[Special]                                                 [The Economist]

Violent and irrational--and that's just the policy

Recent falls in America's crime rate have led policy-makers round the world
to look admiringly at the country's get-tough policies. They should not.
American criminal-justice policy is misconceived and dangerous

REMEMBER serial killers? A few years ago, these twisted creatures haunted
not just the American imagination but, it seemed, America's real streets
and parks: an official of the Justice Department was widely reported as
saying that 4,000 of America's annual 24,000-or-so murders were
attributable to serial killers.
     America loves its myths--and that was pretty much what the "wave of
serial killings" turned out to be: 4,000 people are not victims of serial
murderers; 4,000 murders remain unsolved each year. According to
cool-headed academic research, maybe 50 people a year are victims of serial
murderers; the figure has been stable for 20 years.
     Serial murderers obviously form a bizarre and special category of
criminal. People might well believe extraordinary things about them. But
about crime in general, surely ordinary folk have a better
understanding--don't they? Well, consider two widely-held beliefs:
     "America has experienced a crime wave in the past 20 years." No.
According to the National Crime Victimisation Survey, violent crime fell in
the first half of the 1980s, rose in the second half, and has been falling
in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, it has fallen slightly.
Non-violent property crimes (theft, larceny and burglary) have followed
similar patterns. So has murder: its peak was in 1980 (see chart).
     "America is more criminal than other countries." Again, no. According
to an International Crime Survey, carried out by the Ministry of Justice in
the Netherlands in 1992, America is not obviously more criminal than
anywhere else. You are more likely to be burgled in Australia or New
Zealand. You are more likely to be robbed with violence in Spain; you are
more likely to be robbed without violence in Spain, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand. You are more likely to be raped or indecently assaulted in
Canada, Australia or western Germany. And so on.
     American misconceptions raise two questions. First, why are Americans
so afraid of crime? (As according to Gallup polls, they are: in recent
years Americans have put crime either first or second in their list of
problems facing the country; in Britain, crime limps along between second
and sixth in people's priorities.) Second, why should Americans be so
punitive in their attitude to criminals? (As they also seem to be: when
asked by the International Crime Survey what should happen to a young
burglar who has committed more than one offence, 53% of Americans reckoned
he should go to prison, compared with 37% of English and Welsh, 22% of
Italians, and 13% of Germans and French.)
     One possible explanation is that Americans are irrational in their
attitudes to crime. But that cannot be right: crime imposes huge costs on
the country and has helped turn parts of American inner cities into
nightmares of violence. Given that, it is hardly surprising that Americans
should fear the spread of crime. But it remains surprising that American
public attitudes should be so different from those in other countries which
also have dangerous inner cities. No, there seems to be something else
feeding Americans' fear and loathing of criminals. More probably, two
things: the violence of American crime, and its irrationality. And it is
with these that America's real crime-policy problems begin.

Murder as public choice
America tops the developed-country crime league only in one category:
murder. While you are more likely to be burgled in Sydney than in Los
Angeles, you are 20 times more likely to be murdered in Los Angeles than
you are in Sydney.
     American crime is not only more violent; it is also irrational in its
violence. Think about a person held up at gunpoint who fails to co-operate
with a robber. "Since both the risk of apprehension and the potential
punishment escalate when the victim is killed, "says Franklin Zimring, a
criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley, "the rational
robber would be well advised to meet flight or refusal by avoiding conflict
and seeking another victim." Yet Americans commonly get killed in these
circumstances, and it is the irrationality of such violence that terrifies.

     There is nothing odd or surprising in the observation that America is
more violent than other countries, that Americans are more afraid of crime,
and they are therefore more punitive. But the problem with America's
criminal-justice policy lies in that sequence of thought. By eliding
violence and crime, Americans fail to identify the problem that sets them
apart from the rest of the rich world, which is violence, rather than crime
generally. Americans are right to think they have a special problem of
violence. They are wrong to think their country is being overwhelmed by
crime of every sort. Yet because many people do think that, they are
throwing their weight behind indiscriminate policies which, at huge cost,
bludgeon crime as a whole but fail to tackle the problem of violence.
     America now imprisons seven times as many people (proportionately) as
does the average European country, largely as a result of
get-tough-on-crime laws. These are the laws other countries are now
studying with admiration.
     First came mandatory sentencing laws, requiring courts to impose
minimum sentences on offenders for particular crimes. Michigan, for
instance, has a mandatory life sentence for an offender caught with 650
grams of cocaine. A federal law condemns anybody convicted of possession of
more than five grams of crack to a minimum of five years in prison.
     Then came "three-strike laws", supported by Bill Clinton and adopted
by 20-odd states and the federal government. These impose a mandatory life
sentence on anybody convicted of a third felony. The seriousness of the
felony, and therefore the impact of the law, varies from state to state. In
California, in the most celebrated case, a man who stole a pizza as his
third felony got life. His case was extreme, but not unique: another man
got life after stealing three steaks.

