Since the early 80s, criminal sentencing reform has been dominated by the use of “tough on crime” mandatory sentencing, three strikes, truth-in-sentencing, zero tolerance, and various other criminal justice policies that result in extended and harsher penalties and the elimination of rehabilitation and other programs at significant added cost to all taxpayers. This evaluation proposal will examine the ineffectiveness of these “tough on crime” measures and their implication on the criminal justice system in terms of cost. IntroductionTough on crime policies have dominated sentencing reform since the early 1980’s.
The most popular of these tough on crime policies has been mandatory prison sentencing. These reforms were founded on the beliefs that there was need to increase punishment for serious crimes since the existing ones were far too lenient; that the targeted criminals were dangerous individuals who must be incarcerated since mild sanctions would be ineffective in deterring the proscribed behavior; and that the mandatory prison sentences would minimize crime by incapacitating the dangerous offenders who are targeted by the reforms. One characteristic of get tough movement is the focus on deterrence and incapacitative-based strategies.The concept of deterrence was prominent in classical school of thought and the eighteenth century thought.
Individuals were assumed to be rational beings who measure the benefits of crime against the possible risks of getting caught. Based on this assumption, an individual would act according to what would bring him most pleasure and least pain. Therefore, according to the theory of deterrence, crime will go down when the severity, swiftness and certainty of punishment increases (Rabin, 2007). Mandatory sentences, three-strike legislations, and truth in sentencing-all falling under tough on crime policies-are modeled to establish special deterrence for the individual going through the punishment and general deterrence for other individuals who witness the punishment.
Incapacitation on the other hand is meant to prevent crime by physically constraining the individual. Proponents of incapacitation do not claim offender reform but assert that while an offender is incapacitated, they are unlikely to commit crimes against the society. Many individuals see incapacitative measures as the short cut to public safety. The United States correctional population is marred with incapacitative and deterrent ideologies.
With the implementation of tough on crime policies, an unprecedented increase in the size of federal and state prison population has been realized.Prison construction has been a necessary characteristic of the massive growth in the United State’s prison population. Approximately 2 million Americans were thrown in jails, with about six hundred out of one-hundred thousand behind bars. This figure is unrivaled in other developed countries.
To put this increase in incarceration in the context of history, it should be considered that the United State’s incarceration varied within a restricted range of about 100 to 120 prisoners for each population of 100,000 individuals (Donohue, 2005). To realize the large prison population witnessed today, a segment of imprisoned individuals went up by an annual average of 5% beginning in the mid seventies.Brief description of the program or policy, and questions about it to be exploredMore than being tough on crime, the United States must be smart on crime despite local political environments. A smart approach to the reduction of crimes committed should emphasize the strategic use of limited resources based upon objective data rather than the common emotional and political gut reactions.
A cost effective criminal justice system should include utilizing a range of alternative programs for adult offenders. However, such a criminal justice system requires collaboration and agreement from the key stakeholders in the criminal justice system regarding the goals of the criminal justice system (Dezhbakhsh ; Shepherd, 2004). These elected officials make decisions that impact jail population levels and the degree to which alternative programs and intermediate sanctions will be implemented and utilized.Without coordination and agreement upon goals among criminal justice system stakeholders and elected officials, the United States will continue on its course of throwing more and more increasingly-scarce resources into a broken criminal justice system.
Collaboration and cooperation from key criminal justice system stakeholders is required to achieve agreed upon goals that implement the most cost-effective criminal justice system for all taxpayers.ObjectivesPolicies intended to get “tough on crime” do not reduce crime, do not help crime victims, and instead damage the criminal justice system. The hiring of additional law enforcement, combined with hard-line sentencing by the Courts, has created an expensive requirement for further jail beds but has not measurably achieved the desired outcome of enhanced public safety. Rather, an intelligent approach toward decreasing the crime rate should emphasize cost-effective strategies based upon objective data and analysis rather than common emotional and political reactions.
