hot chocolate is also associated with decreased crime rates. That there is a correlation is expected (both are effects of cold weather), but that does not imply causation.
Yet, there are statistics on all sides of the issue.
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v08/n307/a09.html?104
A prison cell costs about $65,000 to build and $24,000 a year to operate.
That's interesting.For this much money the public expects lower recidivism rates and safer communities. Yet crime rates are still too high. Recidivism rates are still too high. And corrections spending is crowding out dollars for other pressing priorities such as health care and education.
Like many of our performance-minded colleagues across the country, we have wondered whether we are getting our money's worth out of prisons. For violent offenders and sex offenders, the answer is yes. For many nonviolent offenders and probation violators, the answer is no.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2006/05/texas-high-imprisonment-rate-stain-on.html
He's got a point. Including those on probation and parole, the Justice Policy Institute calculated that one in 20 Texans at any one time are under control of the criminal justice system! Take that, Belarus! And what'd we get for it? According to JPI, "Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade [1990 to 2000], Texas' crime rate has declined more slowly than other large states."
So what do we get for locking more people up?
Same source:
Two major categories of modern "crime," immigration and drug prohibition, weren't even against the law the nation's first 130 years or so. (Immigration was first restricted in 1918, drug prohibition rose up in the '20s). Today, immigration cases make up the largest portion of federal prosecutors' workload, followed by prosecuting the drug war. In the states, drug prosecutions still lead the way. Those aren't the only sources, though of what's been referred to on the right as "overcriminalization." In Texas, nearly 2,000 separate acts have been declared felonies by the Legislature - when God laid down the law in Exodus, by contrast, He could only come up with ten.
Same source, comments:
Did anyone ever tell the brainiacs who run the state of Texas that once a person has a criminal record, their earning power is removed permanently for the rest of their lives, making them feel hopeless and more probable to break the law to obtain money?
There was one bizarre theory propounded that legalizing abortion cut crime, but that is incorrect. The arguments and statistics in that article are sometimes a bit shocking, but if you're interested, there it is.
Texas Hold 'Em?
Texas incarceration rates
The Texas prison system grew faster than any other prison system in the country during the 1990s, adding nearly one out of every 5 prisoners to the nation's prison boom. In a new study to be released by the Washington, DC-based Justice Policy Institute on August 29th, the criminal justice think tank found that one out of every 20 adults in Texas were either in prison, jail, on probation or on parole. There are more people in prison in Texas than in any other state, and Texas' incarceration rate is second only to Louisiana.
"Out of every 20 adult Texans you meet, one is under criminal justice control," stated Vincent Schiraldi, the Institute's Director and report co-author. "The sheer numbers of people in prison and jail in Texas are signs of system fixated on punishment, and devoid of compassion."
That's interesting. Texas, despite not having 20% of the population, imprisons 20% of prisoners imprisoned during 1990's.
Same source:
Texas just earned the dubious distinction of having the largest prison population in the country (163,190), surpassing the prison population of California (163,067), which has 13 million more citizens than Texas. The Lone Star State has more than 700,000 of its citizens under criminal justice control.
...
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites, and nearly one in three young African American men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice control. The incarceration rate for Blacks in Texas is 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks.
...
Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade, Texas' crime rate has declined more slowly than other large states.
...
There are 89,400 people being incarcerated in Texas for non-violent crimes.
...
Texas' current incarceration rate (1,035 per 100,000) is 80% higher than New York's (574 per 100,000), yet Texas' crime rate (5,111 per 100,000) is 30% higher than New York's (3,588 per 100,000). In 1998, Texas' murder rate was 25% higher than New York State's rate.
"If locking more people up really reduced crime, Texas should have the lowest crime rate in the country,"
Agreed. So that evidence runs counter to the theory that prisons lower the crime rate. Now, scientifically speaking, all I need is one counter-example to disprove a theory. Therefore, the idea that imprisonment lowers the crime rate stands disproven. Without the accompanying carrot, all the stick does is make the target angry. Where's the carrot? When a dog messes on the floor, we don't shoot him. We train him (stick his nose in it, show him what we want him to do when he needs to go, et cetera). Even if he fails to train properly, we don't shoot him (usually. Your mileage may vary); instead, we put him in the yard, where his messes won't be necessarily a bad thing.