Three steaks and you're out
Now, the fashion is for "truth-in-sentencing". Such laws require the
criminal to spend most of his sentence (usually 85%) in prison, rather than
making him eligible for parole after, say, four to six years of a ten-year
sentence. There is much to be said for a system that does not leave the
public feeling cheated about what sentences actually amount to. But, by
imposing the 85% average on all offenders, "truth in sentencing" makes it
impossible to discriminate between people who seem genuinely remorseful and
might be let out early and the more dangerous types who should serve the
whole of their sentence.
     Since the early 1970s, when the first tough-sentencing laws were
introduced, the prison population has risen from 200,000 to 1.1m. If that
increase were made up mostly of the violent people that have engendered
America's crime panic, that could be counted as a blow against violent
crime. But it is not: the biggest increase is in non-violent drug
offenders.
     Between 1980 and now, the proportion of those sentenced to prison for
non-violent property crimes has remained about the same (two-fifths). The
number of those sentenced for drugs has soared (from one-tenth to over
one-third). The share sentenced for violent crimes has fallen from half to
under one-third.
     And so what, you might ask? Non-violent crime still matters. Even if
America's crime panic is related to violence, it is right and proper that
the system should be seeking to minimise all crime. The prison population
is going up. The crime figures are going down. Let 'em rot. As the right
says: "Prison works."
     Or does it? That depends on what you mean by "works". To many people,
prison can strongly influence the trend in the crime rate: putting a lot of
people in prison, they believe, can achieve a long-term reversal of rising
crime. This must be doubtful. Yes, crime is falling now. But it also fell
in the early 1980s, rose in the late 1980s and fell again in the early
1990s. The prison population rose through the whole period.
     If there is any single explanation for these changes, it would seem to
lie in demographics. Young men commit by far and away the largest number of
crimes, so when there are more of them around, proportionately, the crime
rate goes up. That was what happened in the 1960s, the period of the big,
sustained post-war rise in the crime rate. Demography also tells you that
there will be more young men around in ten years' time to commit more
crimes.
     But demographics cannot be the only explanation. If it were, crime
would have fallen in the second half of the 1980s, when there were fewer
teenagers. In fact, it rose.
     Why? The answer is probably drugs. What seems to have happened is that
the appearance of crack in late 1985 shook up the drugs-distribution
business. The number of dealers increased, kids with no capital got into
the business and gangs competed murderously for market share.
     This theory would account for the decline in homicides in the 1990s.
Crack consumption seems to be falling--possibly just because drugs go in
and out of fashion, possibly because teenagers have seen how bad the stuff
is. And the market has matured as well as declined. Policemen and
researchers say territories have been carved out, boundaries set. With
competition less rife, murders have declined.
     The significance of all this is that it loosens the connection between
the rise in the prison population and the fall in the crime rate. Crime
might have fallen anyway. A combination of demographic and social
explanations, rather than changes in the prison population, seems to
account for much of the changing pattern of crime.

