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PRISONS AND CRIME

Predictors of Crime

Predictors of Crime

While there are a number of predictors of crime, there’s uncertainty as to what all of the predictors are and how impactful each one truly is. This is a complicated issue and needs a multi-faceted approach, not just something like “increase welfare” or “increase police”.

Poverty

• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221674142_The_dynamics_of_poverty_and_crime

• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-0-306-48039-3_4

• https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/crime/322568-violence-is-a-symptom-of-poverty-not-a-cause

• https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7330&context=jclc

• https://www.masslegalservices.org/system/files/library/The_Relationship_between_Poverty_and_Mass_Incarceration.pdf

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5663300/

• City Hall 19 (cited)
  • Report from London City Hall that finds a strong link between poverty and crime
  • ‘The new figures show that three-quarters of the boroughs in London with the highest levels of violent offending are also in the top 10 most deprived, while the same boroughs also have higher proportions of children under 20 living in poverty than the London average.’
• Mok et al. 18
  • ‘The longer a child lived in poorer circumstances, the higher their subsequent risks for self-harm and violent criminality, and vice versa for time spent living in affluent conditions.’
• Transform Justice 15
  • Reports on the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, which follows 4300 children into adulthood
  • ‘Using four measures for poverty including low socio-economic status of the head of the household and neighbourhood deprivation, the Professors found that “poverty had a significant and direct effect on young people’s likelihood to engage in violence at 15, even after controlling for a range of other factors”, positive and negative, including poor family functioning, drug use, impulsiveness, strong relationships with parents.’

• Office of Policy Development and Research 16

• Hannon et al. 08
  • ‘We use iteratively reweighted least squares, a robust regression technique, to estimate race-specific effects for Cleveland census tracts, 1990–2000.’
  • ‘The results are supportive of the racial invariance hypothesis. Reductions in neighborhood poverty appear to produce similar reductions in violent crime in white and black neighborhoods.’
• Bharadwaj 14
  • ‘The results indicate a positive and statistically significant impact of poverty, inequitable income growth and low quality of the legal system on incidence of total property-related crimes. Moreover, the elasticity figures suggest that poverty has the highest impact on robberies. Most convincing result comes from the figures of elasticity of education with crime where a 10% increase in per capita expenditure on education in India leads to a decline between 9.2-11.2% of overall property crime rates.’
• Males 13 (cited)
  • ‘Before taking poverty into consideration, the peak age for homicide deaths is 19 years old, and then declines. However, when socio-economic status is considered, 19 remains the peak age only for high-poverty populations. Indeed, 83% of gun murders among teenagers occur in populations with poverty levels of 20% or higher.’
• Sampson et al. 1987
  • “The paper concludes that there is nothing inherent in black culture that is conducive to crime. Rather, persistently high rates of black crime appear to stem from the structural linkages among underemployment, economic deprivation, and family disruption in urban black communities.”
• Dong et al. 2020
  • Uses data from china.
  • “The results suggest that it is the poverty and low income level, rather than income inequality, that is positively related to homicide rates.”
• Sipsma et al. 2017
  • “After adjusting for potential confounding variables, we found that every $10 000 increase in spending per person living in poverty was associated with 0.87 fewer homicides per 100 000 population or approximately a 16% decrease in the average homicide rate (estimate=−0.87, SE=0.15, p<0.001).”
• Harrell et al. 14
  • Report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics
  • ‘Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8-2.5 per 1,000)’
  • After accounting for poverty and urbanity (which are strong predictors in crime levels), “Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000)”

Inequality

(Document link for sources on inequality)

