Mark Kleiman has an interesting post suggesting that one of the key metrics we’re using in law enforcement – the number of people convicted – is the wrong one.
But what police and prosecutors do from day to day is make arrests and secure verdicts (or guilty pleas) and thus sentences. It seems natural to count those activities and use the counts as performance measures. That, however, turns out to be a mistake. Actual arrests and prosecutions are mostly costs rather than benefits.
It’s an interesting notion, but I think that he ignores one key point.
The audience for crime control isn’t just criminals, it is the citizens who use the state’s ability to protect them as a measure of the legitimacy they grant the state.
This is, for example, kind of crucial in solidifying (or, better, creating) the legitimacy we’re seeing in Iraq.
The consequence of losing that legitimacy looks like this:
Maria del Refugio Perez is a 60-year-old street vendor who says she abhors violence. But this month, she joined a raging mob that corralled, pummeled and hog-tied a suspected thief and almost burned her alive.
Drawn by a butcher’s shouts that she had caught the woman grabbing money from a cash drawer at her shop, Perez and other neighbors quickly seized her. Once the church bells in this Mexico City suburb started ringing, signaling a town emergency, the mob grew in size — and anger.
“These things happen because the authorities don’t do anything,” Perez said, recalling days later how the woman, Juana Moncayo, was tied to a flagpole in the town plaza for several hours as the crowd of 200 insulted and beat her.
An orderly society not only requires some control over who gets to use force and in what conditions; more important, it requires a public sphere of justice and respect for the law.
The risk of a formulation like Kleiman’s is that we may decide not to punish certain criminals, because for us as a society, it is as Kleiman suggests simply too expensive (we do that today – ever try and report an auto burglary in a major city?). Kleiman says:
[Putting someone away is a benefit when an especially active bad guy gets locked up, preferably for a long time, thus reducing criminal victimization through incapacitation, but the median person who goes to prison isn’t actually worth locking up, balancing the costs — financial and non-financial — of keeping him behind bars against the benefits of the crimes he doesn’t commit while incarcerated.]
In making that calculation, he needs to add to the costs the erosion of the legitimacy of the overall body of laws in the eyes of the victimized noncriminal class.
THen it seems to me the only thing left of any value to us in the search for how well the government’s doing with the power given them, is the actual crime rates…. not the arrest rates.
Kleiman makes the following statements: “The key to effective crime control is combining maximally convincing threats with a minimum of actual delivery. That’s not as hard as it sounds: a really convincing threat will virtually eliminate the activity it’s directed at (or crime by the person it’s directed to), thus eliminating the need to deliver on the threat.”
Equating police activities with police actions may or may not be valid. The problem here is that crime enforcement was so lax over the last 25 years, as we fell into the Ramsey Clark error of blaming the state for the actions of the criminal. Only recently has this changed. In New York, the city reached a nadir of safety, when Guliani began the strict “broken windows” style of enforcement. After that, the numbers of bad guys in prison went up and the crimes went down.
But only after a gov’t has provided a steady reliable threat of punishment for crime can we expect both the number of crimes and the number of prisoners to decline. Otherwise, as we wax and wane in our level of serious threat of punishment for crime, we are always playing catch-up.
…the median person who goes to prison isn’t actually worth locking up, balancing the costs — financial and non-financial — of keeping him behind bars against the benefits of the crimes he doesn’t commit while incarcerated.
If by ‘financial’ Kleiman means the cost of damage done to propert vs. the cost of prison, yes, prison typically costs more. But we don’t incarcerate people because of the money they cost, but because they violate the laws of the state. Once that is acceptable because it is too expensive to enforce the law, you might as well give up.
As Armed Liberal says, a society where the citizens do not feel protected by the state will not obey and respect it.
If locking up people is the metric we are falling way behind. There are 20 to 30 million drug law violators out there and yet we only have 2+ million in jail total for all crimes.
Some one is screwing up.
And when was the last time you saw some one arested for jay walking. In fact almost every citizen has commited a violation of the law and yet with a population of almost 300 million we have fewer than 1% in jail.
What I want to know is why the laws of this country are not being enforced?
==
Didja hear the latest Kerry joke?
There is a big difference between Calley and Kerry. Calley is a proven war criminal. For Kerry we only have his word as an officer and a gentleman.
