The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration
5 The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration
Pages 130-156
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From page 130... ...
Violent crime rates have been declining steadily over the past two decades, which suggests a crime prevention effect of rising incarceration rates. For 1 This chapter draws substantially on Durlauf and Nagin (2011a, 2011b)
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From page 131... ...
In this regard, one of our most important conclusions is that the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best. Also, because recidivism rates decline markedly with age and prisoners necessarily age as they serve their prison sentence, lengthy prison sentences are an inefficient approach to preventing crime by incapacitation unless the longer sentences are specifically targeted at very high-rate or extremely dangerous offenders.
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From page 132... ...
We then review panel studies examining the association between rates of incarceration and crime rates across states and over time. These studies do not distinguish between deterrence and incapacitation and might be viewed as estimating a total effect of incarceration on crime.
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From page 133... ...
. Moreover, because the majority of felony convictions already result in imprisonment, policies designed to increase the certainty of incarceration for those convicted -- through mandatory prison sentences, for example -- will have only a limited effect on the overall certainty of punishment.
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From page 134... ...
Empirical Findings Empirical studies of deterrence have focused primarily on sentence enhancements that introduce additional prison time for aggravating circumstances related to the crime or the defendant's criminal history. The earliest attempts after the 1970s to measure the effects of severity examined the deterrent effects of sentence enhancements for gun crimes.
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From page 135... ...
.) One exception to the paucity of studies on the crime prevention effects of sentence enhancements concerns analyses of the deterrent effect of California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, which mandated a minimum sentence of 25 years upon conviction for a third strikeable offense.7 Zimring and colleagues (2001)
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From page 136... ...
examined the deterrent effect of prison sentence enhancements for gun crimes and found no effect. Finally, Lee and McCrary (2009)
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From page 137... ...
The authors conducted a careful and thorough analysis involving comparison of adult and juvenile homicide arrest rates in Richmond and comparison of the gun homicide rates of Richmond and other cities with comparable preintervention homicide rates. They conclude that the threat of enhanced sentences had no apparent deterrent effect.
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From page 138... ...
Because the two curves are drawn to predict the same crime rate for a zero sanction level, the absolute deterrent effect of the status quo sanction level is the same for both. But because the two curves have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental increase in sentence length to S2.
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From page 139... ...
In curve B in Figure 5-1, the largest reductions in crime will be obtained with small increases in short sentences. Figure 5-1 The evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length suggests that the Bitmapped relationship between crime rate and sentence length more closely resembles curve B in Figure 5-1 than curve A
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From page 140... ...
. Thus, there is no evidence one way or the other on the deterrent effect of the second distinguishing characteristic of mandatory minimum sentencing (Nagin, 2013a, 2013b)
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From page 141... ...
. Here we focus on two issues that are particularly important to estimating and interpreting incapacitation effects: the estimate of the rate of offending of active offenders and the constancy of that rate over the course of the criminal career.
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From page 142... ...
The skewness of the offending rate distribution has crucial implications for the calculation of incapacitation effects: as a matter of accounting, the estimated size of incapacitation effects will be highly sensitive to whether the mean, median, or some other statistic is used to summarize the offending rate distribution. Skewness in the offending rate distribution also has important implications for projecting the marginal incapacitation effect of changes in the size of the prison population.
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From page 143... ...
Constancy of λ Over the Criminal Career The criminal career model assumes that the offending rate is constant over the course of the criminal career. However, large percentages of crimes are committed by young people, with rates peaking in the midteenage years for property offenses and the late teenage years for violent offenses, followed by rapid declines (e.g., Farrington, 1986; Sweeten et al., 2013)
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From page 144... ...
144 THE GROWTH OF INCARCERATION Percentage of Free Offenders Percentage of Resident Inmates FIGURE 5-2 Distribution of offense rates (λ) among free offenders and resident inmates.
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From page 145... ...
, for example, find that offending rates among the formerly arrested are statistically indistinguishable from those of the general population after 7 to 10 years of remaining crime free.11 Other Considerations Beyond the constancy of the offending rate across offenders and over the criminal career, several other assumptions relate to the effectiveness of imprisonment as a public safety strategy. Three assumptions are particularly relevant here.
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From page 146... ...
ESTIMATING THE TOTAL EFFECT OF INCARCERATION ON CRIME Instead of studying policy changes in specific jurisdictions or asking offenders about their levels of criminal involvement, another commonly used design analyzes the relationship between imprisonment rates and crime rates across states and over time. The usual specification regresses the logarithm of the crime rate on the logarithm of the incarceration rate, yielding an elasticity of the crime rate with respect to incarceration.
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From page 147... ...
All find statistically significant negative associations between crime rates and incarceration rates, implying a crime prevention effect of imprisonment. However, the magnitudes of the estimates of this effect vary widely, from nil for a study allowing for the possibility that prevention effects decline as the scale of incarceration increases (Liedka et al., 2006)
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From page 148... ...
Levitt argues that such court orders meet the test for providing a valid estimate of the effect of the incarceration rate on the crime rate. The orders are not affected by and have no direct effect on the crime rate, affecting it only insofar as they affect the imprisonment rate.
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From page 149... ...
In all incentive-based theories of criminal behavior in the tradition of Bentham and Beccaria, the deterrence response to sanction threats is posed in terms of the certainty and severity of punishment, not the incarceration rate. Therefore, to predict how changes in certainty and severity might affect the crime rate requires knowledge of the relationship of the crime rate to certainty and severity as separate entities.
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From page 150... ...
THE CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT OF THE FORMERLY INCARCERATED Research on incapacitation and deterrence focuses largely on the contemporaneous effect of incarceration -- the crime prevented now by today's incarceration.14 However, today's incarceration may also affect the level of crime in the future. In studying the lagged effects of incarceration on crime, researchers generally have focused on the criminal involvement of people who have been incarcerated.
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From page 151... ...
Although the incarceration rate had roughly doubled between 1983 and 1994, the results of the two studies are strikingly similar: the 3-year rearrest rate for state prisoners was around two-thirds in both cohorts (67.5 percent in 1994 and 62.5 percent in 1983)
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From page 152... ...
EFFECTS OF INCARCERATION FOR DRUG OFFENSES ON DRUG PRICES AND DRUG USE As discussed in Chapter 2, a large portion of the growth in state and federal imprisonment is due to the increased number of arrests for drug offenses and the increased number of prison commitments per drug arrest. Law enforcement efforts targeting drug offenses expanded greatly after the 1970s, with the arrest rate for drugs increasing from about 200 per 100,000 adults in 1980 to more than 400 per 100,000 in 2009 (Snyder, 2011)
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From page 153... ...
On the demand side, penalties for possession became harsher as well, and criminal justice agencies became actively involved in reducing demand through the arrest and prosecution of drug users. As a result of this twin focus on supply and demand, incarceration rates for drug possession increased in roughly similar proportion to incarceration rates for drug trafficking (Caulkins and Chandler, 2006)
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From page 154... ...
KNOWLEDGE GAPS We offer the following observations regarding gaps in knowledge of the crime prevention effects of incarceration and research to address those gaps. Deterrence and Sentence Length The deterrent effect of lengthy sentences is modest at best.
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From page 155... ...
Evidence is limited on the crime prevention effects of most of the policies that contributed to the post-1973 increase in incarceration rates. Nevertheless, the evidence base demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are ineffective as a crime control measure.
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From page 156... ...
Finally, although the body of credible evidence on the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism is small, that evidence consistently points either to no effect or to an increase rather than a decrease in recidivism. Thus, there is no credible evidence of a specific deterrent effect of the experience of incarceration.
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