Title: Perspectives on Crime and Justice Lecture Series 1999-2000 Series: Research Forum Author: National Institute of Justice Published: March 2001 Subject: Sentencing; crime patterns and future trends; drug abuse and crime; gun violence; program evaluation 117 pages 240,000 bytes ------------------ Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site or order a print copy from NCJRS at 800-851-3420 (877-712-9279 For TTY users). ------------------ U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice Perspectives on Crime and Justice:1999-2000 Lecture Series Volume IV March 2001 National Institute of Justice U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs 810 Seventh Street N.W. Washington, DC 20531 Office of Justice Programs World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov National Institute of Justice World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij To find out more information about the National Institute of Justice, please contact: National Criminal Justice Reference Service P.O. Box 6000 Rockville, MD 20849-6000 800-851-3420 e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org National Institute of Justice Perspectives on Crime and Justice:1999-2000 Lecture Series Franklin Zimring Richard B. Freeman William A. Vega Lawrence W. Sherman Heather B. Weiss March 2001 NCJ 184245 NIJ Amy Mazzocco Program Monitor The Professional Conference Series of the National Institute of Justice supports a variety of live, researcher-practitioner exchanges, such as conferences, workshops, planning and development meetings, and similar support to the criminal justice field. The Research Forum publication series was designed to share information about this and other forums with a larger audience. Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice. Preface Policy discussions and debates about crime and justice are too often reduced to buzzwords and emotional charges and countercharges that voice ideologies rather than ideas. It is understandable that crime and justice evoke intense feelings. A great deal is at stake: the safety of our communities--even matters of life and death. This makes it all the more important that discussion and debate should be reasoned, conducted dispassionately at the highest level of political discourse, and informed by sound and scientifically based research. The Perspectives on Crime and Justice lecture series was designed to create an opportunity for policymakers and researchers to take time to reflect on the latest and best research on topical issues of crime and justice. Through this series, NIJ has for the past 3 years presented discussions by some of the Nation's most prominent scholars in criminology and related disciplines. The remarkable series of speakers continued this year. We heard from Franklin Zimring on the politics of punishment, Richard B. Freeman on the relationship between unemployment and crime, William A. Vega on the relationship between immigration and crime, Lawrence W. Sherman on strategies to reduce gun violence, and Heather B. Weiss on reinventing evaluation to improve child and family interventions. The lectures from this series, published here, are intended to elevate the level of debate and bring the results and implications of current research to the attention of decisionmakers at every level of government. ------------------ Contents Preface Lecture 1: The New Politics of Criminal Justice: Of "Three Strikes," Truth-in-Sentencing, and Megan's Laws Franklin Zimring, J.D. Lecture 2: Does the Booming Economy Help Explain the Fall in Crime? Richard B. Freeman, Ph.D. Lecture 3: A Profile of Crime, Violence, and Drug Use Among Mexican Immigrants William A. Vega, D.Crim. Lecture 4: Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising Lawrence W. Sherman, Ph.D. Lecture 5: Reinventing Evaluation to Build High-Performance Child and Family Interventions Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D. ------------------ The New Politics of Criminal Justice: Of "Three Strikes," Truth-in-Sentencing, and Megan's Laws Presentation by Franklin Zimring Professor The Earl Warren Legal Institute University of California at Berkeley December 8, 1999 Washington, D.C. What are the changing political conditions that have been driving the legislative process on issues of crime and punishment in the United States in recent years? First, crime is a more important legislative issue than ever before at both State and Federal Government levels. Second, rather than following a cyclical pattern in which major new laws might relieve the need for further action in the immediate future, the pressure for punitive legislation is more persistent than ever before. Finally, the politics of criminal punishment in the 1990s is characterized by hostility toward not only criminals but also government officials. The changing politics of criminal punishment have had a major influence on the volume of new punishment laws and on their content since the mid-1980s. Although scholars and practitioners are aware of the new political environment of criminal justice, it has rarely been a central topic of scholarly analysis. I will discuss several major themes relating to the new politics of punishment, hoping that this introduction will tempt others to investigate these matters in greater depth. A variety of punishment laws are emerging from State and Federal legislative bodies, fueled by a political environment that is more crime centered, more polymorphously punitive, and more distrustful of government than the traditional