It is the task of this paper to look at the failure of these policies not only in reducing crime but also in making effective use of public funds. The government of the United States has invested so much money in ineffective ways of fighting crimes instead of channeling this money in effective crime reduction programs. The tough on crime policies have only resulted in prison populations going up while the society still lives in fear of crime.Literature ReviewThe effectiveness of crime control strategies in analyzed through the examination of the rate of recidivism and crime.
Recidivism rate is the number of offenders who are arrested or convicted of a new crime. No significant differences have been found in recidivism rates between offenders placed under this program and offenders placed in traditional probation and parole supervision. Other studies of a representative sample of prisoners that were released from prison in various states show that a large percentage was convicted for a new offense within three years. The recidivism rates indicate that a good proportion of individuals that are directly affected by get tough strategies are not deterred from future crime.
A more complex indicator of the value of crime control policies is offered by crime rates. Preliminary 1997 statistics taken by the Uniform Crime Reports suggest a decline of 4% in serious reported crime. This percentage represents the sixth consecutive annual decline. A similar downward trend is also shown by the statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey.
These reported declines have been used by several researchers to support get-tough strategies. For instance, Langan (1991) has employed the increasing incarceration rates from 1973 to 1986 and a decline in the rates of crime to suggest that these reductions could be attributed to the prisons. However, he failed to see the subsequent increase in violent crime from 1986 to 1993 with incarceration rates going up. Higher rates of imprisonment for reducing crime rates have also been credited by the Center for Policy Analysis.
The reduction in the rate of crime has also been attributed to the increase in expected punishment.The role of get tough strategies in crime reduction has however been challenged by many researchers. Imprisonment clearly possess an incapacitative impact on the individual offender even though the major issue is whether increased imprisonment results in an overall decrease in crime and at what price. An examination of studies on the effect of incapacitation suggests that the reduction in crime were restricted to 10-30% despite a doubling of the prison population.
Other reports also indicate that the rate of violent crime remained stable despite the increase by threefold in the average prison time served for every crime. Such findings suggest that the punishment experiment that the United States has engaged has not resulted in a commensurate reduction in the amount of crime. There are numerous factors that may account for these disparate perceptions on the impact of get tough legislations. The method adopted for the measurement of crime may bias the conclusion.
The effectiveness of tough on crime policies in crime reduction is an issue of much contention, especially with regard to mandatory minimum sentencing. The basic observation is that incarceration’s deterrent impact has not been established and that there exists a negative result on those incarcerated that may support subsequent degrees of criminal misconduct. A recent study by Chen and Shapiro (2005) buttressed this concern about the probable adverse consequences on crime rates from increasing crime rates. This study employed a regression-discontinuity analysis to study the impact of prison conditions and the length of sentences on the rates of recidivism.
They particularly made use of the fact that prisoners included in their sample are given prisons using security-level score. This made it possible for them to study prisoners whose scores were closer to the cut off points.A detailed history of United States criminal punishment has been written by Lawrence Friedman (1993). He offers a comprehensive description of many punishments that have been repeatedly tried.
The rates of failure, according to his findings, do not often seem to vary. It would not be realistic to expect that the public, the media, and politicians are aware of the history of punishment. However, it may be said that individuals rooting for changes in punishment policy, should comprehend the history and development of crime-control strategies. Ignorance of history is relevant to a yearning for revenge.
A yearning for revenge necessitates a dismissal of history which guarantees ineffectiveness. The fact that the death penalty ha not resulted in crime being deterred does not matter much. What matters is that the lust for blood is satisfied. It does not matter whether innocent individuals are executed.
On a minimal tragic scale, though still a ridiculous practice concerning the link between harshness and crime control, Blomberg (1994) observes that prison boot camps are a consequence of public outcry. Boot camps are seen as harsh as compared to community corrections. They are harsh punishments in the manner in which they are applied, not with regard to incarceration but with regard to probation and less serious punishments. The boot camps have realized higher taxes but no observable reduction in recidivism.
