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The U.S. prison population increased fivefold between 1980 and 2009\u2014from approximately 320,000 inmates to 1.62 million. When you look at the work of scholars and the policymakers who are influenced by them, what do you see as the dominant explanations for why this happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
One is that we\u2019re sending people to prison for more and more and more time. The other is the war on drugs\u2014that we\u2019ve made this concerted effort to target people for drug dealing and drug possession, and we\u2019re filling up our prisons with all of these drug-related offenses. The dominant view is that those two changes have transformed the size of the prison population in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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What do you think of those two explanations?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
I understand where they come from. It\u2019s true that legislators have passed a lot of new, tougher sentencing laws over the past 30 or 40 years. And it\u2019s true that we have increased the attention paid to drugs. But in the end, there are other things that play a much, much bigger role in explaining prison growth. The fact of the matter is in today\u2019s state prisons, which hold about 90 percent of all of our prisoners, only 17 percent of the inmates are there primarily for drug charges. And about two-thirds are there for either property or violent crimes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Has the percentage of drug offenders among the prison population been higher in the past?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
It peaked in 1990 at 22 percent and then steadily declined. So even when the percentage of drug offenders among the state prison population was at its peak, about four out of every five people were there for a nondrug offense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Why are you skeptical of the idea that longer sentences have been a significant driver of the prison boom?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
\nIf you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n
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Because while it\u2019s true that legislators have passed a lot of longer sentences, if you actually look at time served by inmates in prison, it doesn\u2019t appear to have changed that much. We have good data going back approximately 20 years or so, and at least in northern and northwestern states where we have better data, about half of all prisoners who get admitted in a given year only spend about two or three years in prison. And only about 10 percent serve more than about seven or eight years in prison. These laws look incredibly punitive\u201425 years for a class B felony\u2014but you just don\u2019t see people serving that amount of time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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OK. So if it\u2019s not the drug war, and it\u2019s not harsh sentencing laws, what is it? What do you think caused the prison boom?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
You need to break the question into two periods. Because there\u2019s a time between 1975 and 1991 when you see this dramatic rise in crime, and the prison population went up as well. And then there\u2019s a more interesting period, between 1991 and 2010, when crime steadily declined, yet prison populations kept going up. So, between \u201975 and \u201991, it\u2019s almost certain that the increase in crime had to play at least some significant role in increasing the prison population. The scale of the crime boom that took place was dramatic: From 1960 to 1991, violent crime rose by 400 percent, and property crime rose by 200 percent. Figuring out how much of prison growth can be attributed to the crime boom is actually statistically quite difficult, but the best estimate that\u2019s out there\u2014which is not a perfect estimate, but it\u2019s the best we have\u2014suggests that about half of prison growth during that period was due to rising crime. Clearly other stuff mattered, but rising crime played a very big role during the first phase.<\/p>\n
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So why did the prison population keep on rising after 1991, when the crime wave ended? It seems like if your theory is right, that the increase in violent crime and property crime caused the prison boom, the end of the crime wave should have been accompanied by decreasing incarceration rates.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
Three things could have happened. One, police just got much more efficient\u2014they\u2019re just arresting more and more people, with new policing technologies, new policing approaches\u2014maybe they\u2019re just arresting a bigger share of offenders. But we don\u2019t actually see that. Arrests tend to drop with the crime rate. So the total number of people being arrested has fallen. The other thing it could be is we\u2019re just locking people up for longer\u2014but like I said, it\u2019s not that. So clearly what\u2019s happening is we\u2019re just admitting more people to prison. Though we have a smaller pool of people being arrested, we\u2019re sending a larger and larger number of them to prison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Why would that be?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
What appears to happen during this time\u2014the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that\u2019s available\u2014is that the probability that a district attorneys file a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the \u201990s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can\u2019t tell you why they\u2019re doing that. No one\u2019s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Isn\u2019t the traditional explanation for why prosecutors tend to be overzealous is that their political careers depend on it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
The political question is interesting because generally the district attorney election is not very difficult to win. DAs tend to win elections pretty regularly. So, when Joe Hynes was defeated in the Democratic primary in Brooklyn, New York, in 2012, he was the first sitting Brooklyn DA to run for re-election and lose in more than a century. But that\u2019s not to say that politics don\u2019t matter: Maybe it\u2019s that next election they\u2019re looking at, that they remain tough on crime because they want to become attorney general or governor. There\u2019s no clear data on this. We\u2019re only just starting to look at this question. But that strikes me as a possible story. What might have happened is the crime boom made being a prosecutor more of a launch-pad position\u2014it elevated the status of prosecutors, and perhaps elevated their political ambitions, and they remained tough on crime even as crime started going down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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OK. So why does any of this matter? Why is it important for reformers to have the right theory for why mass incarceration happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
The reason it\u2019s important to get it right is that if we\u2019re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly\u2014and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won\u2019t solve the problem. So if you think it\u2019s the war on drugs, you might think, \u2018OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.\u2019 And, you know, it\u2019s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison\u2014decarcerating drug offenders\u2014will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we\u2019d still be the world\u2019s largest incarcerating country; we\u2019d still have an enormous prison population.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs\u2019 bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren\u2019t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won\u2019t have that big an effect on prison population either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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What would?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
Well, the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison. And there\u2019s a lot to be said for nonprison approaches to a lot of people who are in prison for violent crimes. But that\u2019s a political issue that we haven\u2019t even begun to address, in part because it\u2019s politically scary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Where does that leave reformers who want to see the prison population drop significantly?<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat makes it very hard is that the person we really need to target now\u2014whose behavior we need to regulate\u2014is the district attorney, and the district attorney is a very politically independent figure. He\u2019s directly elected, and he\u2019s directly elected at the county level. So there\u2019s no big centralized fix. You can\u2019t necessarily go to Washington and say, \u2018Here\u2019s the law that\u2019s going to control what the DAs do,\u2019 because they don\u2019t have to listen to the federal government at all. So you have to figure out how to go county by county and either elect DAs who have less punitive attitudes, or you can try to sort of change the incentives DAs face at the state level. But it\u2019s very tricky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Leon Neyfakh (a SLATE staff writer) Criminal justice reform is a contentious political issue, but\u00a0there\u2019s one point on which pretty much everyone agrees: America\u2019s prison population is way too high. It\u2019s possible that a decline has already begun, with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16428,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16427\/revisions\/16428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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