politics of American criminal justice. Products of this new climate include "three strikes and you're out" laws (enacted by 25 States and the Federal Government within a 2 1/2-year period), truth-in-sentencing reforms, Megan's Law disclosures, "10-20-life" mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes, and chemical castration schemes. Rather than diminishing the pressure for further punitive changes, one punitive political success seems to pave the way for others. My survey of this new politics comes in four installments. First, I cast doubt on two theories that explain the cause of this new political atmosphere: the "crime wave" and "mad as hell" explanations. Second, I describe three characteristics of the new politics that have helped shape penal legislation. Third, I offer my theory of the causes of recent political change. Finally, I suggest promising ways to limit the negative impact of the new politics on criminal justice. Two Simple Explanations According to two popular explanations, the intense new politics of punishment is (1) a result of rising crime rates or (2) the product of increasing citizen hostility toward criminals. Neither explanation fits well with recent American history. The bulk of the U.S. violent crime increase occurred between 1964 and 1974, when the homicide rate doubled. Between 1974 and 1980 homicide rates declined, then climbed up to the 1974 level in 1980, dropped through 1984, and climbed again through 1991. This crime pattern does not follow the punitive policies pattern on either the upside or the downside. Despite the "crime in the streets" theme of the 1968 presidential election, the U.S. prison population declined through 1972, and there was little legislative activity on punishment at the State level. When sentencing reform heated up in the mid-1970s, there was little of the strident punitive emphasis that later characterized the new politics of punishment. By the time the punitive political setting had developed, the sharp increase in crime of the 1960s and early 1970s had been history for a decade. The new political paradigm also was not closely linked to the crime rate on the downside. Crime has been declining in the United States since 1991, and the cumulative impact of that decline was more substantial by 1998 than in any earlier post-World War II period. Yet, the political pressure for new punitive responses has not let up significantly. Instead, the politics of punishment has become a version of "heads I win, tails you lose," in which decreases in crime are evidence that hard-line punishments work, whereas increases are evidence that they are needed. The sustained crime drops of the 1990s have not produced an era of good feeling. For example, the continued angry pressure for hard-line responses to juvenile offenders persisted in 1998 and 1999 in the face of the sharpest drop in juvenile crimes on record from 1994 to 1998. The juvenile crime pattern is typical. The second popular theory of the origins of the harsh new politics of penal policy fits the historical record better than reaction to rising crime rates but still seems quite unsatisfactory. The driving force of this version is the hostility of the public to crime and criminals. In the famous phrase from the motion picture "Network," the man in the street is suddenly "mad as hell and not gonna take this anymore." This theory shifts attention from variations in crime rates to variations in the public mood about crime, an important plus for the mad-as-hell approach. The timing is more flexible too, because it takes time for citizen anger to be aroused and more time for anger to be channeled into political action. But this explanation for political change wrongly assumes that the man in the street 30 years ago did not think burglars and robbers should be locked up. We suspect that populist attitudes about most crime and most criminals always have been consistently negative in the United States. Yet if hostility and punitive preference are nearly constant over time, populist sentiments cannot explain the recent sharp change in the political climate. It seems more likely that citizen fear and anger are necessary conditions that have been present all along and have interacted with other changes in recent times to generate a distinctive new political climate. I will return to this matter. Three Characteristics of the New Political Landscape Before advancing my own theories of cause, I would like to single out three characteristics of the recent politics of punishment that deserve special attention: (1) the loose link between the symbolism and the implementation of punishment laws, (2) the zero-sum rhetoric supporting punishment proposals, and (3) the paradoxical politics of distrust in penal legislation. Loose Linkage Legislation concerning criminal punishment serves two very different public purposes. One is the symbolic denunciation of crime and criminals, a statement of condemnation that enables the political community to make its detestation of crime manifest in legal form. A second public purpose is to change the behavior of courts, prisons, or parole authorities. For most members of the public, symbolism is the most important aspect of penal legislation. Therefore, no profound linkage is needed between symbolic legislation and major changes in the way the system punishes criminals. This loose link between symbolic and operational impacts has traditionally allowed new criminal laws to bark much louder than they bite, to satisfy the need for symbols of denunciation without