aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Grits trashes Wilson’s Pew criticism

The other day I dismissed James Q. Wilson’s do the time, lower the crime OpEd by noting that Glenn Loury had convincingly refuted his arguments to my satisfaction long ago.

Well yesterday Grits for Breakfast gave Wilson’s piece a thorough thrashing that was too good to pass up:

For starters, his comment about incarceration vs. safety results in states ["states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime"] cannot survive a comparison between Texas and New York, for example, so I’d like to see the research backing up that statement. By relying on Mr. Levitt’s often controversial work, he’s identified a scholar whose estimates of the effectiveness of imprisonment fall on the high end of those produced in the last decade. Levitt thinks that imprisonment accounted for as much as 32% of the reduction in crime in the 1990s (See ”Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s”).

Other econometric estimates - including one by UT-Austin’s Bill Spelman - found that expanding the prison population accounted for about a quarter of the crime reduction in the ‘90s. (Bill and I have enjoyed a friendly dispute about this in the past, because I think some of his assumptions overstate incarceration’s effectiveness and understate its harms). Overall, according to a recent paper by the Vera Institute, Levitt and Spelman “produced a fairly consistent finding, associating a 10 percent higher incarceration rate with a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate.”

But if we are to be honest about the state of empirical research on the topic, one cannot declare emphatically, as Wilson does, that “deterrence works” or that expanded incarceration “reduces crime.” According to the Vera Institute, “One could use available research to argue that a 10 percent increase in incarceration is associated with no difference in crime rates, a 22 percent lower index crime rate, or a decrease only in the rate of property crime.”

What’s more, even the highest estimates, like Mr. Levitt’s, still contend that 2/3 of the crime 0reduction had nothing to do with incarceration. So the decline in crime, according to these sources, mostly wasn’t because of putting more people in prison.

Remember, that’s just for starters… READ ON!

Via a public defender, who also points us to the EyeID recap of the landmark eyewitness ID training seminar held in NYC two weeks ago.