Harsh punishments that come in the form of mandatory minimum sentences are self defeating as they actually lead into an increase in crime. Mandatory minimums often imply that violent and dangerous offenders are set free from prison to make room for non-violent and non-dangerous ones that have been sentenced under mandatory minimum statutes.Conceptual schemeNumerous studies on tough on the effectiveness of tough on crime measures have been carried out in the United States even though other important studies have been done in Canada, Sweden, India, Australia, Finland and Britain. Generally, available evidence indicates that tough on crime measures are supported by a good percentage of individuals.
There is a wide consensus that more severe punishments deter crimes even though these claims are not statistically supported. Holistically, studies suggest a negative link between crime reduction and severity of punishment. The findings may be seen as a firm corroboration of deterrence explanation in the theory of rational behavior. That is, an increase in severity of punishment will minimize the expected utility of criminal behavior and therefore the level of crime.
While many empirical assessments of crime in this tradition have used different sets of data and included varying model specification, they show that the deterrent impact of certainty of punishment is generally greater than the deterrent effect of the severity of punishment (Caulkins, & Peter, 2006). The deterrent impact of the probability and severity of punishment vary between the various kinds of crimes.There exist two significant shortcomings that characterize statistical analysis of crime. First, there is often the problem with the nature of data on crime.
The majority of crimes are underreported and the extent of this underreporting varies from one place to another. There also exists a problem with the crime statistics of the police and their relationship with court statistics on convictions and the prison statistics on served sentences. Many researchers depend on aggregate data with the hope that biases will not be significant enough to hide the actual relationship. Second, the simultaneous equations employed in regression analysis of the data give rise to biasness.
For instance, a society is likely to support harsher penalties if crime happens to be on the increase.HypothesisTough on crime policies have increased the rate of incarceration by 50% beyond the level experienced in 1993 with increased costs of approximately $8 billion (Bowers & Glenn, 1980). However, the crime rate would be 5 to 15 per cent lower if this money would not have been spent. In other words, instead of being effective in reducing crimes, the tough on crime measures have resulted in increased costs and no observable reduction in crime.
The society will not be fighting crime in an effective manner unless the government spends in a way that makes the marginal benefit similar for each activity. Tough on crime policies has however increased the prison population with the subsequent increase in expenditure which lays a burden on the society beside crime not being reduced.MethodologyThe ineffectiveness of tough on crime policies can be analyzed by finding out whether its marginal benefits exceeds its marginal cost. Beginning with the benefits to the society, a quantification can be done by considering crime’s elasticity with regard to incarceration.
For the purpose of this paper, a reference is made to research carried out by William Spelman (1994). He carried out research on crime’s elasticity with regard to incarceration and and estimated it as .16. His research design focuses on incapacitation and overlooks the potential crime reduction due to deterrence.
I will rely on his upper bound calculation of .20. With regard to the costs, the economic burden of tough on crime policies can be estimated. Such costs encompass the actual expense of incarceration.
The annual cost of maintaining a single prisoner, as estimated by the National Institute of Justice, is about $57,000. However, I have adjusted this cost to downwards to $46,000 per prisoner per year since the study by NIJ overstates the social cost.It is possible to calculate the optimal rate of incarceration by employing an approximation of the elasticity of crime with respect to incarceration of .20 and an average cost of $46,000 per inmate.
On a wider perspective, the last 5% increase in prison population resulted in a growth of prisoners by 100,000. This imposed a cost of $4.5 billion annually. This growth in incarceration would be expected to minimize crime by 1%.
How did the society gain from this drop in crime? Assuming that the total variable crime cost was $400 billion annually, if follows then that imprisoning 100,000 people would not be optimal. The society pays $4.6 billion to imprison them. $4 billion would have been committed in crime damage if these individuals would have remained free.
