Transcript Imprisonment and Crime: Can Both be Reduced?

Imprisonment and Crime:
Can Both be Reduced?
(Criminology & Public Policy, 2011)
STEVEN N. DURLAUF
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
DANIEL S. NAGIN
CARNEGIE MELLON
UNIVERSITY
Imprisonment and Crime: Can Both Be
Reduced?
 Yes
 Requires a shift from severity-based to certainty-
based sanction policies
 Shift in resources from corrections to policing
Prisoners per 100,000 Pop'n
500
Growth in US Incarceration Rate
400
300
200
100
0
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Crime Prevention Effects of
Imprisonment: Homicide Rates in
the USA from 1974 to 2009
12
10
R
a
t
e
p
e
r
1
0
0
,
0
0
0
8
6
4
2
0
1974
1979
1984
1989
1994
1999
2004
2009
Potential Preventive Effects of Imprisonment
 Incapacitation
 Specific Deterrence—Effect of the
experience of imprisonment on
reoffending

Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009)
 General Deterrence—Effect of the threat of
punishment on offending


Apel and Nagin (forthcoming)
Durlauf and Nagin (2011)
Crime Control and the Imprisonment Rate
 Crime control by incapacitation necessarily
increases imprisonment
 Crime control with deterrence can reduce both
crime and imprisonment—if the crime is deterred
there is no need for punishment
Two Key Theoretical Constructs in Deterrence
 Severity of punishment—sentence length
 Probability of imprisonment given crime
 “certainty of punishment”
 Apprehension threat posed by police
key component of certainty
Deterrence Depends Upon the Interplay of Certainty
and Severity
Certainty (P)
Severity (S)
P&S
Interact
Deterrence
Key Findings from Recent Literature Reviews
 The marginal deterrent effect of increasing already
lengthy prison sentences is modest at best.
 With the right deployment the police have a
substantial marginal deterrent effect.
 Little evidence of a specific deterrent
Policing and Crime Control
 Police are at the frontline of creating
certainty
 How police are used not their numbers is
key
 Not all methods of deploying the police are
equally effective in preventing crime

Hot spots & problem oriented policing v. “standard model”
tactics
Apprehension Risk and Crime Control
 Capturing and incapacitating criminals
 Police presence deterring crime in the first place
 Using police to reduce the attractiveness of criminal
opportunities to prevent crime from happening
 Costs of actually having to imprison someone is averted
 Result: less crime and imprisonment
Guidelines for Formulating Policy
 Lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on
deterrence grounds
 Shifting resources from imprisonment to policing
offers the realistic possibility of reducing both crime
and imprisonment
 In an era of reduced crime control budgets policing
should get a larger share of a smaller budget
Mandatory Minimum Statutes (MMS)
 No nationwide data on numbers sentenced under
MMS
 17% of California’s prison population is 50 or older,
up from 6 percent in 1998
 20% of the US prison population is 45 or older, up
from 10% in 1991
 Policy Recommendation: MMS be amended to apply
only to the demonstrably dangerous or repealed
outright
Implementation of Guidelines: Some Important
Questions
 Policing


Identification of high crime impact policing strategies and paroleprobation strategies
Careful monitoring of negative externalities
 Sentencing
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
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Evidence of severity effects for shorter sentence—European studies
should be a priority
Better studies of stigma and stereotyping effects of imprisonment
Targeted identification of high rate offenders (e.g., Netherlands
Habitual Offender Law)
Better State Level Data on Sentencing
 Create a mechanism for shifting resources from state-
level corrections to local-level policing
Research and Evaluation Infrastructure
 The National Institutes of Health (NIH) model for CJ
Research



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Medical treatments are based on scientific evidence not on dogma
and unverified assumptions
Model of continuous improvement of treatment
Silver bullet medical treatments are the exception not the rule
Medical treatment are disease specific
 NIJ is the natural candidate for taking on this mantle


But Office or Research and Evaluation’s FY08 budget was less than
$20mil—2/3 smaller than in FY 2002
Adoption of recommendations of Strengthening Scientific Research
and Development at the National Institute of Justice is an important
first step
Thank you
[email protected]