Can we not do the same with prisoners?
Here's a thought:
In 1665, bubonic plague made its way to London.
A thousand people a week were dying of the disease by July.
Faced with a horrible situation and the urgent need to do something -- anything -- the Lord Mayor ordered all the city's dogs and cats destroyed.
The Lord Mayor's actions were horribly misplaced. He thought the animals spread the disease, but, in fact, they were the natural enemy of the rats that carried the fleas that were spreading black death.
What is the natural scourge of criminals? Police? Nope. It's citizens who object to crime against them and their neighbors. If we stand idly by while violent or property crimes are committed, we should have no expectation that we will not be the next victims.
But is prison the correct answer?
It has a weak effect on crime rates, if any.
Thoughts.
The more we're protected from pain and hardship by our society, the more opposed we are to pain and hardship for anybody, even when they clearly deserve to receive some. But pain and hardship are part of life; without them, we have no urge to rise above the struggle, or any means of figuring out what's bringing them our way. Pain is a natural corrective.
Flogging was once a standard punishment. It was painful. Was it appropriate? Sometimes I wonder.
Still and all, if we leave unpunished those who have committed crimes against people, do we not commit a greater crime, of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment of all of our fellow citizens? Leaving criminals unpunished lets them prey on us; that essentially punishes US, not them - and we haven't been convicted of anything.
I rather like Heinlein's idea of Coventry, although how we'd keep it safe and impenetrable, I'm not sure. (Heinlein's idea was to enclose a rather large chunk of country behind a wall, and turn prisoners loose in there. His wall included anti-aircraft weapons on automatic to prevent flying out; automated prison defenses augmented with guards; et cetera. DNA records could be used to identify prisoners due to exit. Certainly, this would be an effective measure for some types of criminals (murderers, rapists, et cetera), without running the risk of executing the innocent (although someone else inside might take care of that). In Heinlein's world, the punishment was used as an equivalent to medieval outlawry: if you decline to submit to the state's laws, you also didn't get the state's protections or assistance. Food? Grow your own. Or steal it - but don't be surprised if someone kills you for trying. Defenses against the animals of society? Deal; that's why you're there. A rather forced Darwinist approach to punishment (survive if you can), but I'm not so certain it's altogether to be thrown out as unworkable.
I'm also inclined to think that a larger population carrying concealed weapons will contribute to a lower crime rate.
Further, I agree completely with the idea of "instant karma" where self-defense and defense of family, friends, or property are concerned.
I also agree that the death penalty is excessive.
I believe that prison life should not be cruel, but I also believe it should not be easy. Many of the ex-inmates I've spoken with do not want to go back to prison; some would gladly commit "suicide by cop" to avoid that end. But the recidivism rate is still high.
And, truly, I'm not sure there's a good answer.
Legalizing marijuana and releasing non-violent offenders into the probation system would probably help reduce prison populations. However, some prison sentences for non-violent offenses seem just (Enron executives, for example, seem to deserve prison time). The thing is, our sentencing should not be capricious; there should be some system behind it, especially given public attitudes towards crime these days.
This estimate excludes China's political prisoners.
Article here, NYT, but I'll quote some relevant chunks.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
That is not quite fair, as the US prison population includes political prisoners who are falsely accused of committing crimes. Although perhaps not so many as China has. Nonetheless, even including those, the numbers are still shocking.
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
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.
Maybe we have too many laws?
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges - many of whom are elected, another American anomaly - yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Or -
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
That was 170 years ago.
Now?
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research.
More -
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s.
And a possible reason, though I disagree -
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
(although from 1925 to 1975, it was easier to get guns here, so the logic of that idea falls apart under scrutiny)
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
That's the problem. We have moved certain actions from the "civil" justice arena into the "criminal" justice arena. Since criminal justice is characterized by prison terms, and civil justice is characterized by fines and confiscation and other activities, a higher incarceration rate is expectable when we do this.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
This accounts for a great deal of the separation. If we took out .5 million from the 2.3 million, we'd be left with 1.8 million, competing with China. Hmm. At 4 times the population, you'd think it would work out better.
