Abstract
Questions and answers about incapacitation abound in all discussions about criminal justice policy. They are among the most pressing of all research issues, yet estimates about the incapacitation effect on crime vary considerably, and most are based on very old and incomplete estimates of the longitudinal pattern of criminal careers. This paper provides an overview of the incapacitation issue, highlights information on recent estimates of criminal careers that are useful to the incapacitation model, and outlines an ambitious research agenda for continued and expanded work on incapacitation and crime that centers on developing better estimates of the characteristics of criminal careers and their relevance to policy choices.
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Notes
Because neither approach inherently dominates the other, the combined use of both approaches is likely to be more useful (Zimring and Hawkins 1995).
I can be thought of as the percentage increase in crime that would result if all offenders (or all offenders of a certain type) were released. Also, I must be adjusted downwards to account for the fact that, when co-offenders commit a crime, imprisoning both will only save one offense (Weatherburn et al. 2006, p. 3).
E also has to be adjusted for co-offending.
To be sure, criminologists have spent considerable effort tracking individual patterns of offending by many other offenders over the life course, using a number of recent and important methodological advances. We return to this point later.
The high and low estimates of the average resulted from applying two different consistency standards to classify unreliable estimates.
Texas had a much higher rate of imprisonment so that high-rate offenders made up a larger proportion of the California prison population than of the Texas prison population. California’s estimates are so high because they are a function of the relatively low level of imprisonment; Texas mixes in a greater number of low-rate offenders; but there is a phenomenon of diminishing marginal returns: as long as most high-rate offenders are already in prison, then offenders at the margin of imprisonment will have much lower average crime rates than those already in prison (Zimring and Hawkins 1988, p. 432).
Greenberg (1990) also noted that Zedlewski overestimated the benefits of imprisonment because he assumed the estimate of 187 crimes was true for everyone, when in fact, it should have pertained only to that fraction of the subject population that reported committing the particular felonies under consideration. Yet, 53.3% of the prison inmates said that they had not committed any of those crimes (these inmates had committed crimes that were not among those listed). Thus, according to Greenberg, the appropriate mean offense rate for the prison sample is not 187 offenses per year, but (187)(0.467) = 87.3 property offenses per year (see also Rolph and Chaiken 1987).
Using official arrest rates, Blumstein and Cohen (1979, p. 582) found λ for index crimes to be 13.2, while Cohen (1983) provided an estimate of 8.7 and Greenberg an estimate of 3. Shinnar and Shinnar reported a λ between 6 and 14 for reported crimes. These estimates are smaller than those from self-reports because of the survey instrument used, the assumptions underlying calculations of arrest probabilities, and the sample differences.
The problem is that a sample of inmates arriving in prison is likely to display a higher mean frequency of offending than is the population of all offenders. Zedlewski used the λ estimates derived from prisoner samples to represent offending by unincarcerated offenders without recognition of the potentially severe distortion that introduces. Especially in light of the high skewness of the λ distribution, high-λ offenders distort the mean considerably, and since these individuals are a much smaller fraction of the total population of offenders, it is misleading to use the mean λ of prisoners to represent the mean for the total population of offenders.
This is a specific example where knowledge about individual offending careers can help understand the potential impact of incarceration policies.
The incapacitation model also has a number of other important input quantities including the probability of being apprehended and convicted, the probability of receiving a prison sentence, and the average time spent in prison. While information on incarceration given arrest is likely easier to obtain, information on individual estimates of risk of arrest per offense committed does not exist, within offenders, over time, and by crime type. Longitudinal studies with data on both self-reports of crime and of arrest are needed for such an assessment.
A related point concerns the assumption that career length is exponentially distributed. There has been only very limited work concerning the extent to which career lengths do in fact follow an exponential distribution.
This raises another caution about using aggregate data to arrive at incapacitation estimates because the probability of arrest varies across crime type and jurisdictions (and over time) as does the probability of incarceration which is constrained by local jail and prison conditions (Cohen 1986, p. 409). For example, Spelman (2000a, pp. 473–476) shows that states differ considerably in the strategies they pursue. Some states incarcerate a small proportion of their offenders but do so for long terms, while other states incarcerate more offenders for shorter terms (Spelman 2000a, p. 473). Moreover, states may alter these strategies and decisions over time, by making selections to give prison sentences differentially according to crime type. As Blumstein et al. (1986, pp. 148–149) show, not only do crime rates and prison use vary by states and over time, but so too does the probability of prison given crime, and the median time served in prison. These, of course, influence the cost/benefit ratios from incapacitation and yield different elasticity estimates.
It should also be recognized that λ is not merely a scalar value, but a vector representing the offending frequency over a mixture of crime types. If one took it over six crime types (murder, robbery, rape, assault, burglary, and larceny), one would cover over three quarters of the non-drug offenders in US prisons. We have omitted drug offenses here because we recognize that their incapacitation effect is likely to be nullified through the recruitment of replacements in the community.
In their critique of the incapacitation approach, the main issue raised by Miles and Ludwig is that it offers no useful information to policymakers because of “insurmountable” practical and conceptual problems. They argue that the primary policy implication of the measurement of λ is selective incapacitation, and that even if estimates of λ accurately identified the highest risk offenders with sufficient speed to permit the justice system to prevent the commission of crimes, λ estimates would still have limited use to decision-makers because few criminal justice policies have selective incapacitation as their goal. They fail to acknowledge that incapacitation research is focused largely on “collective incapacitation” and has largely ignored selective incapacitation, recognizing that “stochastic selectivity” achieves many of the same goals without incurring the problems. Noting that criminal justice policies include deterrence and replacement in addition to incapacitation, they conclude that micro-parameter estimates are unlikely to provide useful guides about the combined effects of deterrence, incapacitation, and replacement effects from a particular change, since the bundle of effects produced is likely to be specific to the policy change in question. A single estimate of λ would provide incomplete and potentially even misleading information for policymakers forced to choose among these different policy options. Policy is not typically driven by any single value of λ, but rather a range and by the insights derived from the various relevant parameters. Additionally, Miles and Ludwig write as if policymakers are more likely to consider and adopt information from the aggregate approach. They claim that the aggregate approach is straightforward and ultimately more useful to criminal justice policymakers because it encourages lawmakers to consider changes in sanction policy to look for rigorous evaluations of the net effects of similar policy changes implemented in other jurisdictions. But experience with policymakers makes it clear that they do not want “take-it-or-leave-it” parameter estimates; rather, they need the insights that derive from a complex area of research. Further, Miles and Ludwig make it seem as if a policymaker would adopt the econometric approach and resultant estimates because they are based on a single policy experiment, but they do not fully appreciate that what may work in one jurisdiction may not work in another. On this score, recall that results from the original domestic experiment in Minneapolis showed that arrest deterred subsequent domestic violence. In the six replications that followed however, arrest deterred in certain jurisdictions but backfired in others, and the effect of arrest was contingent on particular offender characteristics. Given that policy experiments of the sort advocated by Miles and Ludwig are likely to have particular effects in particular jurisdictions, because each jurisdiction has a unique makeup of crime types and offender characteristics, it is unclear how the aggregate level information will be any more influential or better than micro-level information.
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Piquero, A.R., Blumstein, A. Does Incapacitation Reduce Crime?. J Quant Criminol 23, 267–285 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-007-9030-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-007-9030-6