As I was driving to work today, I listened with great intrigue to the new Freakonomics podcast. I'm a huge fan of those Freakonomics guys. The first full episode of their brand new podcast poses the question "what do Nascar drivers, NFL "hitmen", and Glenn Beck have in common?" That alone was intriguing. The answer to this question is what Steve Levitt refers to as the Peltzman Effect (named after a University of Chicago professor Sam Peltzman). The Peltzman Effect arises when people adjust their behavior to a regulation in ways that counteract the intended effect of the regulation. So, for example, with safer, "death proof" cars, Nascar drivers have become more dangerous in their racing habits. And with great strides made in improving safety gear for sports such as football, the players have responded by taking greater risks on the field, which in turn ironically leads to greater probability of injury. So what struck me as I was listening to this is that perhaps prison is a Peltzman Effect. Historically, America's experiment with mass incarceration was a response to skyrocketing crime rates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But ironically as mass incarceration eventually led to a leveling off (and eventual decrease during the late 1990s) of the crime rate, perhaps the unintended and collateral consequences of mass incarceration will soon lead to increases in the crime rate. Thus, what was intended to make us more safe as a society (and did so for a period of time), may actually make us more unsafe in the long run. We haven't seen large increases in the crime rate yet (in fact crime rates are still falling in many cities nationwide), but many criminologists speculate that this may be on the way. There is a whole literature on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, including an observed propensity towards criminal behavior for children of incarcerated parents. Several criminologists have also studied the negative impacts that high incarceration rates have on certain (primarily urban) communities. And then there are those researchers who study prisoner reentry, noting that offenders returning to the community after a significant period of incarceration may face obstacles that can actually facilitate their return to criminal behavior. Those who study the impact of prison on crime more generally, have found that, on the whole, a period of incarceration tends to have more of a criminogenic than a deterrent effect (although the verdict is still out on this). Speaking in the technical language of researchers who study the prison-crime relationship, the problem with simply examining correlations between crime rates and incarceration rates is that these correlations suffers from endogeneity (or simultaneity). Absent truly experimental evidence, this problem is a hard one to overcome methodologically. The problem is that there are good reasons to believe that crime rates impact imprisonment rates and conversely that imprisonment rates impact crime rates. If we lock up more people when crime goes up (i.e., crime rates primarily impact imprisonment rates), then we'd expect to observe a positive correlation between crime rates and imprisonment rates. But if prison serves to reduce crime (either through a deterrent or incapacitative effect), then we would expect the correlation between prison and crime to be negative. So how do we disentangle this relationship? Well...that's for another post. My point is that perhaps mass incarceration will one day come to be known as a Peltzman Effect.
Speaking of ironies, I read a criminal justice news story the other day that struck me as ironic. The story comes from the state of California (a state that is no stranger to ironies). Apparently in California a new piece of legislation has created a type of parole supervision referred to as "non-revokable parole". This is most likely in response to California having the highest technical parole violator rate in the country. Under "non-revokable parole", the only way that a parolee can be returned to prison is by being prosecuted through the court system for committing a new crime. No technical parole violations can be given out. Why this strikes me as ironic is that this type of approach to parole supervision seems to fly in the face of the central premises of the popular new book by UCLA professor Mark Kleiman entitled "When Brute Force Fails". I've actually been looking for an opportunity to write on Kleiman's book so here it goes. In the book, Kleiman applies the age-old principles of deterrence theory to a community corrections setting. In classical deterrence theory, punishment must be certain, severe, and swift in order to be effective. Kleiman, like other recent criminologists, finds that certainty and swiftness are far more effective than severity. In fact, severity is often the enemy of certainty and swiftness since certainty and swiftness are sacrificed almost by necessity (at least in our current criminal justice system) as the severity of the proposed sanction increases. This idea is particularly germane to probationers and parolees. Kleiman points to a successful experiment in Hawaii (the H.O.P.E. project) as evidence that minor punishments for technical violators (e.g., a weekend or week in jail at most) can be extremely effective in reducing recidivism if delivered swiftly and with a high degree of certainty. If monitoring of probationers/parolees is increased (e.g., weekly random drug tests, GPS monitoring, etc.), expectations are outlined to probationers/parolees in advance, and every infraction is punished immediately, the evidence suggests that even hardcore meth addicts can change their behavior without treatment. The underlying principles of this approach are actually quite common-sense to any person who has ever raised a child or a puppy. Evidence in support of these principles have also been demonstrated in policing experiments going back more than a decade. All of this evidence suggests that careful monitoring and sanctioning of parolees can stimulate conforming behavior. Technical violations can be a particularly effective tool in the toolbag because they can be delivered swiftly and frequently without court processing. So it is ironic that the the spokesman for this type of approach is a prominent professor at a California-based university (UCLA), and yet California has just gone the opposite direction by implementing "non-revokable parole". Personally, I wonder what is even the point of "non-revokable parole". If parole agents can only "arrest" for new crimes and now must go through the court system in order to prosecute, then it strikes me that (a) parole agents are now just cops and (b) parole supervision has a lower chance of being a deterrent since the certainty and swiftness of sanctioning will in all likelihood decline.
To tie it all together in one final ironic twist, it may be the case that while prison is generally not a deterrent (and may in fact have a "Peltzman Effect" by actually increasing crime), it may be a significant deterrent for parole violators if delivered correctly.
