Matt Yglesias

The Quality of Mercy is Not Stained, If the Perpetrator Is Elite Enough

An important point from Adam Serwer about the sudden outbreak of “forgive and forget” attitudes among political and media elites:

Cohen’s argument simply reflects the consensus among certain journalistic and political elites that the powerful simply shouldn’t be held accountable when they make mistakes, because, after all, we all make mistakes. This compassionate attitude naturally doesn’t extend beyond this small group. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fully 1% of the population. I’m sure there are millions of people currently incarcerated who would like it if Cohen’s policy of absolution for crimes was extended to them.

More importantly, this entire philosophy has it backwards. Accountability is the burden of the powerful in a democracy. Those who are responsible for upholding our laws shouldn’t get a pass when they break them, precisely because they have that responsibility. Power without accountability is, by definition, tyranny.

I would even take this beyond prison. The United States isn’t run along Social Darwinist lines, but we’re closer than any other major developed country. To an extent that I find frankly astounding—and certainly unseen in other wealthy nations—people from modest backgrounds are expected to suffer the economic consequences of poor decision-making or bad luck, all in the name of personal responsibility. But when someone really important screws up, either in terms of provoking a financial crisis or overseeing a policy disaster or breaking the law or whatever, well then it turns out that we have better things to do than “look backwards” at who deserves what.

It’s absurd and it’s unfair. Meanwhile, at the exact time I was writing this post, Pandora put “Cheat” on—”Don’t use the rules / They’re not for you, they’re for the fools / And you’re a fool if you don’t know that.”

Metaphorical Pirates

Noting the relative insouciance of the operators of the Swedish file-sharing service The Pirate Bay upon conviction, Tom Lee remarks “The gravity of the situation seems to have not yet struck the people involved — either that or Swedish prisons are awfully cushy.”

I think the issue is that Swedish prisons actually are pretty cushy. You can read a funny account here or a more serious explanation from Sweden’s Kriminalvarden agency. But the long and short of it is that, as I understand it, the Swedish system basically understands criminal activity as overwhelmingly stemming from substance abuse problems, mental illness, and lack of labor market problems. Consequently, though the prisoners are certainly closely supervised, the conditions in prison are extremely humane and not especially “punitive.” The emphasis is on trying to help people with their problems and trying to ensure that dangerous people aren’t out and about on the streets.

To the best of my knowledge, the system works pretty well. But what it won’t do is provide a ton of deterrence against criminals who are to a large extent motivated by a conviction that they’re actually doing the right thing. One would rather avoid Swedish prison, but it’s not a terrifying situation and a prisoner of conscience could comport himself relatively comfortably.

Black Drug Incarceration Down; White Drug Incarceration Up

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blow for equality:

For the first time since crack cocaine sparked a war on drugs 20 years ago, the number of black Americans in state prisons for drug offenses has fallen sharply, while the number of white prisoners convicted for drug crimes has increased, according to a report released yesterday.

The D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported that the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses had fallen from 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005, a 22 percent decline. In that period, the number of white drug offenders rose steadily, from about 50,000 to more than 72,000, a 43 percent increase. The number of Latino drug offenders was virtually unchanged at about 51,000.

This seems to leave us with roughly the same aggregate level of people in prison, so ultimately it’s hard to see this as an enormous advance. One can hope, though, that more white folks in prison may help boost the political momentum for prison reform. Better policies really could give us less crime, less punishment, and less inhumane conditions for those who are in prison.

Senator Jim Webb Calls for Prison Reform

Jim Webb’s talked about prison reform before, and now is prepared to take action on the issue with a new bill. The introductory document notes that “with 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses 25% of the world’s reported prisoners” and “four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.” This fact, in particular, seems unlikely to be an effective or humane way of dealing with the issue. The legislation’s specific mandate is for not much more than the creation of a national commission on the issue. But I think that’s a good idea. The politics of trying to turn this around are treacherous, but my impression is that there’s actually a lot of common ground that people who’ve analyzed this issue seriously find themselves reaching.

A few favorite points on the issue:

– Obviously, mentally ill people should be getting treatment for their mental illness; it’s quite possible that with treatment many of these people would be no danger to anyone.

– An effective parole system could keep criminals who are also drug addicts off drugs, and thus sharply reduce their proclivity to commit crimes, without the financial or human costs involved in keeping them incarcerated over the long term.

– At the margin, it’s better to fight crime by having police officers patrolling the streets than by expanding the number of people in prison.

– Insofar as drug use is criminalized, it’s still possible to target actual law enforcement in the first instance at people involved in violent criminal enterprises.

– Overcrowded prisons are unsafe, which encourages people to join gangs which, since the prisoners get out eventually, makes the crime problem worse.

– Sentence lengths should be better-calibrated to reflect actual research on preventing crime rather than pure moralistic outrage. Keeping a person who’s likely to commit violent crimes in prison is an effective crime-control tactic, but we need to focus on people who are actually likely to commit violent crimes. Many people in prison have already aged out of the period at which violent crime is likely.

There seems to be some interest on the Hill in this bill so hopefully something will happen.

The Case for Less Incarceration

Ross Douthat lauds the success of mass incarceration at contributing to reduced crime rates, but rightly observes that the time has come to ease up on this enormously ethically problematic approach:

But as you might expect, a policy turn undertaken during a period of emergency will eventually produce diminishing returns – as Steven Levitt puts it, “the two-millionth criminal imprisoned is likely to impose a much smaller crime burden on society than the first prisoner” – even as it imposes substantial moral costs. And precisely because the tough-on-crime approach was largely vindicated by events, it’s extremely difficult for elected officials to walk back from some of the dubious practices that have grown up around it – like, say, the possibly cruel-and-unusual use of long-term solitary confinement.

I think the most promising solution here is to replace funding for ever-growing prisons with funding for other measures that are just as indubitably “tough” on crime. Most of all, more police officers. At this point, there are very good reasons to believe that an extra cop would have more crime control impact than additional prisoners, and preventing crime by having cops on the street deterring bad behavior and perhaps convincing criminals to find some other way of getting money is a lot more socially beneficial than preventing crime by letting criminals commit bad acts, and then locking them up for years.