M. Simon:
Another good Kerry joke, from “Jay Nordlinger”:http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/impromptus200408250939.asp today:
Kerry and Edwards are at McDonald’s, doing some campaigning. An employee, in her excitement, spills some coffee on Kerry’s hand. Edwards wants to sue — but Kerry wants to write it up for his fourth Purple Heart.
Since we’re on the subject of law enforcement I have a draft circulating on what the role of domestric law enforcement should be in the War On Terror.
I’m looking for some thoughts. Al-Qaeda has taken this war into Cyberspace. Unique legal questions surface when pursuing aQ in Cyberspace.
*****
DRAFT PAPER
The Traditional Law Enforcement/Criminal Justice System Paradigm Is Ill Prepared to Fight this War On Terror –
What Should Our Domestic Rules of Engagement be?
By Ron Wright
August 11, 2004
Link:
http://www.hspig.org/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1275
“…the median person who goes to prison isn’t actually worth locking up, balancing the costs — financial and non-financial — of keeping him behind bars against the benefits of the crimes he doesn’t commit while incarcerated.”
Wrong. The median person who goes to prison (as opposed to jail, which is where misdemeanors are sentenced) has been arrested and convicted of a serious offense that probably represents only a tiny percentage of the crimes he has actually committed. The system is overburdened and underfunded to the degree that prosecuters will plea bargain most cases to the bare minimum to avoid the costs of trial and boost the office conviction stats. In my experience, the median person who goes to prison should have been locked up a long time ago.
Kleiman writes of the crime issue from a viewpoint that appears to have encountered very few criminals. You cant balance the cost of incarceration against the benefits of the crimes committed unless you can quantify the human emotional damage to victims as well as the financial damages.
Pogo,
Of course the “broken windows” form of law enforcement comes with its costs as well.
TC,
Can you define the phrase “serious offense” please? Because for drug anti-prohibitionists many of these so-called “serious offenses” are hogwash.
The median of criminality is wildly distorted by the war on drugs. Setting side people imprisoned for victimless crimes, most criminals are well worth locking away. Locking the drug users away is more of a cost/cost analysis, than cost/benefit…
Brett
bq. _”Locking the drug users away is more of a cost/cost analysis, than cost/benefit.”_
On this I would disagree since this category seems to fall equally in both camps. Having first hand family experience with drug abuse the problems encountered are criminal activity against the family as well as society in general.
Locking up the drug user eliminates the criminal activity against society but does not necessarily eliminate the drug problem. Rehabilitation be it in prison / jail or mandated by law in lieu of prison / jail is still a tax payer / family economic burden. As with all rehabilitation there is no guarantee. I would venture to say most are recursive as is the case with my personal experience. A family member has been to rehabilitation 3 times, jail 3 times and is currently serving a 4th sentence. None of the treatments or incarcerations have had any effect on the changing the criminal behavior or drug use.
In this case the benefit to society of incarceration is better than any other alternative.
Gary,
Some ridiculous percentage of burglars (at least %90) are also habitual substance abusers. It goes with the territory. Now, while I dont care what they do with their personal health, as long as they dont get high and drive (but of course they do), I would just as soon they were behind bars rather than grabbing my car stereo or emptying my jewelry box into a pillow case so they can sell my priceless momentos to some pawn for 100 bucks and a quick fix. As I said about criminal histories, once someone is sentenced to actual prison instead of diversion, rehab., probation, county jail, etc…they are very likely to have committed a plethora of crimes that victimize others in one way or another, so the balancing act between the item they were convicted of and their real cost to victims and society is hard to reconcile.
Its really plain and simple.
We have been fighting a war on drugs since the 1920’s. It is now 2004. Any sign of this being won anytime soon? his nice eighty year war that locks away Americans disenfranchising them and turning them and their children into enemies of the state?
And with arrest and crime rising wouldn’t you think maybe just maybe the answer isn’t to lock everyone up and instead spend some cash putting them to work?
But these questions and answers all fail to address the real reasons for full prisons, people being arrested for silly things, and the failures it would appear our police forces are making. It fails to address the fact that you cannot stop arresting these people or empty out prisons because it has become a huge industry. And to fix the problems it generates would instead cause serious econmic problems to this country because for eighty years we having been gearing up a polic state that provides cheap labor to local industries.