making much difference in the penalties meted out to most offenders. But recent events have shown that the loose connection between symbolic and operational impacts can work both ways. The U.S. Federal system and California enacted laws labeled "three strikes and you're out" in 1994. By late 1998 the U.S. Federal statute resulted in 35 special prison sentences, while the California law produced more than 40,000 special sentences. The difference is more than a thousandfold. In other words, laws serving the same symbolic function can produce very different results in different settings. The Federal law was traditional in that it barked louder than it bit. The California law, on the other hand, bit louder than it barked because 90 percent of California's enhanced prison sentences were given not to people who had two prior convictions (strikes) but to offenders who had only one prior conviction. The law was 10 times as broad as its label, "three strikes and you're out." When citizens are concerned more with the symbolism of penal laws than with their results, the same rhetoric can lead to very different operational law reforms. In such cases, the practical impact of new penal laws is determined more by who controls the planning and drafting processes and what they want than by the level of public support for labels like three strikes. And those who wish to maximize impact can ride slogans a long way. The California version of three strikes has resulted in 9 times as many prison terms as all of the 25 other three-strikes laws combined. The chronically loose link between symbolic and operational impact will lead to high-stakes competition for control of legislative drafting as a recurrent phenomenon in the politics of modern criminal justice. The Zero-Sum Fallacy A second feature of the recent politics of punishment also concerns the relationship between the symbolic and the operational aspects of penal law. The rhetoric supporting new punishment proposals in current politics often seems to assume that criminals and crime victims are engaged in a zero-sum contest: Anything that hurts offenders by definition helps victims. If the competition between victims and offenders is like a football game, then any detriment to the offender team helps the victim's score. The zero-sum assumption also conveniently avoids questions about exactly how (and to what extent) measures that hurt criminal offenders might also help their victims. The law of equivalent benefit in true zero-sum settings implies that anything that hurts the other team helps the competition in equal measure. Therefore, to choose punishment policy in a true zero-sum setting, a citizen must simply decide whether she prefers victims or offenders. What makes this approach illogical is the fact that crime and criminal justice is not a zero-sum game. When victims of violent crime are given public funds to compensate them for their economic losses, does that benefit automatically hurt criminal offenders? Of course it does not, because there is no zero-sum relationship to government policy toward criminal punishment and crime victims. But assuming there is one generates a justification for endless cycles of increased suffering on false grounds. Perhaps some believe that the symbolic denunciation of offenders always supports the social standing of crime victims, but that does not mean that the pain of punishment creates equal and opposite reactions in victims. The Paradoxical Politics of Government Distrust The punishment of criminals is at root an exercise of government power. It might, therefore, seem reasonable that citizen support for harsh measures against criminals would rise with increasing citizen trust in government and that citizen support for excessive punishments would decline when confidence in government falls off. In this interpretation, support for harsh punishment would be a disease of excess confidence in state authority. But the recent pattern is the opposite: Support for mandatory penalties and truth-in-sentencing laws increases with additional distrust of, for example, parole officials, judges, and other professionals meting out punishment. Distrust in government can raise the stakes in criminal punishment policy. Citizens worry that judges will identify with offenders and treat them with inappropriate leniency. A bad judge in this view "coddles" criminals and thus acts against the interests of the ordinary citizen. The imposition of stern penal measures such as the mandatory punishment term guards against such governmental weakness. But the mandatory term is a huge expansion of punishment, rendering excessive outcomes in many cases to ensure sufficiency of punishment in a very few that might otherwise escape their just deserts. Such huge inefficiency is the hallmark of the three-strikes law in California and of truth-in-sentencing reforms generally. The politics of distrust links Megan's Law (which allows citizens rather than just police access to information on sex offenders' addresses) to three strikes and to truth in sentencing. Megan's Law reflects distrust of police, three-strikes and mandatory sentences reflect distrust of judges, and truth in sentencing reflects distrust of parole authorities. The Punishment Lobby and Structural Shifts If fear of crime and hostility toward criminals are persistent features of public opinion, what accounts for the intense new phase of the politics of punishment? I suggest two changes in political conditions relating to punishment policy that have interacted with broader changes in State and local politics to create an altered political climate. The first is the growth of single-issue lobbies dedicated to criminal punishment issues. The second is the reduced distance between the symbolic politics of crime and the locations in government where punishments are set. The single-issue punishment lobby is a new element in American State politics. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was one early example in the 1980s. Victims' rights organizations came on the scene in the late 1980s. In California, we have a prison guards' union with a strong pecuniary interest in expanding the scale of imprisonment and a large budget for political contributions. Single-issue lobbies have changed the politics of punishment in several ways. They have mobilized citizen fear and hostility, shaping these emotions into a hard-line consensus for additional punitive legislation. In addition, many of these groups--for example, the guards' union and the authors of the California three-strikes law--care about not only the symbols of punishment but also making punishment more severe. Truth-in-sentencing legislation, like mandatory minimum penalties, is another reform designed to create the maximum impact on prison populations. The job of the results-oriented lobby is to push the public consensus into legislative directions where big operational changes are produced. Finally, single-issue lobbies keep the pot constantly boiling. For example, after the three-strikes law was enacted in California, prime mover Mike Reynolds was in danger of working himself out of a job. Without a pending issue, his political importance was in question. So within months, he had introduced a 10-20-life set of mandatory minimum penalties for crimes committed with firearms. When a version of this proposal passed in California, he worked for its enactment in other States. If he had not, he would have needed still another new proposal or been relegated to the sidelines. I believe that the work of single-issue lobbies to keep the political pot boiling destabilizes the jurisprudence of criminal punishment. Layers of new law are added on top of others like stalactites and stalagmites in limestone caves. By 1999 the layers of legislation that determine criminal punishment in California are as unintegrated and collectively unprincipled as any penal code in the developed world--and subject to change without notice. Structural shifts in the governmental organization of punishments have multiplied the impact of lobbies in State legislatures. Such shifts rendered California vulnerable to a three-strikes revolution of maximum impact. The gap between largely symbolic legislation and the operational setting where punishments were determined was traditionally maintained by the power of expert bodies and legal actors to influence punishments. Sentencing was the province of judges, and power over prison release was in the hands of parole authorities. Removing the authority of parole agencies in the 1970s and putting legislatures in charge of determining punishment for individual offenses and offenders drastically reduced the insulation between democratic politics and the governance of punishment. A key function was relocated from the professional to the political arena. Once that occurred in California in 1977, for three strikes to pass was only a matter of the right groups learning to exploit the vulnerabilities of the new governmental organization of punishment. The deprofessionalization of setting punishment started long before the single-issue lobbies grew powerful, but the two are interacting in some jurisdictions to destabilize punishment levels in a new way. The mandatory minimum sentence is the nuclear weapon of the new politics of crime because it purports to remove any discretion from the sentencer in punishing individuals prosecuted for committing mandatory-term crimes. This disempowers judges and makes the identity of the offender irrelevant to the punishment imposed. In practice, the prosecutor simply assumes powers that prosecutors and judges had shared. In theory, however, choosing punishment becomes nonprofessional and entirely under the control of democratic politics. Broad mandatory minimum laws patterned after California's three-strikes law are the ultimate extreme of politicized punishment. They can be mitigated by prosecutorial discretion, but they otherwise make the enterprise of criminal sentencing a nonprofessional act. Criminal sentencing becomes the province of politics, not professional expertise. There is no insulation between political sentiment and the principles of criminal sentencing. Limiting the Negative Impact of the New Politics What are the countermeasures to unitary and extreme political control of punishment? One focus ought to be on separating individual punishment decisions from general sentiments about crime. The legislature that enacts a penal code should rarely, if ever, decide what prison sentence a person convicted of an offense should serve prior to release. This blending of the general and the particular invites disaster. I have similar reservations about binding general rules promulgated by sentencing commissions. A second focus should be insulating the sentencing of offenders far from political sentiments by interposing expert institutions. Sentencing commissions in several States can be seen as deliberate attempts to create new expert institutions as insulation between politics and punishment. But sentencing commissions are both a risk and a benefit as insulators