Prison reform - Increasing the probability of a sentence is more effective than longer sentences

[True Earthling]

The criminal justice system needs major reform. We need to transition from traditional sentencing based mostly on guess-work and outdated, disproven methods to a more scientific and statistic based model...

How to End the Death Penalty for Good

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-06/how-to-end-the-death-penalty-for-good

As a method to reduce crime, simply handing out stiffer sentences has only limited effectiveness. For one thing, people tend to age out of violent crimes, so as people age, you get less and less crime-reducing benefit from holding people behind bars. A 60-year-old man being detained for a gang murder committed 30 years ago is probably not being kept from doing much except walking around.

Nor do long sentences necessarily provide as much deterrence as you might think. To be sure, if the sentence for a particular crime is “stand in a corner for 10 minutes,” you probably won’t get any deterrence at all, and you need to increase the sentence. But most criminals are not rational calculating machines of the sort that will think, “Well, given the odds of getting away with it, I’m willing to risk a sentence of 15 years, but not 30.” Violent criminals tend to be impulsive, and not very good at calculating cost-benefit ratios. The economic jargon for this is “hyperbolic discounters”: they place very high weight on things that will happen in the very near future, and very low weight on things that will happen a long time from now.

Because of this, increasing the length of the sentence is much less effective than increasing the probability of the sentence -- which is to say, the likelihood that someone who breaks the law will get caught and punished. Probation systems, parole boards and drunken-driving-prevention programs have all achieved amazing results with new models that use very short jail terms (as little as a night or two), combined with much tougher monitoring to ensure that anyone who violates the conditions of their parole will definitely spend those nights in jail. This, it turns out, is much more effective than the model that public policy professor Mark Kleiman calls “randomized draconianism,” or as a probation judge put it to me, “No punishment, no punishment, no punishment, BAM! Five years in prison.”

This compilation of prison studies shows that longer sentences actually increases the likelihood of recidivism...

The Effects of Prison Sentences on Recidivism

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/e199912.htm

Should Prison Sentences Be Based On Crimes That Haven’t Been Committed Yet?

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/04/the-new-science-of-sentencing#.pD8AHyqRH

Risk assessments have existed in various forms for a century, but over the past two decades, they have spread through the American justice system, driven by advances in social science. The tools try to predict recidivism — repeat offending or breaking the rules of probation or parole — using statistical probabilities based on factors such as age, employment history and prior criminal record. They are now used at some stage of the criminal justice process in nearly every state. Many court systems use the tools to guide decisions about which prisoners to release on parole, for example, and risk assessments are becoming increasingly popular as a way to help set bail for inmates awaiting trial.

But Pennsylvania is about to take a step most states have until now resisted for adult defendants: using risk assessment in sentencing itself. A state commission is putting the finishing touches on a plan that, if implemented as expected, could allow some offenders considered low risk to get shorter prison sentences than they would otherwise or avoid incarceration entirely. Those deemed high risk could spend more time behind bars.

[Major Nikon]

1. Our criminal punishment model isn't even remotely based on what works

It's based on revenge and barbarism that appeals to the lowest common denominators of society.

[True Earthling]

2. Agree - to much emphasis on punishment...

We need more education & mental health services for prisoners and we need to do a better job of identifying and helping the young who are at risk of criminality as adults to steer them into behavior that will lead to a more positive, productive life.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Makes sense, esp. thread title. . . . nt

[True Earthling]

4. Even if we released every state and federal drug offender, the U.S. would still be the world leader

in imprisoning people...

Releasing Drug Offenders Won’t End Mass Incarceration

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-wont-end-mass-incarceration/

According to the Bureau of Prisons, there are 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons. Roughly half (48.6 percent) are in for drug offenses. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are 1,358,875 people in state prisons. Of them, 16 percent have a drug crime as their most serious offense. There were also 744,600 inmates in county and city jails. (The BOP data is current as of July 16. From BJS, the latest jail statistics are from midyear 2014, and the latest prison statistics from year-end 2013.) That’s an incarceration rate of about 725 people per 100,000 population.

Suppose every federal drug offender were released today. That would cut the incarceration rate to about 693 inmates per 100,000 population. Suppose further that every drug offender in a state prison were also released. That would get the rate down to 625. It’s a significant drop, no question — these hypothetical measures would shrink the overall prison population by about 14 percent. (There isn’t data from BJS on the most serious charges faced by those in local jails, so let’s assume that no jail inmates are released in these scenarios.)

But let’s have some international context. Even in that extreme hypothetical situation, the U.S. would still be an incarceration outlier. Even without its many inmates who are convicted of drug charges, the U.S. still leads the world in imprisoning people. Next is the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a rate of 542 per 100,000 people, followed by Turkmenistan at 522 and Cuba at 510. Russia’s rate is 463. (See the bottom of this post for the full list of international incarceration rates. The international data is from the International Centre for Prison Studies, and I’ve restricted the list to countries with a population of at least 100,000.)

Locking up drug offenders is only part of the larger story behind mass incarceration. Other reasons for the high rates include the severity of nondrug sentencing, the attitudes of judges and prosecutors, a high rate of violent crime such as murder, and rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s. “The increase in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40 years is preponderantly the result of increases both in the likelihood of imprisonment and in lengths of prison sentences,” the National Research Council wrote in a report last year.

[True Earthling]

5. State law enforcement agencies make over 1.25M drug possession arrests each year...

Major Rights Groups: Decriminalize Use Of All Illicit Drugs

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/10/12/major-rights-groups-decriminalize-use-of-all-illicit-drugs/

According to the new report, state law enforcement agencies make more than 1.25 million drug possession arrests per year — one of every nine arrests nationwide. Regarding racial disparities, the report said black adults use drugs at similar or even lower rates than white adults, yet are more than twice as likely to be arrested for possession.

The report argues that the decades-long “war on drugs” has failed, with rates of drug abuse still high. It says criminalization of drugs tends to drive people who use them underground, making it less likely they will get treatment and more likely they will be at risk of disease and overdoses.

[LWolf]

6. Okay.

Personally, I would like to see our justice system move to a restorative model, with only those proven to be a serious danger to others incarcerated; and I'd like incarceration to be humane and to include education, socialization, and mental health services.

A nation whose focus, whose attitude, philosophy, conversation, was on restorative justice rather than revenge and punishment, would be a healthier nation.