• https://equalitytrust.org.uk/crime
  • Rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies. This finding holds up in many different contexts, when looked at via different methodologies and after controlling for other determinants of crime such as low income, unemployment, and teen birth rates.
  • Small permanent decreases in inequality - such as reducing inequality from the level found in Spain to that in Canada - would reduce homicides by 20% and lead to a 23% long-term reduction in robberies[4]. The evidence on the link between changes in income inequality and crime is less clear than the evidence on income inequality and crime at one point in time. While there is a consensus that property crime and some types of violent crime – homicide, murder and robbery - are related very strongly to changing income inequality, it is more ambiguous as to whether other types of violent crime, such as rape and assault, are affected by inequality
  • Inequality affects crime through these mechanisms:
    • It may stimulate social competition and so encourage violence or may curtail opportunities for some, giving rise to a sense of hopelessness which incites fear, violence and murder.
    • Low levels of trust in (highly) unequal countries may provide the link which leads from higher inequality to high murder rates. Such societies may lack the social capacity to prevent violence and create safe communities. Experiences of inferiority may make someone less inclined to behave in a socially desirable way. This materialises as increased aggressive behaviour and high crime rates.
• https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/655357
  • “The same could be said of the empirical status of economic/resource deprivation theory. One of its key theoretical variables-poverty-was also one of the five strong and stable predictors of crime noted in table 3. To be sure, these analyses show that in addition to having a substantially robust mean effect size (ADJz = 0.253), the effect of poverty on crime is not significantly conditioned by methodological factors (e.g., measurement differences, model specification variations, and so on). The effect of inequality on crime is only slightly smaller in effect size (ADJz = 0.207), and it fell into the moderate categories for both strength and stability in table 3. Given the relative strength and stability of the relationships between poverty, inequality, and crime, therefore, economic/resource deprivation theory was designated as having received strong empirical support across studies.”
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24095661_Inequality_And_Crime
  • This paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties. The behavior of property and violent crime are quite different. Inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime, with an elasticity above 0.5. By contrast, poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime, but little on violent crime. Property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime, while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories.
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2523129_Inequality_And_Violent_Crime
  • Crime rates and inequality are positively correlated (within each country and, particularly, between countries), and it appears that this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates, even controlling for other crime determinants.
• https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2022/08/01/is-the-risk-of-crime-against-businesses-greater-in-more-unequal-countries/
  • Measured:
    • “inequality, measured using the Gini coefficient, against crime exposure among businesses (i.e., the average probability of theft incidence over 2006-2018).”
  • And found that:
    • “The plot, which is based on 122 countries covered in our dataset, reveals a clear positive association between crime and inequality with a correlation coefficient of 0.40. In South Africa, the most unequal country in the world with a Gini of 0.63, the chance that a firm will experience crime in a given year was 43.3 percent. In Kazakhstan, where inequality is moderate with a Gini of 0.28, the crime risk of businesses was just 17 percent.”
  • The result was that, for every 10% increase in the GINI coefficient, there was a 4% increase in such crime:
    • “The results indicate that a one decile increase of the Gini coefficient is associated with a 4 percent increase of crime risk. This is a large increase compared to the 20 percent average crime risk in the sample.”
• http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67733/3/blogs.lse.ac.uk-How_neighborhood_inequality.pdf
  • Finds that richer neighborhoods have higher crime rates the wider the income gap is with neighboring poorer neighborhoods, as those in the poorer neighborhoods weigh the benefits of where to commit crime, and choose the richer one.
• http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper63.pdf
  • Review of the factors involved in crime:
    • “The papers presented and discussed permit to deduce that criminal behaviour is influenced by some specific factors: probability of punishment and apprehension, deterrence, differential wages between legal and illegal activities, wage inequality, level of education, unemployment, cultural and family background and other economic and social factors that may affect individual’s propensity to commit crimes such as cultural characteristics, age and sex.”
• https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=clsoc_crim_facpub
  • “Their findings show that gender income inequality is a significant contributor to rape, but gender inequities in educational attainment and occupational status do not contribute significantly to this offense. The analysis also points to a number of other structural factors, including general income inequality, that are powerful predictors of rape.”
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
  • “Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.”

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Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation instead of imprisonment is shown to curb crime, lower cost, and increase employment. Check out this doc as well.