because they often attempt to restrict discretion in individual cases. The sentencing judge is a key expert in a defense against a populist politics of punishment. In any legal system based on proportionality in criminal punishments, individual decisions and individual discretions are necessary. Judicial discretion was one early casualty of the politics of governmental distrust back when distrust of government was a theme from the Left rather than the Right. Nothing could have been further from the intentions of those early critics than most of the laws and policies produced by the new politics of the 1990s. But the unintended consequences of the shift to determinate sentences may greatly increase the operational impact of a punitive regime if it occurs. It is my belief that structural remedies will be more effective than appeals to reason in the politics of crime. Damage control almost always is the first priority in the democratic politics of punishment. Creating distance between symbolic legislation and the determination of punishment in particular cases is the best hope currently available for a sustained program of damage control. These structural approaches are much more than just mechanical tinkering. Keeping the symbolic and operational spheres of criminal punishment separate confronts the duality of criminal punishment in an appropriate and fundamental way. Question-and-Answer Session Elizabeth Fraser, Institute for Law and Justice, Alexandria, Virginia: I learned recently that a couple of the Northwestern States have State legislation that moves sentencing decisions for revocations of parole into the correctional side, rather than requiring them to go back to the court. When there is revocation by sentenced offenders, they go back to the parole body that watches over them and have a hearing under that authority rather than going to the court. Do you think having sentencing decisions go to the correctional authorities is an improvement? F.Z.: In general, if there is a principled rationale for it, I am greatly in favor of "back end" power in determining correctional stays and questions like revocation because of the "dual currency" phenomenon. When you are sentencing a criminal, you are doing two things at the same time: you are condemning crime, making it perfectly clear how terrible the offender is and how innocent and worthy of community support the victim is; you are also deciding how you should allocate a scarce resource like prison time, how dangerous the offender is, and whether he rather than the next person you are going to judge should deserve an extra year in the State prison system. Those are an awful lot of agendas to juggle. The sentencing judge is making a "front end" decision, one that is closer to the crime and further removed from the time when a person gets out of prison. In traditional parole, a "time to be served" decision was made after the dust had settled and closer to the time that release might occur. The notion that you could maintain the focus on operational impact was an advantage of parole (particularly when people were sentenced to very long terms) that we never noticed until we started abolishing it. There is another thing that we never noticed about our State systems: Who pays the bills for prisons? State governments. Who controls prison populations? Usually, local governments. Judges and prosecutors in most States are instrumentalities of local units of government, and sending people to prison is something like a free lunch for local government. If you ship them out of the county (as opposed to putting them in a county jail), the State pays the bills. When we abolished parole and adopted determinate sentencing, centralized State correctional authorities suddenly had no power over their own population. Parole was the one centralized power that States had. They could make those decisions at the back end of prison sentences and influence and respond to prison overcrowding. The most famous example of that in California came during the Reagan administration when, rather than the States' spending new money, a lot of people had the back ends of their prison terms snipped off in the interest of economy. Having said that there is a great deal structurally to be argued for back-end controls, let me also say there are two things that must happen for the back-end control to have credibility in the new political environment. First, the agency should have a claim to expertise. It is not good enough that some faceless bureaucrat does this. Second, there should be some rationale. The California Determinate Sentencing Act of 1976 appeared to have no rationale. The lawmakers thought parole was awful, so instead an oriental carpet sale replaced parole in California: every sentence issued by a judge was cut 50 percent through nearly automatic good time. This way symbolic sentences could be doubled without paying for the operational impact. I think we learned from three strikes, 10-20-life sentences, and everything else that we're doing in California that without a credible rationale, that kind of mechanical discounting function is naked of principle and thus highly vulnerable. Under those circumstances we must create a structure of governance in which the back-end punishment adjustment agencies can say what it is they are supposed to be experts in and how they are doing a job that couldn't be done as well by a legislature. What sorts of things might that be? Judges can look at the particular facts of a particular crime and a particular offender and measure