Chase Woodruff's masterpiece of starting with advocacy and then writing "news" around it. Get involved. Learn how to effectively (and assertively but not aggressively) speak up and speak out.
Chase Woodruff's masterpiece of starting with advocacy and then writing "news" around it. Get involved. Learn how to effectively (and assertively but not aggressively) speak up and speak out.
Thanks for reading Colorado Accountability Project! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Progressive Reporter Chase Woodruff's masterpiece of starting with his advocacy on crime and criminal justice, and then writing "news" around it. Mr. Woodruff is a reporter for Colorado Newsline, an organization which bills itself on its About webpage (linked first below) as "... a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent source of online news. It launched in July 2020. It provides fair and accurate reporting on politics, policy and other stories of interest to Colorado readers."
What I understand you to be arguing is that while harsher punishments may not deter crime and may not reduce recidivism, long sentences for offenders will definitionally reduce the rates of some crimes while those offenders are incarcerated. Criminologists refer to this as "incapacitation," since incarcerated people are incapable of committing many types of crime (though by no means all) for the duration of their sentence. Incapacitation effects are real; it would be strange if they weren't. But there are a couple things to note about them.
First, if you talk to researchers — I'd encourage you to do so — they'll point out one obvious conceptual problem with focusing exclusively on incapacitation: if the goal is simply to incapacitate as many future offenders as possible, it follows that our only criminal justice policy should be a law giving everyone a life sentence for their first criminal offense, since, definitionally, the closer we are to 100% incarceration, the closer we'll be to a 0% crime rate. What anyone with common sense understands is that there are all kinds of societal costs and moral considerations that factor into these policy decisions.
More to the point, there's plenty of evidence (some of it linked above) that those costs outweigh whatever benefits can be derived from short-term incapacitation effects. Any temporary reduction in crime rates is soon offset by what some researchers call the "replacement effect," in which the social and economic drivers of crime create new offenders and perpetuate the cycle, while incarcerated people (especially those sentenced harshly for low-level offenses) are very likely to reoffend at higher rates in the long run.
While I'm happy to discuss what the academic criminological literature has to say about all this, as I wrote in my piece, it's not really necessary to illustrate my point. Most people know that crime rates went up pretty much everywhere in 2021-22, and have fallen pretty much everywhere since then. The trends were and are roughly the same in red states and blue states with vastly different policies relating to criminalization, incarceration and severity of punishment. If those policies have such a significant effect on crime rates, why didn't we see wider, more consistent disparities between jurisdictions? Why were trends roughly the same in Colorado counties with tough-on-crime Republican DAs and those with reformist Democratic DAs? No one has given me a good answer on that. No one has really even bothered to try.
Thanks for the comment. There's a whole lot in here to digest and/or respond to. I may not get to all, but understand that my not mentioning them (at least not now) doesn't mean my assent.
I will give those papers a look as I have time and may take one or more up. As for what I argue, I think you put is partially accurate.
Indeed, I argue that there is some reduction in crime by people being in prison vs. not. There's more than that. I think one of the main themes I write on re. crime (both in this piece and in others I've written on the subject) is that crime and responses to same are more multidimensional than either of the simple arguments that it's the environment causing it or that harsher laws will make us safer.
Neither, I believe, is entirely true because humans are complicated, all the more so due to our free will.
Hi Cory. Appreciate you taking the time to read one meta-analysis linked in the piece. Here's some other reading for you if you're interested:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635864
https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_raphael_crimeincarc_JLE.pdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-prisons-make-us-safer/
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2014/09/weighing-imprisonment-and-crime
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/what-caused-crime-decline
What I understand you to be arguing is that while harsher punishments may not deter crime and may not reduce recidivism, long sentences for offenders will definitionally reduce the rates of some crimes while those offenders are incarcerated. Criminologists refer to this as "incapacitation," since incarcerated people are incapable of committing many types of crime (though by no means all) for the duration of their sentence. Incapacitation effects are real; it would be strange if they weren't. But there are a couple things to note about them.
First, if you talk to researchers — I'd encourage you to do so — they'll point out one obvious conceptual problem with focusing exclusively on incapacitation: if the goal is simply to incapacitate as many future offenders as possible, it follows that our only criminal justice policy should be a law giving everyone a life sentence for their first criminal offense, since, definitionally, the closer we are to 100% incarceration, the closer we'll be to a 0% crime rate. What anyone with common sense understands is that there are all kinds of societal costs and moral considerations that factor into these policy decisions.
More to the point, there's plenty of evidence (some of it linked above) that those costs outweigh whatever benefits can be derived from short-term incapacitation effects. Any temporary reduction in crime rates is soon offset by what some researchers call the "replacement effect," in which the social and economic drivers of crime create new offenders and perpetuate the cycle, while incarcerated people (especially those sentenced harshly for low-level offenses) are very likely to reoffend at higher rates in the long run.
While I'm happy to discuss what the academic criminological literature has to say about all this, as I wrote in my piece, it's not really necessary to illustrate my point. Most people know that crime rates went up pretty much everywhere in 2021-22, and have fallen pretty much everywhere since then. The trends were and are roughly the same in red states and blue states with vastly different policies relating to criminalization, incarceration and severity of punishment. If those policies have such a significant effect on crime rates, why didn't we see wider, more consistent disparities between jurisdictions? Why were trends roughly the same in Colorado counties with tough-on-crime Republican DAs and those with reformist Democratic DAs? No one has given me a good answer on that. No one has really even bothered to try.
Thanks for the comment. There's a whole lot in here to digest and/or respond to. I may not get to all, but understand that my not mentioning them (at least not now) doesn't mean my assent.
I will give those papers a look as I have time and may take one or more up. As for what I argue, I think you put is partially accurate.
Indeed, I argue that there is some reduction in crime by people being in prison vs. not. There's more than that. I think one of the main themes I write on re. crime (both in this piece and in others I've written on the subject) is that crime and responses to same are more multidimensional than either of the simple arguments that it's the environment causing it or that harsher laws will make us safer.
Neither, I believe, is entirely true because humans are complicated, all the more so due to our free will.
Have a good afternoon.