Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

• Reforms that Ignore the Black Victims of Crime John R. Lott Jr
• Charges of racism flow freely in Professor Loury's recent book and this essay. 
• But Loury forgets an important fact: for violent and property crime there is always an individual victim who gets hurt —for black criminals that victim is overwhelmingly black.
• He also neglects acknowledging that we can't determine if the number of people in prison is "too high" without discussing the benefit from prison... system.  Looking at only the cost of imprisonment seems a very strange way to answer the question
• Why Focus on the Race of the Criminals and Not Also the Race of the Victims?
•  Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks.... 90.2% of black murder victims were murdered by blacks....poor blacks commit crimes against poor blacks.
•  If we punish black criminals a lot, isn't it possible that the reason we are doing it is because we care about the black victims?
• When Are There Too Many People in Prison?
• So the United States puts more people in prison than other countries?  By itself that isn't evidence that something has gone wrong.
•  The evidence that punishment deters criminals is overwhelming.
• United States also appears to have a relatively low violent crime rate compared to most other developed countries. 
• Changes in arrest rates account for up to about 18 percent of the variation in murder rates (see Lott, 2007, Chapter 4).  Conviction rates explain up to another 12 percent.  Prison sentences another 10 percent and the death penalty another 10 percent. 
• I don't put much weight in the cross-sectional analysis apparently favored by Loury simply because it is much easier to control for differences across countries with panel data, but the United States' high prison rate is at least balanced off by a relatively low violent crime rate. 
• The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) indicates that for the violent crime categories of sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, the U.S. looks remarkably safe.
• The U.S. white murder rate is comparable to many countries in Europe, and is just a fraction of Russia's, one country that Loury compares the US to.  The difference is driven blacks. 
• Even for the death penalty the vast majority of published refereed academic work finds that the death penalty deters crime
• Why Focus on Prison as the Only Penalty?
• The fact that blacks go to prison at relatively high rates is not the same thing as saying that they disproportionately bear the lion's share of criminal penalties.  Prison represents only one part of the penalties
• The criminal justice system discriminates against higher-income criminals
• Take the case of a bank embezzler with an income one standard deviation above the mean: he or she faces a total monetary penalty that is 4.94 times greater than that for an average income embezzler.
• it isn't clear why an economist would advocate having greater penalties for a criminal simply because he has a higher income.  Economists normally view criminal penalties as making the criminal bear the harm that he is imposing on others. 
• If Loury is after more equality in society, why not instead use the income tax to redistribute wealth?
• There are at least 32 different types of collateral penalties... Overall these penalties are greater for higher-income criminals....
• Another Type of Criminal Penalty
• : The Death Penalty From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders.
• it is hard to look at this data and claim that the death penalty is obviously adversely applied against minorities.  
• Affirmative Action and Police
• By eliminating or reducing standards on basic intelligence tests, police departments appear to have lowered the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum and made police less effective in solving crime.  These lower quality recruits have increased crime rates,
• Addressing the Problems that Lead to Prison James Q. Wilson
• we have put into prison a large fraction of our citizens... Loury says little about why this happened
• He looks askance at those who speak about the "purported net benefits to 'society' of greater incarceration." I am one of those,
• social scientists who have worked hard to understand...Let me summarize what Daniel Nagin, David Farrington, Patrick Langan, Steven Levitt, and William Spelman have shown... a higher risk of punishment reduces crime rates.
• results of prison in America: It helps explain why this country has a lower rate of burglary than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and a lower rate of auto theft than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, and Sweden. On the other hand, America's homicide rate remains much higher... America is more punitive, but except for homicide, it is also safer.
• The central question is why blacks commit these crimes in such high numbers. My research, like that of Orlando Patterson and others, suggests that slavery and Reconstruction deeply harmed African American culture by making intact families rare and denying to black victims the same degree of police protection that was afforded to whites.
• many black children have grown up in father-absent families.... 70 percent of black males in prison did not grow up with a resident father.
• We can, of course, wait until men get in trouble and then try to rehabilitate...But the gains, on the average, are small: recidivism rates are reduced by about 10 percent.
• If we knew how to make street gangs less attractive to boys we could reduce dramatically
• The best approach is to invest in crime prevention programs aimed at young children... They include the Perry Pre-School program, nurse home visitations, various parent-child training programs, and certain school-based programs.
• many of the best prevention programs cost a lot of money... defining some children as "at-risk" means talking specifically about black and Hispanic children in welfare homes,
• the programs that work are typically small, intense efforts that may or may not work if they are scaled... good programs often lose out to bad ones because the latter, though equally devoted to prevention, lack supportive evidence but have political muscle.

continua