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Right. Twice the sentence equals twice the population expected. Still doesn't work out, I don't think. England's per capita prison population is low.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
Interesting.
The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.
True. We are that way, and we expect others to be - but not excessively so.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
That's quite interesting, too.
Bigger question is, does it work?
“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”
Perhaps it seems to work, but some other cause is responsible for the rises and falls of crime rates?
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
In the responses to the article online (responses), there are some interesting ideas presented:
There may be a reason other than "democracy" to explain high incarceration rates in the US: profit. Along with the increase in convict populations, America has experienced a rapid rise in the number of corporate-owned (privatized) prisons across the country. Prisoners in these institutions work for their owners, often at far less than minimum wage and with no access to collective bargaining or benefits for their families. According to a recent comment by Paul Handford in the UK's Guardian (21 March), 18 corporations now control inmates in 27 states, and state officials have been luring other corporations to these areas so that they might benefit from the "local competitive labour scene". Thus a significant profit motive might also be a factor in the incarceration of 1 percent of the US population, many for trivial and/or essentially victimless crimes. Handford observed rightly that in this situation "the opportunity for corruption is clear and substantial". What is happening in these prisons is tantamount to slave labour, and deserves a good hard look by the media, labour organizations, and defenders of civil liberties.
Surely we haven't reinvented slavery?
We should study ancient Israel where there were no prisons. Criminals paid off their debt by the courts forcing them to working for the people they stole from for a maximum of seven years. In some cases they were given stripes-a lot better than being cooped up like an animal.
There are times when I think that public flogging would be a really good punishment for many crimes. At other times, I'm struck by the brutality of such punishments, but it occurs to me that for brutal actions, brutal punishments are often appropriate. It seems to me that the "cruel and unusual punishment" mentioned in the Constitution of the U.S. did not mean flogging, executions, or hard labor. What it meant instead, well, read this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/rightsof/punish.htm
Justice Thurgood Marshall, in Furman v. Georgia (1972)
Whether the English Bill of Rights' prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments is properly read as a response to excessive or illegal punishments, as a reaction to barbaric and objectionable modes of punishment, or both, there is no doubt whatever that in borrowing the language and including it in the Eighth Amendment, our Founding Fathers intended to outlaw torture and other cruel punishments.
There are some interesting notes:
Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, declared that "capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments." Even a conservative like Alexander Hamilton believed that "the idea of cruelty inspires disgust," and that the death penalty undermined republican values and behavior.
Another:
Representative Samuel Livermore on cruel and unusual punishment (1789)
The clause seems to express a great deal of humanity, on which account I have no objection to it; but, as it seems to have no meaning in it, I do not think it necessary. . . . No cruel and unusual punishment is to be inflicted; it is sometimes necessary to hang a man, villains often deserve whipping, and perhaps having their ears cut off; but are we in the future to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel? If a more lenient mode of correcting vice and deterring others from the commission of it could be invented, it would be very prudent in the Legislature to adopt it; but until we have some security that this will be done, we ought not to be restrained from making necessary laws by any declaration of this kind.
And another:
We have nothing to guide us in defining what is cruel and unusual apart from our own consciences. A punishment which is considered fair today may be considered cruel tomorrow. And so we are not dealing with a set of absolutes. Our decision must necessarily spring from the mosaic of our beliefs, our backgrounds and the degree of our faith in the dignity of the human personality.
Still another question is whether incarceration prevents crime.
Does the Death Penalty? Many claimants on both sides of this debate. See here and here (warning: that's a highly biased site!) and here (lots of comparative stats on murder, along with data showing the relationship between executions and murder rates). This person (PDF) argues that the death penalty has no effect, but the high prison population does.
Back to the comments on the Times article:
For example, in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, its not safe for tourists to leave their compound after dark, and criminals go in and out of jail like a revolving door. In the British Virgin Islands, where they are really tough on crime, once can walk in Road Town at 3AM and not be concerned about safety. My hat's off the the government of the BVI's. That's where I go spend my money - I avoid St. Thomas like the plague.
So there may be some measurable effect. But do increased prison sentences actually work?
