Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer

Author:Marc Mauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2010-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

DIMINISHING RETURNS

A second critical factor that limits the utility of imprisonment as a means of controlling crime emerges from a close examination of the continuing increases in the institutional population over the past quarter century. Essentially, as the prison population has escalated, the offenders who are locked up are ever-less serious offenders on average than in previous years. The result: diminishing returns in crime control.

In order to understand this, consider the workings of any court system. A state legislature trying to “toughen” its sentencing policies can accomplish the goal in one of two ways. As noted in Chapter 2, either a greater proportion of convicted offenders can be sentenced to prison or those who are sentenced to prison can be required to stay longer. If the latter strategy is undertaken, the legislature will run up against the limitations imposed by the demographics of crime: crime rates tend to diminish with age, resulting in diminishing returns for a longer-sentence strategy. (We will return to this issue later.) The option of choosing to send a greater number of offenders to prison, though, has its own set of diminishing returns, too.

If a choice is made to increase the number of offenders receiving a prison term, relatively few additional violent offenders who are not already receiving a prison term will be sentenced to one. At the same time, considerably greater numbers of nonviolent property and drug offenders will be brought in. Though the public generally places a priority on using prison cells for violent offenders, a policy to imprison more offenders would likely have the opposite impact: greater numbers of nonviolent offenders would be locked up.

The reasons why greater numbers of less serious offenders are locked up over time is clearest in the realm of drug offenses. The typical drug ring consists of a handful of “kingpins” at the top of the distribution network, a modest number of wholesalers in the mid-levels, and large numbers of street-level sellers. On those relatively rare occasions when kingpins are apprehended, they are virtually always sentenced to harsh prison terms, as are most of the wholesalers. So by insisting on a dramatic increase in the number of drug offenders in prison, as states have since 1980, they ensure that the vast majority of new prisoners will be lower-level offenders.

As we saw in Chapter 2, a substantial portion of the rise in the inmate population for the period 1985-2000 consisted of drug offenders—28 percent at the state level and 65 percent at the federal level. This increase has been disproportionately felt by African Americans: 37 percent of the prison population increase from 1985 to 2000 among blacks nationally consisted of drug offenders.5

Looking at California, a state that quadrupled its prison population in the decade 1980-90, we see similar dynamics. While 60 percent of state prison inmates in 1980 had been committed to prison for a violent offense, only 27 percent of the additional prison space added in the following ten years was used to incarcerate violent offenders.6

The phenomenon of diminishing returns has a substantial impact on the value of prison as a crime control tool.

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