Vox populi, vox dei, vox dementiae
That said, there might still be a justification for putting more people in
prison: if by doing so you lowered the overall level of crime by taking
criminals out of circulation. Indeed, if a small number of young men commit
a disproportionately large number of crimes, then locking up this
particular group might depress crime a lot.
     Liberal criminologists sometimes appear to doubt this. "It seems,"
says John DiIulio, the right-wing's favourite thinker on crime, "that you
need a PhD in criminology to doubt the proposition that putting criminals
in prison will keep down crime." Of course, the proposition is
self-evidently true. If you banged up for life anyone who had ever
committed a crime, however trivial, crime would plummet. But the question
is: is this sensible, even if it does work?
     To many ordinary Americans, it is and politicians are happy to oblige
the voters by promising to get ever tougher on crime. But what is the
evidence about whether prison is an effective way of reducing crime?
     Looking across the states' different crime rates and imprisonment
rates, there is no correlation between the two. True, you would not
necessarily expect one: states are different and tough-sentencing laws
might be a reaction to a high crime rate as much as a way of bringing it
down. But more sophisticated analyses confirm there is no link. Mr Zimring
took the adult and juvenile crime rates in California and studied what
happened over the period when tough laws were being introduced for adults,
but not for juveniles. No relationship is detectable: for most crimes,
offences committed by juveniles either fell or rose significantly less than
did those committed by adults.
     And, just as there is no convincing argument that prison effectively
reduces the level of crime, nor does there seem to be a convincing
cost-benefit argument in favour of prison. The problem lies in costing
crime. One often-used estimate, which monetises intangibles like pain and
suffering, calculates the annual costs of crime at $450 billion. This makes
prison look a bargain: its annual bill is $35 billion, while the
criminal-justice system, including police and courts, costs $100 billion.
But if you calculate the costs of crime on the basis of physical
damage--hospital bills or the cost of replacing stolen goods--the figure
comes out at a mere $18 billion a year. The moral is that, while the cost
of crime must be high, no one has any real idea what it is.
     What you can say is that, out of the range of options for dealing with
criminals, prison is among the most expensive. One currently popular
alternative is the "drugs court". Under this system, people charged with
possession or small dealing may opt to go through a drugs-treatment
programme rather than stand trial. Treatment costs $3,500-15,000 a year,
depending on whether it is residential or not; prison costs $22,000. There
is also some evidence that these courts are better than prisons at
discouraging reoffending, though, since they are relatively new, the
evidence is not conclusive.
     Of course, get-tough policies raise questions other than that of
efficacy. One is moral. Is it right to lock somebody up for life for
stealing a pizza? Another is racial (see page). These concerns have not, it
seems, made much of an impact on public opinion. According to Mr DiIulio,
"Americans have lost interest in the Anglo-Saxon,
innocent-until-proven-guilty model of justice. They want to get the bad
guys."
     Yet even by this measure, the get-tough policies are misfiring. Around
100,000 people go to prison for the 6m-odd violent crimes committed a year.
The system is not getting the bad guys. What it is getting is a great many
drug-taking, drug-dealing, small-time thieves. Conservatives argue that
most people in prison are either violent or repeat offenders. True, but
many of the repeat offenders are addicts financing their habit through drug
dealing or burglary. Nobody suggests that they are unfortunates for whom
one should merely be sorry; but it is not clear that sending a crack-user
to prison for five years is a rational solution to America's violent-crime
problem.
     America is awash with academics, judges, commissioners and policemen
who know and study crime. The Justice Department's research arm, the
National Institute of Justice, spent $53m last year on research of a higher
standard, and in a larger quantity, than goes on anywhere else in the
world.
     Almost all of this stuff doubts the efficacy of what is going on in
criminal justice, and fears for the consequences. Almost all the
professionals agree that America's problem is violence, and that the way to
reduce violence is to restrict access to guns. And on this--though the
point is rarely noticed--the public agrees: 62%, according to a recent
Gallup poll, favour stricter gun control.
     Yet none of it makes much difference to public policy. The
administration promotes a three-strike policy even though it knows that the
main effect of three-strike laws is to bung up the prison system with
people long past crime-committing age.
     American crime policy seems to have become an area where the
arguments--admittedly often complex and finely balanced--take second place
to the lobbying power of special-interest groups. The effectiveness of one,
the National Rifle Association, has been well-documented. A less familiar
one is the prison-building lobby.
     Prisons have been likened to the defence industry as a government
subsidy to the white working class. For areas hit by the end of the cold
war, and by the ups and downs of agriculture, prisons provide attractively
recession-proof employment. As the flier for the American Jail Association
last year said, "Jails are BIG BUSINESS." Towns compete to get them.
     The prison guards' union has also become a powerful voice. According
to a study of campaign contributions in California in 1991-92, the local
version, the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, was the
second-largest donor in the state. It spends around $1m on political
contributions for the governorship and the legislature in each electoral
cycle.
     But more important than the lobbying, and more worrying, is the
failure of public debate on prison, its costs, and the alternatives.
According to Bobby Scott, a Democratic congressman opposed to
tough-sentencing laws, "When you call for more incarceration, you do not
have to explain yourself; when you argue for effective alternatives, you
do. And in politics, when you start explaining, you've lost." If that is
true--and it sounds painfully accurate--something has gone badly wrong not
just with American crime policy, but with America's capacity for reasoned
public debate.

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