DO THE TIME, LOWER THE CRIME

Too Many People Behind Bars? the Statistics Suggest Otherwise.

Do we have too many people in prison?

If you read a recent report by the Pew Center on the States, you would
think so. As its title proclaimed, more than one in 100 American
adults is in jail or prison. For young black males, the number is one
in nine.

The report's authors contend that the incarceration rate represents a
problem because the number of felons serving time does not have a
"clear impact" on crime rates -- and that all those inmates are
costing taxpayers too much money to house. But nowhere in the report
is there any discussion of the effect of prison on crime, and the
argument about costs seems based on the false assumption that we are
locking people up at high rates for the wrong reasons.

In the last 10 years, the effect of prison on crime rates has been
studied by many scholars. The Pew report doesn't mention any of them.
Among them is Steven Levitt, coauthor of "Freakonomics." He and others
have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to
prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the
other ways (poverty, urbanization and the proportion of young men in
the population) that the states differed. A high risk of punishment
reduces crime. Deterrence works.

But so does putting people in prison. The typical criminal commits
from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses). Locking him
up spares society those crimes. Several scholars have separately
estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has
driven down crime rates by 25%.

The Pew writers lament the fact that this country imprisons a higher
fraction of its population than any other nation in the world,
including Russia. But what they ignore is what the United States gets
in return for its high rate of incarceration. For instance, in 1976,
Britain had a lower robbery rate than did California. But then
California got tough on crime as judges began handing out more prison
sentences, and Britain became soft as laws were passed encouraging
judges to avoid prison sentences. As a result, the size of the state's
prison population went up while Britain's went down. By 1996,
Britain's robbery rate was one-quarter higher than California's.
Compared with those of the U.S. overall, Britain's burglary and
assault rates are twice as high, according to a comparative study done
by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

These differences in crime rates involve many countries with low
imprisonment rates. The robbery rate in the U.S. is not only lower
than that in Britain but also that in Australia, Canada, the
Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Scotlandand Spain, according to the
same study. The imprisonment rate in these countries is one-fifth to
one-tenth that in the United States.

You cannot make an argument about the cost of prisons without taking
into account the benefit of prisons. The Pew report makes no effort to
do this. Instead, it argues that spending on prisons may be crowding
out spending on education. For instance, tax dollars spent on higher
education in the U.S. have increased much more slowly than those spent
on corrections. The report does not ask whether the slower growth may
be in part because of the sharp increase in private support for public
universities, much less whether society gets as much from universities
as it does from prisons.

But Pew rightly points to problems in the nation's imprisonment policy
and in what it does (or, typically, doesn't do) to prevent crime in
the first place. Take California. It has failed to manage well the
health -- especially the mental health -- problems of many of its
inmates. Federal judges are in the process of imposing tough new rules
to rectify the problem. Nor has the state found good ways to integrate
former inmates back into society. Instead, parole officers routinely
send people back to prison if they misbehave -- and sometimes the
return orders are for minor violations.

California does not handle drug offenders wisely either. Just how big
this problem is remains uncertain because some inmates involved in
serious crimes plead out to drug offenses to avoid tougher prison
sentences. For serious drug users who have not committed a major
crime, the goal should be to get them into a community treatment
program and keep the offenders there.

To do that, we might emulate the HOPE (Hawaii's Opportunity for
Probation with Enforcement) project in Honolulu. The program, started
by state Judge Steven Alm in 2004, aims to get probationers to stay in
a treatment program. Alm makes offenders take a random, mandatory drug
test every week. If they fail, he immediately sends them to jail for a
short time to discourage them from being on drugs. Within four years,
according to a study by professors Mark Kleiman of UCLA and Angela
Hawken of Pepperdine University, the violation rate among HOPE
probationers fell by 90%. (Oddly, the Pew report, in discussing our
"excessive" use of prison, makes no mention of the fact that there are
about as many felons on probation as there are in prison.)

There is more that could be done to prevent young people from
embarking on a life of crime. The Pew report rightly notes the success
of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, which began in
the 1960s. The project has reduced delinquency among children of
(mostly) poor black women by exposing them to a high-quality preschool
program.

What we have learned from High/Scope is especially noteworthy because
a random sample of youngsters were enrolled in the preschool program
and the results were compared with those of a control group.

The Pew report could have mentioned at least 10 other crime-prevention
programs that work. They can be found in "Blueprints for Violence
Prevention," published by the Institute of Behavioral Science at the
University of Colorado, and include Big Brothers/Big Sisters, nurse
home-visitation programs and various special education programs in
high schools. All were rigorously tested by controlled experiments in
at least two locations.

But even with prevention programs, there will always be many people in
prison. A major challenge for scholars today is to discover better
ways of placing ex-inmates back into the community. If such methods
can be devised, we can reduce the large number of parolees who are
sent back to prison for violating the terms of their release.

But we should not suppose that, except for some minor drug offenders,
we imprison too many people. There are still people who ought to be in
prison and are not. There are more than 1 million felons on probation,
in many cases because prisons are overcrowded, according to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics. There are violent gang members who are hard to
arrest and convict because their neighbors are afraid to go to the
police or testify against them.

It is discouraging to read a report by an important private
organization that can do no better than say we incarcerate too many
people, get nothing from it and are stealing money from higher education.