Maybe. There are people I know who claim to know ex-inmates with a "second strike" already who still commit felonies. In their cases, the only thing prison did was make them much more careful about what they take and where. But it doesn't stop drug dealing - without a usable skill or an employable personality, how shall they live?
A summary of Lott's work on concealed carry:
http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae7_3_6.pdf
One of his points is that statistics lie - statistics can be forced to tell any story you want; they cannot speak for themselves (this is why I don't trust studies where the raw data are not available for examination).
For cross-sectional
data, journalists not trained in statistics quickly find themselves in over their heads. The New York Times conducted a cross-sectional study of states with and without the death penalty, and concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. It overlooked the fact that many states without the death penalty already had low murder rates. Miranda warnings have no doubt made it more difficult for police to get confessions from lawbreakers, but such a contention is impossible to conclusively prove since other factors could be influencing changes in the variables.
Even then, the exploration of other causes is paramount; it is difficult to imagine something like "crime rate" being related to only one affecting variable (like prison population).
One author points out that an increase in the consumption of hot chocolate is also associated with decreased crime rates. That there is a correlation is expected (both are effects of cold weather), but that does not imply causation.
Yet, there are statistics on all sides of the issue.
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v08/n307/a09.html?104
A prison cell costs about $65,000 to build and $24,000 a year to operate.
That's interesting.For this much money the public expects lower recidivism rates and safer communities. Yet crime rates are still too high. Recidivism rates are still too high. And corrections spending is crowding out dollars for other pressing priorities such as health care and education.
Like many of our performance-minded colleagues across the country, we have wondered whether we are getting our money's worth out of prisons. For violent offenders and sex offenders, the answer is yes. For many nonviolent offenders and probation violators, the answer is no.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2006/05/texas-high-imprisonment-rate-stain-on.html
He's got a point. Including those on probation and parole, the Justice Policy Institute calculated that one in 20 Texans at any one time are under control of the criminal justice system! Take that, Belarus! And what'd we get for it? According to JPI, "Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade [1990 to 2000], Texas' crime rate has declined more slowly than other large states."
So what do we get for locking more people up?
Same source:
Two major categories of modern "crime," immigration and drug prohibition, weren't even against the law the nation's first 130 years or so. (Immigration was first restricted in 1918, drug prohibition rose up in the '20s). Today, immigration cases make up the largest portion of federal prosecutors' workload, followed by prosecuting the drug war. In the states, drug prosecutions still lead the way. Those aren't the only sources, though of what's been referred to on the right as "overcriminalization." In Texas, nearly 2,000 separate acts have been declared felonies by the Legislature - when God laid down the law in Exodus, by contrast, He could only come up with ten.
Same source, comments:
Did anyone ever tell the brainiacs who run the state of Texas that once a person has a criminal record, their earning power is removed permanently for the rest of their lives, making them feel hopeless and more probable to break the law to obtain money?
There was one bizarre theory propounded that legalizing abortion cut crime, but that is incorrect. The arguments and statistics in that article are sometimes a bit shocking, but if you're interested, there it is.
Texas Hold 'Em?
Texas incarceration rates
The Texas prison system grew faster than any other prison system in the country during the 1990s, adding nearly one out of every 5 prisoners to the nation's prison boom. In a new study to be released by the Washington, DC-based Justice Policy Institute on August 29th, the criminal justice think tank found that one out of every 20 adults in Texas were either in prison, jail, on probation or on parole. There are more people in prison in Texas than in any other state, and Texas' incarceration rate is second only to Louisiana.
"Out of every 20 adult Texans you meet, one is under criminal justice control," stated Vincent Schiraldi, the Institute's Director and report co-author. "The sheer numbers of people in prison and jail in Texas are signs of system fixated on punishment, and devoid of compassion."
That's interesting. Texas, despite not having 20% of the population, imprisons 20% of prisoners imprisoned during 1990's.
Same source:
Texas just earned the dubious distinction of having the largest prison population in the country (163,190), surpassing the prison population of California (163,067), which has 13 million more citizens than Texas. The Lone Star State has more than 700,000 of its citizens under criminal justice control.
...
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites, and nearly one in three young African American men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice control. The incarceration rate for Blacks in Texas is 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks.
...
