Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 14, 1994 TAG: 9409140021
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BOB EVANS NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS For the Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But after more than two decades of steadily increasing imprisonment rates in the United States with little or no drop in crime rates, many criminologists say that so-obvious relationship is simply wrong.
``I don't know of any study or any data that shows that you get an additional reduction in crime by expanding sentences beyond what we do now,'' said Douglas McDonald, a senior analyst with Abt Associates, a Cambridge, Mass., criminal-justice research company.
You might keep one particular criminal from committing a new crime by locking him up for a longer time, McDonald said. Then again, you might just be delaying the time he'll get out and steal or kill again. Meanwhile you've paid to lock up several others who, statistically, won't commit more crimes, he said.
So few criminals are caught that the chances of preventing crime through incarceration are reduced even more, McDonald said. If a few career criminals really are responsible for the bulk of crimes, he said, how can you be sure you've got the ones worth spending all that money to lock up?
Rick Kern, director of Virginia's crime research center and one of the brains behind Gov. George Allen's parole and sentencing reform plan, said Virginia's plan will succeed because it focuses on violent offenders by giving them dramatically longer prison terms.
Other states generally have increased prison terms for all criminals, so it is no surprise that the effect is diffused, he said.
All the comparisons between crime rates and incarceration rates miss the most important point, Kern said. Instead of looking at how many people are put in prison, the important thing to consider is how long certain offenders are imprisoned.
He said no one effectively has studied what Allen plans to do: target only violent offenders for dramatically longer prison terms while leaving prison stays the same for other offenders.
``I would describe the approach of the other states as more helter-skelter,'' Kern said, because by choosing to lock up more criminals, they have not been as selective as Allen's plan would be.
But McDonald and others said they have seen no credible studies demonstrate that dramatically longer sentences such as those proposed by Allen's plan will cut crime.
As for whether longer sentences are a deterrent, most research indicates they are not, McDonald and others said. Many offenses are committed while people are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, they said, and most offenders don't calculate the risk because they don't figure on getting caught.
Darrell Steffensmeier of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Pennsylvania State University scrutinized what happened when Pennsylvania increased the average time served behind bars during the 1980s.
Even though prison terms were 23 percent longer, violent crime rose 25 percent. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania was experiencing a sharp decline in the number of people at the peak ages for violent crime, between 15 and 29, he said.
Kern said research based on Virginia criminals shows increased prison terms can reduce recidivism, particularly among young offenders. The study looked at first-time violent offenders released in 1991, comparing those who had served sentences of less than three years with those who had served longer. The goal was to see how many were back in prison within three years of release.
The findings showed recidivism was as much as 35 percent lower for 18- to 22-year-olds who had served sentences of more than three years. Longer sentences for older offenders appeared to make no difference. For offenders 30 and older, longer sentences seemed to result in increased recidivism.
Kern's research is unable to show whether the significantly longer sentences in the Allen plan would have any more effect on recidivism than the three-year sentences. In fact, Kern's research shows typical offenders for many violent crimes already are serving more than three years.
For law breakers, such distinctions are not even considered because living conditions outside of prison are worse than any legal treatment behind bars, said David L. Fallen, executive director of the Washington State Sentencing Commission.
He dismissed the idea that prisons are like hotels or country clubs but said prison never can be a deterrent to someone whose normal living standards do not include a bed, shelter and regular meals.
William Barr, the former U.S. attorney general who is co-chairman of Allen's commission on parole abolition and sentencing reform, thinks putting more people behind bars will curb crime.
addition to his work in Virginia, Barr has been touting higher imprisonment rates and tougher laws in many states as a spokesman for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a private, nonprofit conservative group that studies issues of importance to state legislatures.
The Exchange Council and the National Rifle Association commissioned research by Michael Block, a professor at the University of Arizona. They say Block's research shows that imprisonment, generally measured by incarceration rates, does affect crime.
While most criminologists define the incarceration rate as the number of people in prison divided by the total population of a state or nation, Block and others said a more accurate incarceration rate figure is one tied to crime itself.
For Block and others, the most-telling incarceration rate is determined by dividing the number of prisoners by the number of crimes reported in the FBI's annual ``Crime Index.'' He and others call this the ``criminal incarceration rate.''
Block's research showed that by using this method, the only states that experienced a declining violent crime rate between 1980 and 1992 were 10 states where the criminal incarceration rate increased at a faster pace than nationally. Those states were Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming.
Critics of Block's research noted that those 10 states are more rural and less populated than most states, and therefore had to add fewer beds to their prisons to increase incarceration rates by any measure. None of the states has a population as large as Virginia's, and only one - Nevada - has a higher incarceration rate than Virginia for overall population.
Block's calculations also show Virginia had a higher criminal incarceration rate than the national average from 1980 to 1992, yet violent crime rose 22 percent.
The Exchange Council and NRA say that's because Virginia didn't lock up enough crooks, even though Virginia's criminal incarceration rate was higher than in several states where violent crime declined.
Crime rates and criminal incarceration rates can act independently of one another, Block's figures show.
In South Carolina, for example, violent crime remained high, even though the state had one of the highest criminal incarceration rates in the country. Kern said that's because South Carolina isn't holding violent prisoners for dramatically longer periods.
Christopher Baird, a senior vice president for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, said there's another reason: There's no relationship between incarceration and crime.
Baird did a computer analysis to study how changes in the criminal incarceration rate for violent offenders, along with other social factors, related to changes in crime rates nationwide from 1960 to 1990.
This analysis showed that incarceration was an insignificant factor. More significant were factors such as changes in urban population, in unemployment and in the number of single-parent families.
The strongest link was with how many 15- to 29-year-old males there were, Baird said, but even that relationship was not very strong.
Baird and others pointed to simpler examples to show that the relationship between crime rates and incarceration rates, no matter how they're calculated, is weak.
Baird lives in Wisconsin and noted that his state and adjacent Minnesota are similar in geography, history and demographics. The two states had similar prison policies and incarcerated people at below the national average.
But since 1979, Wisconsin has doubled its incarceration rate compared with Minnesota. If Barr and the others are right, Baird said, there should have been a notable difference in the two states' crime rates.
Instead, he said, there has been little or no change in the relationship in crime rates.
``The evidence that the imprisonment binge has not produced the desired results is absolutely overwhelming,'' Baird said.
by CNB