proportionally how that offender compares with other robbers or burglars and to other claims on penal resources. Proportionality is one part of it. We have to remember that criminal sentences are legal decisions. Anybody who tells me that the rehabilitative ideal is dead in the sense that rehabilitative considerations are irrelevant has never visited a drug court or a juvenile court. Considering alternatives to prison is a second claim to expertise--on either actuarial or treatment grounds--for people who are making decisions about individual offenders. These kinds of structural accommodations are good ideas that can work only with credible rationales and claims to expertise. If there is a good final-exam question for a criminal law class on this, it is going to be, "What is the claim to expertise of a sentencing commission?" One thing is scarce resources--the allocation of scarce penal resources on a centralized, rationalized basis. But I'm not sure that sentencing commissions are a good way (and I'm sure that sentencing guideline grids are not a good way) of measuring proportionality in individual cases. And I'm absolutely sure that, while you might want to add to actual punishment at the back end of the punishment system, the one indispensable actor in individual cases and the one indispensable discretion in the criminal justice system in sentencing is the judge. Any system without substantial judicial discretion will sooner or later be gratuitously and excessively punitive. Charlie Sullivan, Citizens United for Rehabilitation (CURE), Washington, D.C.: I certainly agree with your analysis, but I'd like to point out that there are two areas in this prisoner and prison buildup. First, what you are talking about is scarcity of resources, and I don't think that we have looked at the role of the U.S. Department of Justice in this expansion of prisons and prison space. The Justice Department, since the 1994 Crime Act, has given close to $3 billion to States to build more prisons. And a condition of half of that money is that they move into truth-in-sentencing reforms. This is basically "seed money" to move in that direction. Statistics have backed up the idea that, if a person is locked up, they will be able to divert many, many crimes. We almost were at cross purposes. The Justice Department just gave almost another half billion dollars in this last year's appropriations. General Barry McCaffrey, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, talking about drug treatment, says 10 percent of that money could be used by States to provide drug treatment. A year ago, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone wanted to divert that money to drug treatment to help mentally ill prisoners, and the Justice Department went against that. What you're saying in all of these areas is that the Democrats (going back to Lyndon Johnson, etc.)--the ones leading and talking about an enlightened policy- -have joined the Republicans. I think it goes back to the Willy Horton case. Politically, the Congressional Black Caucus is the only group that is continuing to talk about an enlightened criminal justice system and enlightened prison policy. The second point, besides the role of the Justice Department in this prison and prisoner buildup (which I think has not been really researched), has to do with the role of the National Rifle Association (NRA). This gets back to the Democrats as well. The NRA was very close to them, particularly in rural areas where the Democrats have dominated. It has kind of been a "marriage" in which Democrats might have said, "Okay, NRA, we are going to listen to you and we are going to lock up the people who commit crimes for longer sentences." I was in Texas when the first mandatory minimum started in the mid-1970s. It came out of the Democratic legislators, who felt this was the way to respond to the NRA. "If you do the crime, you will do the time." They were trying to avoid the gun control issue. (By the way, I think the Justice Department has done a wonderful job, at least on that issue). Because I am with a grassroots prison reform organization of families of prisoners (as you can tell from my question), I am on Capitol Hill a lot, talking about these issues. F.Z.: Let me first take a little bit of the heat off the Department of Justice by saying that the 1994 Crime Act passed by Congress, with so-called truth-in-sentencing incentives (although incentives of a very peculiar kind) was a wonderful example of the new politics of punishment. It was passed in 1994 in an atmosphere of insatiable punitiveness. Despite that, the Republican majority was back 6 months later to try to amend it to make it more punitive--to take out, among other things, the famously labeled "midnight basketball" and to toughen up some policy programs they regarded as equivocal. That $3 billion in grants that you're talking about is in pursuit of one version of truth in sentencing, which is wildly different from other versions, and I want to use it as an example. It requires that prisoners convicted of violent crimes serve 85 percent of their sentences. This aim at violent offenders, if it had any impact at all, might have been a radical redistribution of prison resources. The creation of a double scale in which the State correctional facilities can without penalty "cycle out" their nonviolent drug offenders while keeping in their violent offenders (while that is problematic on some theoretical grounds) is very different, in a practical sense, from having legislatively imposed