I was reading an article about Kentucky’s longest serving prison inmate, Willie Gaines Smith, who has been incarcerated for almost 55 years:
There is one claim in the article that surprised me:
Is this a correct statement? 
Not all murders are the same.
First degree premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances is the worst of the worst, but only a minority of murders. “Manslaughter” can mean accidentally killing someone, which is usually considered a less serious offense (though, obviously, still quite serious in its own right) and usually involves a much shorter sentence than murder one, but might still be lumped into the “murder statistics”.
So the next question to ask is what qualifies as “murder” for reporting purposes of this sort. I think most of us would agree that there is a difference between accidentally killing someone jaywalking across the street and plotting and methodically carrying out a plan to kill someone one. I wouldn’t expect those offenses to get identical sentences.
I think the reference is to time served, not the sentence.
Average time served in the US for murder and non-negligent homicide is 71 months (cite - pdf), which represents 48% of their sentence. Thus the average sentence is a little more than twelve years, but on average, they serve less than half of that.
Regards,
Shodan
To steal from Bill Clinton, I would take issue with the word ‘is’ in that sentence.
While your source is impeccable, the cited report is rather long in the tooth. It tabulates the time served by violent offenders released from U.S. prisons in 1992. During the early to mid 1990s, as you may recall, there was a largely successful push for less discretion in sentencing and parole, and more stringent requirements that actual time served must be closer to the length of the sentence.
This data is from too early a point in time to reflect that change, and is way too far back in time to reflect the facts as they exist today.
You can see slightly updated numbers here. It appears the mean sentence has actually gone up (20 years), which is likely the result of a lot of mandatory minimum sentencing laws adopted during the Clinton years.
This states that for third degree murder (voluntary manslaughter) the punishment (federal) is a fine or years in jail. With that level of discretion, 6 or 7 years seems not unusual. Seven years is actually a long time. Presumably with parole, that’s actually a sentence of 12 to 14 years.
Prison, not jail. We don’t have federal jails.
In addition to dating from 1992, as RTFirefly correctly pointed out, by counting only people released from prison this method of measurement systematically fails to count every single person who gets a life sentence without parole and is therefore never released from prison. It also doesn’t count death penalty cases.
Systematically excluding all the longest sentences and then claiming the average length of sentence is equal to the average of the unexcluded ones is absurd. Therefore this claim wasn’t even close to correct in 1992.
Exactly. I also found this statistic:
→ Life imprisonment in the United States - Wikipedia
In light of this, I found the “7 year” reference particularly strange.
Apparently, the legal definition of “murder” is rather broad. I wasn’t really aware of that.
Isn’t that selection bias, only including the prisoners who are being released while excluding the ones who haven’t been released?
I mean, imagine you’re looking at four murderers…
#1 was paroled today after serving 5 years out of a 10-year sentence for manslaughter.
#2 was paroled today after serving 9 years out of a 15-year sentence for second-degree murder but tomorrow he’ll violate his parole and go back inside.
#3 is still inside and will stay there until he dies of old age because his sentence is “life without possibility of parole”.
#4 was sentenced to 30 years but he got stabbed today and now he’s dead.
Does it sound fair to you to look at that data and say “The average murderer gets out in 7 years.”? I don’t think so.
It smells to me like somebody was trying to make the data fit the conclusion. They started with the conclusion “prison times are too short” and worked their way backwards from there. They included manslaughter along with murder, and then excluded anyone who stays in prison until they die. And then on top of that, they selected a point in time when the data looked the worst.