Though we have a smaller pool of people being arrested, we’re sending a larger and larger number of them to prison.
the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s 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.
He argues that this, rather than other people’s favorite reasons, accounts for the high incarceration rate. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I still have many questions. For example, has the number of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up? Or has the proportion of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up? Do other countries, with lower prison populations, have fewer mentally unstable, violent individuals? Do they have an alternative way for dealing with such individuals that works better? etc.
End drug war and some other thing “neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.”
I hate liberal strawmen. I don’t care about the incarceration explosion except to point out that our incarceration rates were either wrong before or wrong now or more likely both. If drugs explain half the people in prison, maybe we need A LOT more non-drug people in prison and zero drug war prisoners.
The first sentence is consistent with police officers are being more selective when it comes to whom they arrest, with the likelihood of conviction in mind.
This seems incredibly naive. DAs bring felony charges when they think they have a high chance of getting a guilty verdict, preferably through a plea. The “other people’s favorite reasons” are things like mandatory minimums that give the prosecutor significantly more leverage to get a guilty plea, and thus increase the chances that the prosecutor will bring a charge in the first place.
Add the scope creep of racketeering, drug war, and now “anti-terrorism” police techniques/freedoms in evidence gathering.
As the kids say, zero fs were given to systems analysis.
The rate of change is quite interesting, though. It went from 1/3 to 2/3 over the course of about 20 years. That’s pretty rapid!
The period of time sounds about like a generational change. That is, newest generation of DAs learned from the previous generation, and has gotten much more efficient at getting the most convictions for the least effort.
The current generation of DAs has many more tools available to coerce pleas. That’s why the percentage of cases resolved by plea bargain has gone from 80% in the 80s to 97% today.
Hopefully Handle will chime in. He probably has good insight.
Depends on how involved DAs are in arrests and how responsive police are to DAs. Could be DAs are telling police not to pursue/they won’t pursue small charges and will only pursue cases they have a good chance of winning, that is, this is just increasing efficiency and experience.
That would mean in 1975 they decided to stop being negligent in their duties.
Or police started becoming effective in theirs. It may have nothing to do with DAs at all.
Instapundit also picked this up. Rob Ives in the comment section adds some knowledgeable perspective. He commented several times. This is one:
Rob Ives
There are a couple of aspects to the mass incarceration issue that I have not seen discussed.
When I started out as a prosecutor in 1987 our local jail generally held less than just a few prisoners on any given day, perhaps 5-10. Today, our jail generally has 30-40 prisoners. I do not know why this is so, but there are a few things I think have caused this. 1. In the past Courts often gave Defendants short jail sentences or fines without any probation. However, the use of probation (at least locally) is much greater today. When I started our county (which has the same population today that it had in 1987) had one probation officer. Today it has three, all of whom are busy.
2. In 1987 we had Marijuana and Cocaine cases. Today we have Heroin, Methamphetamine, Synthetic Cannabinoids, and far more prescription drug cases.
3. Probationers get tested regularly for drug use. Drug testing technology has improved hugely since 1987.
4. Many of the people in our jail (and also sent to the Indiana prison system) are there not because of their original sentence, but rather because their probation was revoked.
So-
1. More drug use.
2. More use of probation, for drug offenders and others.
3. More supervision by probation officers and especially more drug screens.
4. More people in jail.
Second issue:
Statistics…
Sometimes in discussion of jail people will add the probation population to the actually jailed population.
We actually have four different types of people subject to active sentences:
1. People on probation.
2. People subject to House Arrest.
3. People on Work Release (In jail when not at work)
4. People incarcerated 24/7.
“For example, has the number of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up? Or has the proportion of mentally unstable, violent individuals gone way up?”
Well, it’s worth considering that we are roughly two generations out from so-called de-institutionalization of the mentally ill. So maybe we don’t have more of them, but more of them in regular society. And to the point, given what we are learning about associative mating, consider that it must be easier to breed outside a mental hospital than within it.
One of the craziest women I ever knew criminally threatened a judge during a termination-of-parental rights proceeding for one of her five children.