I presume you mean the crime peak of the 1990s.
Nah, I’m going off this guy’s assertion.
Plus you’ve given a cite to a different country. Though I imagine the graphs would be similar.
I don’t think those articles support your position about first-time offenders getting sent to prison. From the articles you cited:
He was first arrested in Panama City, Florida for LSD possession and released on his own recognizance. A second arrest occurred that resulted in three years of probation.
On November 4, 1995, Leandro Andrade stole five children’s videotapes from a K-Mart store in Ontario, California. Two weeks later, he stole four children’s videotapes from a different K-Mart store in Montclair, California. Andrade had been in and out of the state and federal prison systems since 1982.
Weldon Angelos, the son of a Greek immigrant and founder of a rap record company, was accused of selling marijuana to a police informant on several occasions worth a total of $350
Other people you linked to like Clarence Aaron and Mandy Martinson were knowingly involved in major drug dealing operations. Yes, they were way down at the bottom of the operation and they got big sentences while people higher in the organization were able to make deals and get lesser sentences. But that’s more an indication that they were in over their head rather than being innocent bystanders.
Just to clear up the numbers:
Homicides, violent crimes, and property crimes all essentially climb until the late 70s and go down since then, with a brief detour during the glory years of crack: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/images/murderrate.png
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/02/01/ucr.gif
I should have clarified that crime itself was at a peak in the late 70s, meaning the peak era for forming criminals as children was the late 60s.
The numbers support both the lead and incarceration hypotheses. Lead paint was banned in 1978 and leaded gas was severely restricted in 1973 and phased out in stages ending with a total ban in 1996. This tracks “people who were at the age when lead exposure destroys the brain’s impulse control centers commit less crime at ages 16-25 if they aren’t subject to lead poisoning” quite well in the above numbers. Similarly, the 1993 crime bill made it fairly hard to spend your entire life outside of prison as a murderer, rapist, or armed robber.
The other major driver of serious crime is drug prohibition, which creates massive incentives to form ever more violent street gangs; the crack bubble above says it all.
I believe the link between crime and lead as an ingredient in in gasoline is quite firmly established.
It was only a couple of years ago I read an article on a study that showed that the delayed crime drop associated with phasing out lead also matched the speed of the phaseout in a country.
This is a false question because we aren’t presented with such a choice in reality. My preference would be to see the vast majority of non-violent drug criminals not incarcerated, and most non-violent offenders would get multiple chances before ever seeing prison. When they did, they would see lower security (and thus lower cost) prisons that focused more on rehabilitation and job training. Only the true violent criminals who have committed deliberate, violent, permanently injuring acts, would be locked away forever. Such a system would reduce the prison population by probably 60-70%, and the maximum security (which is the most expensive sub-group) by even more, since a wide range of people who now serve inappropriately long sentences (and in many states and the Federal system get classed into high security units based solely on sentence length) would not be in maximum security where they never belonged in the first place.
Retribution is a loaded word. I like the word “equity.” There has to be equitable treatment for things you do to harm other people, regardless of any other concerns, that must be part of the criminal justice system or said system is frankly invalid.
I also will argue that the relatively light sentences in Scandinavia and Europe for murders, rapes and etc is likely not why they have less of those crimes. I think that the better rehabilitation for all criminal offenders is at least one aspect of why they have less serious crimes. Few rapists or murderers are first convicted of those charges. They often have petty criminal offenses, drug offenses, escalating violent offenses etc before they commit the most serious crimes. In a system that focused more on non-custodial solutions to minor crimes and rehabilitation would likely see fewer rapists and murderers. But those that still commit the most heinous of crimes can still be locked away forever in such a system, and should be. They shouldn’t be rehabilitated. And it’s frankly unlikely that “spending more on rehabilitation” in the form of “not imprisoning rapists and murderers” is a good solution for those who have actually committed rape and murder.
For what it’s worth, Sweden is the rape capital of Europe, sixth in the world, with only five African countries ahead of them. Maybe whatever they’re doing isn’t working.
Spending on criminal justice is limited, but government revenues do go up over time. My simple point, based on the real world budgets of States and the Federal government, is we should reduce costs by eliminating various forms of unnecessary incarceration.
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No more incarceration for drug possession of any quantity.
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No more incarceration for “low level” dealing. Examples being people who sell their spare prescription drugs or who sell a little weed here or there. I’m more inclined to incarcerate people who are running “criminal enterprises”, but that’s a huge difference from someone who got a prescription for oxy, decided to sell it, and the guy he sold it to ended up being an informant so now he has to go to prison for 20 years.
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No more incarceration for “first time” non-violent offenses. These are things like frauds, thefts, white collar crimes etc. An exception would exist for “extreme” crimes affected large numbers of people or involving vast sums of money. Guys like Madoff or the Enron CEO being examples of who would need to be imprisoned on their first offenses. People that can’t help themselves and continue to steal, defraud etc after multiple chances would eventually be imprisoned too–but not on a first offense.