Despite adding more than 100,000 prisoners this decade, Texas' crime rate has declined more slowly than other large states.
...
There are 89,400 people being incarcerated in Texas for non-violent crimes.
...
Texas' current incarceration rate (1,035 per 100,000) is 80% higher than New York's (574 per 100,000), yet Texas' crime rate (5,111 per 100,000) is 30% higher than New York's (3,588 per 100,000). In 1998, Texas' murder rate was 25% higher than New York State's rate.
"If locking more people up really reduced crime, Texas should have the lowest crime rate in the country,"
Agreed. So that evidence runs counter to the theory that prisons lower the crime rate. Now, scientifically speaking, all I need is one counter-example to disprove a theory. Therefore, the idea that imprisonment lowers the crime rate stands disproven. Without the accompanying carrot, all the stick does is make the target angry. Where's the carrot? When a dog messes on the floor, we don't shoot him. We train him (stick his nose in it, show him what we want him to do when he needs to go, et cetera). Even if he fails to train properly, we don't shoot him (usually. Your mileage may vary); instead, we put him in the yard, where his messes won't be necessarily a bad thing.
Can we not do the same with prisoners?
Here's a thought:
In 1665, bubonic plague made its way to London.
A thousand people a week were dying of the disease by July.
Faced with a horrible situation and the urgent need to do something -- anything -- the Lord Mayor ordered all the city's dogs and cats destroyed.
The Lord Mayor's actions were horribly misplaced. He thought the animals spread the disease, but, in fact, they were the natural enemy of the rats that carried the fleas that were spreading black death.
What is the natural scourge of criminals? Police? Nope. It's citizens who object to crime against them and their neighbors. If we stand idly by while violent or property crimes are committed, we should have no expectation that we will not be the next victims.
But is prison the correct answer?
It has a weak effect on crime rates, if any.
Thoughts.
The more we're protected from pain and hardship by our society, the more opposed we are to pain and hardship for anybody, even when they clearly deserve to receive some. But pain and hardship are part of life; without them, we have no urge to rise above the struggle, or any means of figuring out what's bringing them our way. Pain is a natural corrective.
Flogging was once a standard punishment. It was painful. Was it appropriate? Sometimes I wonder.
Still and all, if we leave unpunished those who have committed crimes against people, do we not commit a greater crime, of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment of all of our fellow citizens? Leaving criminals unpunished lets them prey on us; that essentially punishes US, not them - and we haven't been convicted of anything.
I rather like Heinlein's idea of Coventry, although how we'd keep it safe and impenetrable, I'm not sure. (Heinlein's idea was to enclose a rather large chunk of country behind a wall, and turn prisoners loose in there. His wall included anti-aircraft weapons on automatic to prevent flying out; automated prison defenses augmented with guards; et cetera. DNA records could be used to identify prisoners due to exit. Certainly, this would be an effective measure for some types of criminals (murderers, rapists, et cetera), without running the risk of executing the innocent (although someone else inside might take care of that). In Heinlein's world, the punishment was used as an equivalent to medieval outlawry: if you decline to submit to the state's laws, you also didn't get the state's protections or assistance. Food? Grow your own. Or steal it - but don't be surprised if someone kills you for trying. Defenses against the animals of society? Deal; that's why you're there. A rather forced Darwinist approach to punishment (survive if you can), but I'm not so certain it's altogether to be thrown out as unworkable.
I'm also inclined to think that a larger population carrying concealed weapons will contribute to a lower crime rate.
Further, I agree completely with the idea of "instant karma" where self-defense and defense of family, friends, or property are concerned.
I also agree that the death penalty is excessive.
I believe that prison life should not be cruel, but I also believe it should not be easy. Many of the ex-inmates I've spoken with do not want to go back to prison; some would gladly commit "suicide by cop" to avoid that end. But the recidivism rate is still high.
And, truly, I'm not sure there's a good answer.
Legalizing marijuana and releasing non-violent offenders into the probation system would probably help reduce prison populations. However, some prison sentences for non-violent offenses seem just (Enron executives, for example, seem to deserve prison time). The thing is, our sentencing should not be capricious; there should be some system behind it, especially given public attitudes towards crime these days.