• RAND: Davis et al. 13
  • Includes a META-ANALYSIS of 58 studies of recidivism, or the rate at which criminals return to jail, after rehabilitation programs.
  • Analysts found that inmates who participated in correctional education programs had a 43% lower odds of recidivating compared to inmates who did not, thus indicating that correctional education is an effective strategy for reducing recidivism
  • The odds of obtaining employment postrelease among inmates who participate in correctional education was 13% higher than for those who did not
  • ^ pg 45 of pdf
  • Cost- effective: “Our cost analysis showed that correctional education is highly cost-effective for incarcerated adults: For every dollar spent on correctional education, five dollars are saved on three year reincarceration costs.” (pg 23 of pdf)
  • Also found minimal publication bias in research
• United States Department of Justice
  • Recommends various methods by which recidivism can be reduced
  • Nearly all recommendations made are prisoner-oriented, rehabilitative practices. This includes but is not limited to:
    • Building a “school district” within the prison system
    • Prioritizing mental health of prisoners
    • Equipping prisoners with appropriate information and resources as they return to the community
  • Not once are “harsher prison sentences” or other punitive methods recommended as a means by which to reduce recidivism
• APAC-run rehabilitation programs in Brazil
  • In these systems, prisoners are given much more freedom and are treated much more humanely compared to mainstream Brazilian prisons. Recidivism by inmates here has been below 10%
  • Some limitations, e.g. non-comprehensive data and possible selection bias favoring those who have better backgrounds. Despite this, it’s still a widely praised and very promising option
  • Rehabilitative prisons in general have really low recidivism rates in Brazil
• Dowden et al.13
  • A META-ANALYSIS of 22 studies examining the restorative justice literature over the past 25 years.
  • Generally, compared to traditional non-restorative approaches, restorative justice was found to be a more effective method of improving victim and/or offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with restitution, and decreasing recidivism of offenders.
  • Restorative programs found to be significantly more effective criminal justice responses than incarceration, probation, court-ordered restitution, etc.
  • It’s argued that restorative and rehabilitative justice programs compose a comprehensive response to criminal behavior by capitalizing on each of their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
• Clear 96
  • Gives some possible explanations for the reason that prisons (in the US) do not result in crime reduction.

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Private Prisons

Private Prisons

The private prison-industrial complex has no or little cost saving benefits compared to public prisons, and high social costs such as tragically higher recidivism and poor rehabilitative opportunities. The Prison Policy Initiative is a great resource on the ineffectiveness of the prison system and criminal justice reform.

• Prisoners at private prisons in Minnesota have dangerously higher recidivism rates than state owned prisons. Attributable to fewer vocational and rehabilitative opportunities https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0734016813478823?casa_token=X2hR6uTvFfIAAAAA%3AXxFhDKQlBVnWSTu-bet_3DVYobw6OFtMFE4dbEaPsU6YjLtJkZ8cif8DDJMjcHlEHTZZ7pubXA

• Meta-analysis research shows that private prisons are no more cost-effective than state prisons. The best indicators of cost effectiveness are economies of scale, age, and security level https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011128799045003004?casa_token=A1a3oNqpnloAAAAA:ahXlPQxl1V0sJG4YFleNCHuOl8pcrh_h94talwCR4QmqHHhyWQVJxtJ30DyVhTLDJRyhEQ2zXQ

• Meta-analysis indicates that private prisons are not cost-effective and don’t have higher quality. Public prisons slightly better skills training and slightly better prisoner grievances https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1049731509331946?casa_token=SU2asdwvo1oAAAAA:-XrpSf4WJnGCFIg_90uY_oM07l0cHJ_EUbvbZHD2K0Adl7sUgXWDA9_8OUiCRGwqK9-XTT4gaQ

• No evidence found in the superiority of private prison model; private prisons had significantly higher recidivism across all models https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011128707307962?casa_token=0xy6Pa0qNXkAAAAA:0_sxSVK1-OivQNuDOnEYoXrN_Gy14mhkPwbE5ExsvM-Q1z93ydyJoKEtJ8-FQIvTr3lO85-geQ

• Federal government ripping on private prisons https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bja/181249.pdf

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Deterrence Theory

Deterrence Theory

The criminal justice system’s emphasis on punishment yields no meaningful individual or general effect on crime, only to strengthen criminogenic factors of those caught.

• Deterrence theory has at best weak effect on preventing crime https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-22890-013

• Deterrence only had a significant effect on smaller crimes like administration offenses, not serious crimes like homocides https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=249259

• Another study also indicating that deterrence has a weak to no effect in preventing crime https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279598389_The_Empirical_Status_of_Deterrence_Theory_A_Meta-Analysis

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Death Penalty

Death Penalty

Feel free to cite this doc for convenience. The Death Penalty Information Center provides a great collection of resources on the death penalty and etc if you want to take a look.

