Crime and criminal justice in the United States Jens Ludwig University of Chicago & NBER

Composition of state prisons in US by offense (Source: Marshall Project calculations for the 1.3 million people in state prisons) Many people believe much / most of the growth in incarceration in the US due to war on drugs, but our best estimates suggest that changes in incarceration of drug offenses accounts for “only” about one-third of overall increase in prison population over the last several decades. We have been increasing incarceration rates for all sorts of crimes across the board, including violent crimes, which as you can see in this graph accounts for a majority of the people detained in the largest segment of our incarcerated population – state prisons (1.3M people)

The fact that violent offenders account for a large share of all prison inmates begins to highlight the challenge that we have moving forward. Many people have come to conclude that crime, including violent crime, is itself no longer a problem in the US because of the overall decline we have seen in homicide rates in the US as a whole over the past 20 years

But that decline in the overal US homicide rate (shown here over past 25 years by the blue line at the bottom) masks tremendous variability across places. Look at the trends here by city, what do we notice about places like Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland, St Louis – their homicide rates today are not that much different from what they were in the early 1990s. People living in those cities are looking around at the tragedies that occur daily in their communities and asking themselves “WHAT crime drop?” Note also what is a shared feature of the cities I mention – they are disproprotionately home to some of the most economically and socially vulnerable people in American society

We can see this across neighborhoods within my home city of Chicago as well; where is the violent crime problem concentrated? In the most economically and racially segregated neighborhoods of the city’s south and west sides, where we see homicide rates of the sort that you see in some of the most dangerous central american and south american countries

One implication is that as we work to reduce the scale of incarceration in the US, that has to be balanced against the desire to not exercabate the other side of this problem, which is violent crime. Note BOTH of these problems – incarceration and violence – are very regressive in their impacts, so if we get this balance wrong this could turn out to be just a zero-sum game where we alleviate some of the burden of imprisonment on disadvantaged communities but at the costs of exacerbating the impact of violence

Prevention: Scalable but not very effective Efforts to reduce income poverty

Prevention: Effective but of unknown scalability Efforts to strengthen human capital (ex) Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man in Chicago, 50% reductions in violent crime arrests

Prevention: Effective and scalable I am thinking of an intervention that- Is very scalable Shown in numerous high-quality studies to work Prevents crime (less crime without more detention) Make distributional point- Crime concentrated in poorest areas (mostly intra- not inter-racial and within not across social class lines, at least for violent crime) Advocates think they are pushing for progressive policy to reduce disparities by arguing that marginal person in prison has no effect on crime But that is not an evidence-based view (in my opinion) Creates real risk of becoming a REGRESSIVE policy by leading people to think we can cut prison populations WITHOUT having to reinvest any of the savings in other forms of crime control, would widen disparities in well being (rich white people get tax cut while low income african american and hispanic people experience increased crime)

Prevention: Effective and scalable I am thinking of an intervention that- Is very scalable Shown in numerous high-quality studies to work Prevents crime (less crime without more detention) But would require us to put politics aside Make distributional point- Crime concentrated in poorest areas (mostly intra- not inter-racial and within not across social class lines, at least for violent crime) Advocates think they are pushing for progressive policy to reduce disparities by arguing that marginal person in prison has no effect on crime But that is not an evidence-based view (in my opinion) Creates real risk of becoming a REGRESSIVE policy by leading people to think we can cut prison populations WITHOUT having to reinvest any of the savings in other forms of crime control, would widen disparities in well being (rich white people get tax cut while low income african american and hispanic people experience increased crime)

Question What is a more likely (and more socially productive) path to reducing incarceration? Dramatically reducing imprisonment for violent-crime inmates in current US political climate? Dramatically reducing the amount of violent crime?