Debunking myths about incarceration, and promoting some

Doc Berman points us to an article in Slate by Prof. John Pfaff of Fordham University law school identifying what he says are "Five Myths About Prison Growth Dispelled." The piece makes for an interesting starting point for discussion, but also promotes some mythology of its own.

The first "myth" Pfaff describes is entirely on point, disputing the contention that "Long sentences drive prison growth" Says Pfaff, "Our data on time served is imperfect at best, but it appears that the time served by the median prisoner is about two years, sometimes much less." That more or less jibes with Texas' experience (see pp. 36-37 of TDCJ's annual statistical report for data on time served). Pfaff writes:

So what is actually driving prison population growth? Admissions. Far more offenders who in the past would have received nonprison sentences are being locked up for short stints, driving up the overall population. Stop admitting as many people, and the prison population would shrink rapidly. Cutting back on long sentences is far less likely to have the same meaningful effect.

This is an excellent observation - the enormous volume of prisoners we see today comes from applying incarceration to more petty offenses than in the past, not from punishing people for longer periods. In fact, large numbers of admissions for penny ante crime tends to push more serious offenders out of the system.

The second "myth" Pfaff describes, though, doesn't seem so mythological here in Texas: That "Low-level drug offenders drive prison population growth." Pfaff claims that "most of the drug offenders are in prison for distribution, not possession," but that's not true here at all.

Among Texas' state jail felons convicted of drug offenses, 87.3% are in for possession of less than a gram of a controlled substance according to TDCJ, while 58.6% of more serious drug cases were possession-only offenses, not for "distribution." Perhaps it's true that some or even many of those charged with "possession" were really full-blown drug dealers, but that assumes facts not in evidence; it's not the offense for which most of them were convicted.

Pfaff's third "myth" is that "Technical parole and probation violations drive prison population growth," but once again, for Texas that's just not accurate (I can't speak for elsewhere). According to the Council of State Governments, "Between 1997 and 2006, the number of probation revocations to prison [in Texas] increased 18 percent, despite a three percent decline in the total number of persons under community supervision."

Indeed, Texas' experience on this score controverts both Pfaff's second and third "myths," since drug offenders make up the largest portion of those who enter prison because their probation is revoked. Meanwhile, reduced probation revocations are credited with Texas' successful efforts to stave off a projected need to build new prisons in recent years.

If reducing revocation rates empirically reduced Texas' rate of prison population growth, it stands to reason higher revocation rates would increase it. It's possible that Pfaff's assertion would be more accurate if he'd limited the observation to parolees, but Texas' experience with probation precisely contradicts his assertion.

Pfaff's attempts to dispel the fourth "myth" he describes are the most ... well ... mythological. He contends that the United States has not "newly diverged from the rest of the world on punishment," declaring that "if we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s."

Certainly it's true that a large number of Texas prisoners are mentally ill, but Pfaff's historical comparison ignores the history of who populated mental institutions in the first half of the 20th century compared with who's in prison today. Yes, many more people were locked up in mental institutions in 1950 than now, but US mental institutions back then were mostly filled with white women, while in today's prisons it's black men who are demographically overrepresented.

The dissolution of Jim Crow had a lot more to do with high incarceration rates than reduced reliance on mental hospitals, but apparently that's not the history they're teaching at Fordham.

Pfaff's fifth "myth" is a red herring, an argument he proposes and debunks that nobody really makes out in the world: "The incarceration boom has had no effect on crime levels." Except nobody claims that.

Having set up a straw man, Pfaff debunks this "myth" by declaring that "The best numbers available, controlling for a host of challenging statistical problems, suggest that the growth in prison populations contributed to up to 30 percent of the crime drop during the 1990s." Of course, "up to 30%" means most estimates are actually lower.

Even so, few serious observers I'm aware of claim incarceration has "no effect" on crime. Instead, the more common argument is that most crime reduction witnessed in the '90s and since the turn of the century was not due to high rates of imprisonment - a fact with which Prof. Pfaff entirely agrees.

He argues that prisons are "not the most efficient tool we have" to reduce crime. "A dollar spent on police, for example, is 20 percent more effective than a dollar spent on prisons," he says. (And that's if you accept the highest estimates for prisons' crimefighting effectiveness.) So Pfaff is claiming to debunk a "myth" promoted by critics of high incarceration rates, while actually adopting those critics' position and claiming they said something they didn't.

In addition, Pfaff ignores research showing that, after a certain point, incarceration can actually become a counterproductive factor causing increased crime. According to a 2007 meta-study by the Vera Institute:

Raymond Liedka, Anne Piehl, and Bert Useem have confirmed, moreover, that increases in prison populations in states with already large prison populations have less impact on crime than increases in states with smaller prison populations. States experience “accelerating declining marginal returns, that is, a percent reduction in crime that gets ever smaller with ever larger prison populations,” they argue. Thus, increases in incarceration rates are associated with lower crime rates at low levels of imprisonment, but the size of that association shrinks as incarceration rates get bigger. Eventually, they say, there is an “inflection point” where increases in incarceration rates are associated with higher crime rates. This inflection point occurs when a state’s incarceration rate reaches some point between 325 and 492 inmates per 100,000 people. In other words, states with incarceration rates above this range can expect to experience higher crime rates with future increases in incarceration rates.

In other words, in a state that incarcerates relatively few people, there are higher safety gains from relative increases in incarceration. But in a state like Texas where more than 1 in 100 are already in prison 4.6% of adults are under control of the justice system, increased incarceration produces much less public safety bang for the buck and may even increase crime by imposing untenable collateral consequences on more and more low-level offenders.

Pfaff's article is a useful starting point for discussing soaring incarceration rates and how to reduce them - particularly his observation that admissions, not sentence length, drive expanding incarceration rates. But I'm afraid he's promoted nearly as many "myths" in this piece as he's dispelled - at least as far as the Texas is concerned.