A few months after I moved to Chicago, President Trump directed his wrath toward my new home.
“If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on… I will send in the Feds!” he tweeted.
He was referring to the uptick of violence in Chicago: in 2016, 764 people were murdered, 58% more than in the previous year. Other cities also experienced surges in violence of similar proportions, but most–Washington DC, Baltimore, Milwaukee–have smaller populations. Chicago’s large population lends it the unfortunate distinction of being the U.S. city with the most total homicides, even though its homicide rate is below half that of St. Louis.
This hasn’t shielded Chicago from Donald Trump’s incessant commentary. On the campaign trail, Trump pronounced, “I think Chicago needs stop-and-frisk. Now people can criticize me for that or people can say whatever they want. But they asked me about Chicago and I think stop-and-frisk with good strong, you know, good strong law and order. But you have to do something.”
Do something, indeed. But what?
Before now, my thought about questions of crime and punishment has been limited. As a college freshman, I wrote an irate essay about the brief, four-year prison stint of Ivan Frederick, the Abu Ghraib guard who admitted to torturing and sexually humiliating his prisoners. (The defense particularly irked me: Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo argued the prison’s harsh environment caused Frederick to act evilly, despite his good nature. If that argument succeeded, then why wasn’t it exonerating every American criminal with a difficult upbringing? Privilege and double standards, that’s why. I digress.) A couple years later, I wrote an op-ed referencing the moral injustice of collective punishment.
But to the tune of thoughtful, research-based advocacy around a topic commanding so much social import, I’ve been lacking. Now–what with Chicago’s reports on rising crime, our opening trauma center, and local communities of eloquent activists–certain questions have become unavoidable. What is the state of crime and justice in America today? What strategies work to mitigate crime and improve societal well-being? What strategies don’t?
The statistics are daunting. America has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. In 1972, less than 200,000 Americans were behind bars: today, that number is 2.2 million.
In her book The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander sheds light on the racial contours of those numbers. African-Americans make up a disproportionate segment of the 2.2 million: today, more African-Americans are in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850. She argues that this is because Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, declared in 1982 when drug crime was falling, disproportionately targeted communities of color. As an example, she cites the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created minimum sentences for distribution of crack, associated with Blacks, that were significantly more severe than those for cocaine, associated with whites. Racial bias has further been shown to play a role in judicial sentencing decisions.
John Pfaff from the Fordham Center pushes back on the drug-focused explanation for the upsurge in incarceration. He points out that while half of federal inmates are serving time for drug offenses, federal inmates comprise just 10% of the total. On the other hand, a mere 16% of those in state prisons (which host 87% of total inmates) are in there for drug-related charges. Instead, he asserts violent crime–the charge for over half of state prison inmates–is the culprit.
Namely, prosecutors began filing higher rates of felony charges, even during years when crime fell. Between the mid 1990s to 2008, the likelihood that prosecutors would file felony charges against an arrestee doubled from one in three to two in three. Pfaff contends that for many, violence is a phase they will grow out of—and therefore locking up violent criminals may not actually protect society. He believes that true prison reform would mandate a less prison-happy approach to violent crime (a tough sell politically, unsurprisingly), as well as legislating a reduction in prosecutorial power.
Pfaff does agree with Michelle Alexander that “the criminal justice system is driven by and exacerbates racial inequality.” Being behind bars incurs long-lasting consequences: it’s harder to get a job, you can legally be discriminated against for housing and public benefits, and you’ve been estranged from your family and community. The societal repercussions are compounded by civic ones: many states restrict the right to vote for convicted felons, due to laws dating back from Jim Crow days. Michelle Alexander argues that these policies tell people: “You’re not a person to us, a person worth counting, a person worth hearing”—and that those mindsets then spread to hurt families and communities of color.
Regardless of its roots, the discrepancy between America’s imprisonment rate–the highest of all developed countries, 3.5 times that of Europe–versus its unremarkable crime rate, at least should raise eyebrows. And we can disentangle the normative statement “mass incarceration should not be our solution to crime,” from a positive, testable underpinning, which is: “how does incarceration impact crime?
Short answer, provided by University of Michigan economist John Mueller-Smith? Not favorably. Using data from Harris County, Texas, he calculated that an additional year in prison increases the odds of a felony defendant reoffending by 4-7% a quarter. This post-prison effect quickly reverses the incapacitation effect, where the marginal felon defendant is 3-6% less likely to be charged for criminal activity per quarter behind bars. Furthermore, there was a lasting effect on self-sufficiency: that additional year translated in a 3.6% reduction in likelihood of quarterly employment.
For the long answer, read his paper, entitled “The Criminal and Labor Market Impacts of Mass Incarceration.”
Alternatively, go the next page to watch me walk through the analysis his paper uses, taking very incremental, it’s-been-awhile-since-I’ve-taken-econometrics-and-I-hope-to-revisit-this-in-the-future steps.
To be continued