The Death Penalty is Not a Deterrent

To start off with a bit from Amnesty International - “[The argument that death penalty deters crime] supposes that criminals study and anticipate the consequences of getting caught, and decide that a long term of imprisonment is acceptable, whereas execution is not. Many crimes are committed on the spur-of-the-themoment, leaving little opportunity for potential punishments to influence whether the crime is committed in the first place as criminals do not believe they will be caught and held to account. … Once criminals have knowingly committed a capital offence, they no longer have any interest in lessening their potential punishment by not committing further murders or other offences. For example, if armed robbery carries the death penalty, the robber loses nothing by committing murders while attempting to flee.”

• Do executions lower homicide rates?
  • Looks at the opinions of leading criminologists on the topic of the death penalty detering murder
  • 88.2%** of the respondents said no to the question: “Do you feel that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to the commitment to murder—that it lowers the murder rate, or not?”
  • In 1996, 83.6% said no to that question, so expert consensus has been consistent
• NAS Death Penalty Deterrence Evaluation in 2012
  • A panel of the National Academy of Sciences unanimously concluded that there was no credible evidence that the death penalty does or does not deter homicides, mainly because not enough research has been done into the subject
• Deterrence or Brutalization? An Impact Assessment of Oklahoma’s Return to Capital Punishment
  • Looks at Oklahoma, where the death penalty was abolished then put back in
  • Finds death penalty is not a deterrent
• Uses and abuses of emperical evidence in the death penalty debate (cited)
  • Suggets that the deterrence argument should be taken out of the death penalty debate
• Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis
  • A poll of police chiefs rank the death penalty at the bottom of their priorities for safer societies
  • They say the death penalty in the U.S. is an enormously expensive and wasteful program with no clear benefits
• Executions, Deterrence, and Homicide: A Tale of Two Cities
  • Study in Hong Kong (who abolished the death penalty in the 90s) and Singapore (who increased use of it)
  • Finds no detectable effect on crime with use of death penalty

The Dealth Penalty Comes With an Expensive Cost

Studies from a number of states all come to the conclusion that the death penalty is more expensive compared to alternative routes, including costs being:

• 70% higher in Kansas
• 48% higher in Tennessee
• 3x higher in Maryland
• 12x higher in California

Similar results have been found in other states. This study, which rounds up info from various other studies into figure one, finds that across the board cases which seek the death penalty cost more than those that do not:

The State	$ Seeking Death Penalty	$ Not Seeking Death Penalty
Maryland	2,400,000	1,100,000
California	2,087,926	1,460,604
Connecticut	380,000	177,635
Indiana	449,887	407,229
Kansas	1,200,000	740,000
Arizona	143,604	70,231
Montana	1,200,000	800,000
Oklahoma	3,500,000	1,000,000
Ohio	3,000,000	1,000,000
Federal level	620,942	77,618
Cost Average	$1,498,235	$683,331

There’s a lot of variation in cost depending on the state, which could come down to different state data collection methods or different processes for other stuff. However, the seeking the death penalty still leads to higher costs for every state examined. This is also just explicit costs, and doesn’t take into account post-execution costs, healthcare matters, etc. which would raise costs further.

So why are death penalty costs so high? DeathPenaltyInfo provides a basic list of reasons for why the death penalty costs so much, including:

• More stuff happens pre-trial
• Longer trials
• More time spent on jury selection process

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Red States vs Blue States

Red States vs Blue States

Many conservatives will claim that crime is driven by progressive policies and that crime is primarily a big city, blue state problem. This isn’t really true.

• “The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem” from Third Way, 2023
  • Trump-voting states have had higher murder rates than Biden-voting states every year from 2000 to 2020
    • Over time, the red-blue murder gap has increased from 9% in 2003 to 43% in 2020
  • This murder gap persists even if you remove the biggest, bluest cities from red states, which means that blue cities are not to blame for high crime levels in red states: “Over the course of the full 21 years between 2000 and 2020, the Red State murder rate was still 12% higher than the Blue State murder rate, even when murders in the largest cities in those red states were removed.”
  • Red states have also dominated the list of states with the highest murder rates from 2000 to 2020. Louisiana and Mississippi (deep red states) have dominated the list for years while New York and California have never once been in the top ten.
  • The report does not give definitive reasons for why murder rates are higher in red states, but it does suggest a few possibilities like higher gun ownership rates, higher poverty levels, and lower education levels.