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Elimination of the American bail system. The bail system is antiquated, stupid, and unjust. Many judges (including a national organization of trial judges) is opposed to the current bail system, and aside from like the Philippines no other country uses such a patently stupid system for handling pre-trial detentions. While they are not convicted criminals, people who are held in jails pre-trial still have to be housed, guarded etc. They represent a very large percentage of people behind bars at any given time, and most of them frankly do not belong there.
Instead I would say judges should consider three options and three factors for pre-trial defendants. The options would be: releasing a defendant on their own recognizance, putting a defendant under electronic monitoring, or incarcerating a defendant in a jail. The factors would be: likelihood of appearance, seriousness of the offense, and danger presented to society.
So a defendant charged with a minor offense, who is not thought to be a danger, and who has a high likelihood of appearance should be RORed. A defendant who isn’t really a danger to a society, but maybe charged with a more serious offense and thus perhaps likely to flee to avoid the consequences, can be put under electronic monitoring. A defendant who is like charged with murder or something and believed to be a threat to commit more (think guys like Dylann Roof) would be incarcerated.
Right now in many States (some have reformed a little bit, largely due to cost concerns) basically all crimes (all misdemeanors and all felonies) by default you have to pay bail to get out. A judge has a discretion to ROR you, but often times the bail is set at 500 to $2,000 or so instead. These low bail amounts are actually very troubling. They tend to be associated with very minor crimes. Bail bondsmen make money of about 10% of the bond posted, so that means a $500 bail is actually impossible to get a bail bondsman to post for you. He only makes $50 off of it, it’s just not worth the overhead costs involved. Bail bondsmen start getting involved at a few thousand, but that bail range of $500-1000 sadly is beyond the ability of some people to pay, and because bail bondsmen won’t touch it you actually have people sitting in jail for weeks or months (typically this will cost them their employment if they have any) because they don’t have $500 in cash to get out and their family is no better off than they are so can’t help.
This makes them far more likely to plead guilty, whether they are or not. Because often these crimes, after you plead guilty, you get sentenced to something like probation or a minor fine that you’re allowed to pay off over time. So the pre-trial detention is actually the biggest punishment levied, and paradoxically you could spend a few months in jail for a crime that, when convicted of, you get no jail time for but instead get probation or a small fine.
The massive savings from removing all these unnecessary incarcerations removes from reality the need to discuss “should we lock rapists and murderers up forever.” Because at the very least with the huge resources we have freed up we should first try to implement rehabilitation and lower level forms of detention (like home confinement / probation) for less serious offenders and see what that does to the violent crime rate before we start “experimenting” by giving murderers 5 year prison sentences.
Personally if it was up to me, I’d legalize all drugs. Marijuana, LSD, cocaine, heroin, meth - if you want to use it, go ahead. If you die, that’s on you. The only laws I’d have would be about minors using drugs and doing things like driving a car while you’re under the influence.
Beyond it being an issue of personal liberty, I feel this would have a major beneficial effect on law enforcement. Drugs are a significant factor in crime - and not just drug crimes. Drug sales finance criminal organizations. The drug trade causes violence. And drug users often commit crimes to support their habit. Legalization would pretty much eliminate these problems. You don’t hear about people getting shot over cigarettes or mugging somebody so they can buy a six-pack.
But getting back on topic, I still maintain that prison is not the problem. Prison is where we put the problem. People don’t get their lives fucked up because they go to prison. People go to prison because they have already fucked up their lives (or had their lives fucked up if you prefer that viewpoint). By the time somebody gets sent to prison that’s probably the best place for them to be.
So if you want to fix the prison problem, don’t go to prisons. Go out and fix the school problem and the unemployment problem and the health care problem and the homelessness problem. And fix the drug addiction problem because even if it were legalized, drug abuse is still a problem. Fix those problems and you’ll find you don’t have a prison problem anymore.
No, he clearly only wants to fund prison or prevention. Say we go with prevention, what do we do with the current rapists and murderers who won’t benefit from the prevention programs that are supposed to start in childhood? If they’re not in prison we have the choice of a. letting them go or b. executing them all. Neither of these is going to sit well with the public.
You are missing the point slightly.
The point the article made is that for each year a person is in jail, that increases the risk that he will commit more crimes once he is released.
Thus for longer sentences to be more effective than shorter ones, they would have to deter at least as much crime as the additional crime those extra years causes the criminal to cause when he gets released.
So that’s considering only the victims, not the life of the criminal himself.
You can’t murder, rape, kidnap, or rob anyone except other prisoners when you’re in prison. You’re basically just constructing an argument for imprisoning everyone convicted of a violent offense for life.
I’m not saying that the only factor we should consider is the risk of another crime being commited.
What I am saying is that (according to the article) even if that is all we consider, we should still prefer lighter sentencing. (Or other prison arrangements.)