Higher approximations of the variable crime cost might indicate that the last five percent increment in incarceration would have been cost beneficial.Updating figures that were generated by Anderson (1999) and Cohen (2005), Jens Ludwig approximates that the total cost of crime in the United States could be in the order of $2 trillion annually. $700 billion of this total cost is derived from the costs to victims; about $350 billion is derived from government or private expenditures on prot4ective measures; $250 billion is derived from the lost value mainly from the time spent by the criminal planning crime or in prison; and the remaining $750 billion or about that figure, is from costs imposed by white collar or economic crimes (Ludwig, 2006). For the purpose of this paper, the total victim’s cost of $700 billion is the only relevant figure from Ludwig.
This would lead to the conclusion that the final increase in incarceration yielded positive results since the $4.6 billion in incarceration offered seven billion dollars in reduced victimization cost.There exists a debate about the magnitude of elasticity of crime estimates and the cost of incarceration as they are not perfectly accurate. What has been picked is that which is seen to be the lower and upper bounds of the existing estimates.
These bounds have been employed to create the above figures and between five and fifteen percent reduction in crime for hypothetical circumstances. The above range is the present value of incarceration’s future cost.Beside employing cost-benefit analysis, there is yet another way through which the effectiveness of tough on crime policies can be assessed, especially the efficiency in relying on mandatory minimum sentencing (Becker, 1968). Specifically, the opportunity cost of incarceration and the relative efficiency of the various ways of crime-fighting resource allocation can be studied.
Apart from incarceration, there exists other additional strategies for fighting crime. Given this other option, it must be questioned whether the heavy reliance on tough on crime policies is the most effective method of fighting crime.Human Subjects ProtectionThe information sought for this study, whilst it is not readily compiled, is available in the public domain, therefore, no further consent is required for its use.Evaluation implicationIt is clear that the public support for sentencing reforms was based on arguments that were oversimplified and erroneous data.
The punishment of offenders before the reforms were not as light as it was believed neither was it less severe than those of other countries. The implementation of tough on crime policies led to the increase in prison population due to imprisonment of many offenders. There is no indication that increased incarceration has resulted in the reduction of certain crimes such as drug crimes. In the contrary, there is sufficient evidence that the increases in incarceration has resulted in the misallocation of meager prison resources.
This may be frustrating families and communities, thus making a contribution to the problem of crime.Instead of pursuing tough on crime policies for more classes of offenders, punishment policies should be structured to punish offenders, enhance the undesirable consequences of past policies and address the underlying motivations to criminal activities. With this regard, severe punishment for serous offenders should not be altered.ConclusionPoliticians and policymakers have discussed and selectively endorsed a model of crime and punishment based on economics.
They have in most cases offered this economic model of crime and punishment as a justification for tough on crime policies. As much as some useful insights have been generated by this model, it has also been employed in ways that can be quite harmful. On the positive side, the model brings an awareness of fines against incarceration while suggesting that areas where fines can be extensively used. Ironically, the economic model of deterrence, which emphasizes on the benefits of high fines and the social advantages of imprisonment, has its major influence in giving justification for the massive increase in the United States incarceration rate.
As indicated by the analysis, this development was important in overcoming an inclination towards relying on punitive sanctions. However, there are concerns that the continuing growth of the prison industrial complex is an indication that the criminal justice policy has shifted too far in the direction of massive incarceration. Inaccuracy in the parameters required to approximate the optimal level of incarceration makes it difficult to know the exact point we are with regard to whether the marginal increases in imprisonment impose more costs than the benefits they offer. Therefore, there is need for further research into enhancing the accuracy of these estimates together with identifying other social costs that are associated with tough on crime policies.
If would-be murderers comprehend the circumstances under which capital punishment applies, then they would be barred by death penalty from capital murder but not from murder in general. The potential murderer’s calculus would be shifted toward non-capital murder by the death penalty. It is not clear if the life of the victim would be saved if this is the case.Even those who support deterrence strongly are not likely to favor a system in which harsh punishments are applied with immediacy even though such immediacy would clearly maximize its deterrent effect if at all such an effect exists.
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