Let’s look at some real-life typical cases, two who went to prison with their latest conviction for a drug offense, the other incarcerated for a property crime. The imprisoned drug offenders had multiple arrests, bouts on probation, and adult and juvenile crimes, including auto theft, burglary, robbery, retail theft, domestic violence, sexual assault, drunk driving, jumping bail and, of course, drug dealing too. First-time drug offenders were less than 2 percent of the population. Moreover, as a recent study funded in part by the National Institute of Justice correctly observes, “the label ‘drug offender’ is a misnomer.” As the study notes, the term implies “a degree of specialization not supported on individual offending patterns,” which shows plainly that drug offenders “commonly commit other types of crime, most notably robbery, burglary, and violent offenses.”įor example, in a forthcoming Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) study of the complete adult and juvenile criminal histories of prisoners from Milwaukee, WPRI analyst George Mitchell and I find that 91 percent of these urban criminals had one or more convictions for a violent crime. What about mere drug offenders behind bars? While federal convictions for drug-related crimes skyrocketed between 19, at the state level, the number of persons incarcerated for violent crimes grew at 1.3 times the growth in imprisoned drug offenders. The rest were guilty of serious violations of the terms of their parole or had committed new crimes.įrederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society - University of Pennsylvania Petersilia dug into the records on the 84,197 adults admitted to California prisons in 1991, she found that only 3,116 (fewer than 4 percent of total admissions) were, in fact, technical parole violators. Of course, the truth about who really goes to prison in America can be known only from detailed, case-by-case, rap sheet-by-rap sheet analyses of those behind bars.įor example, several blue-ribbon panels have asserted that the growth in California’s prison system since 1980 has been driven largely by the return to prison of mere technical parole violators (released felons who simply failed a urine test or failed to show for a date with their parole agent). ![]() (Empirical studies by analysts at the National Bureau of Economic Research and elsewhere indicate that the average number of non-drug crimes that prisoners commit when free may be higher than twelve a year.) In 1993 we studied a large sample of New Jersey prisoners and found exactly the same thing-they committed a median dozen crimes a year, again excluding all drug crimes. We found that in the year before they were imprisoned, these prisoners committed a median of 12 crimes, excluding all drug crimes. For example, in 1990, Harvard economist Anne Morrison Piehl and I studied a large sample of the Wisconsin prison population. The state-by-state data tell the same tale. Comparable national data stretching back to the 1970s make plain that over 90 percent of prisoners are violent or repeat criminals. Bureau of Justice Statistics has shown conclusively that fully 94 percent of state prisoners had either committed one or more violent crimes (62 percent) or been convicted more than once in the past for nonviolent crimes (32 percent). (And, by the way, between 19 more than 400,000 Americans were murdered, but only 226 convicted killers were executed and only 2,713 remained on death row.)īased on a scientific sample representing 711,000 imprisoned felons, Lawrence Greenfeld of the U.S. While under supervision in the community, these prisoners had committed at least 218,000 violent crimes including 13,200 murders and 11,600 rapes (more than half of the rapes against children). Indeed, in 1991 alone some 45 percent of state prisoners were criminals who, at the very moment they committed their latest crimes, were on probation or parole. Adding in those in local jails, on any given day, for every three incarcerated, seven convicted offenders were doing time on the streets with little or no supervision. Over the same period, however, the number of convicted criminals out on probation or parole increased from 1.3 million to more than 3.6 million. ![]() In fact, as the relevant data clearly show, for over a decade now the justice system has been working overtime to keep all but the most dangerous and deserving criminals outside the prison gates.įor starters, consider that between 19, the nation’s state and federal prison population increased from 319,598 to 999,808. Critics of prison-building programs often argue that no additional capacity is needed because many of those currently incarcerated are low-level drug offenders or first-time nonviolent criminals who might safely be released into the community.
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