truth in sentencing for everybody. Yet, truth in sentencing as a Federal law is totally mindless because there are three very different sentencing systems in the States, and the law has hugely different impacts on each. Where there are sentencing commissions with mandatory guidelines that were historically based, the 85 percent really means that people will go on serving sentences that historically had been determined by previous parole release patterns. That's very different from what is going to happen where there are active parole authorities at the State level and the standard sentence that Federal law requires is much longer because it is based on nominal preparole sentences. That's different again from systems that have become determinate through force of law without anybody doing anything--the automatic releases of the California system. So I think that the Federal truth in sentencing incentive is, first of all, an example of the new politics. Second, it is a wonderful example of how having some control over the process of drafting a law can make for huge operational changes in a system if truth in sentencing was going to happen in some form. The violence-only form that the 1994 Federal law gave it was by no means the one that would have maximized the negative operational impact of truth in sentencing. Third, when you look at the money that Congress was trying to give the States and the pressure it was trying to put on the States, and you compare that with what the Federal Government has done in truth in sentencing--how much money has been spent and how stringent the Federal effort has been for making sure that a lot of folks are getting locked up with that money--you see that there is a huge gap. There is no ideological sincerity on the part of the administration of the Department of Justice in the enforcement of those provisions. If you use the Crime Act of 1994 as an example of the new politics, it is still "barking a lot louder than it bites," at least through the end of the year 2000. The political winds may change that, and the structural accommodations may still create a system in which the net effects of this kind of Federal policy are to increase prison populations and increase them substantially. Jeremy Travis, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: The only point I would make about the NRA is that their usual political incentive for tough mandatory penalties is simply to change the subject away from guns. Now, that's fine. The way they used to do that had zero operational impact on the prison system. They didn't care about impact on prisons because their primary ambitions were legislative negatives: to keep the attention off guns. F.Z.: What happened is that, once the NRA started interacting with some of the other single-issue lobbies, they were the big money source (with the prison guards union behind three strikes in California). They also didn't care much if in fact these new laws had a high impact on prison population. So rather accidentally, they got co-opted into the operational impact business and are now supporting laws that "bite a lot harder than they bark" just as easily as they used to support the symbolic laws that had no operational impact. I don't think that theirs is a principled presence in the new politics. I think they have been "swept up" like the rest of us have. Paul Hofer, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Washington, D.C.: In your concern that any sort of determinate rules, mandatory minimum statutes, or guidelines are going to be vulnerable to manipulation if your solution is going to be to empower judges, what about the traditionalists' concern regarding disparity in the power of different judges? F.Z.: The issue of disparity in outcomes was solved in two very different ways in the 1970s. Most of the State determinate sentencing regimes that tried to solve the problem of individual judicial disparity did so in a way that turned out to be unprincipled. That is, what they did (I will use Illinois and California as examples simply because those are systems I studied more thoroughly than Indiana and some of the other early determinate sentencing States) is to say that the judge still has unlimited discretion in deciding whether or not a convicted offender goes to prison. We're not touching that discretion. But, if a sentence of imprisonment is decided upon, we are going to force the judge, constrain him given what offense was committed, to a very narrow selection of terms of imprisonment. From a standpoint of principle, that is a hilarious system. What it was responding to was the notion that two guys are cellmates and one says, "I'm a burglar, and I got 10 years." And the other says, "I got 2." So somebody like former corrections commissioner David Fogel writes a book called We Are the Living Proof and makes sure that no matter how many burglars are out on probation, if two of them end up in the Stateville Penitentiary (which he is running), they will have roughly analogous sentences. As a logical matter, that kind of a system had real flaws. The Federal Sentencing Commission guidelines, the Criminal Justice Act of 1984, and the guidelines of 1987, instead, take a broad look at general disparity--because what could be more important, from the perspective of disparity, than whether offenders go to prison or not--and the way in which they deal with the issue is to create binding or near-binding general notions of an appropriate punishment. The problem is that the criminal justice system is now (and has been for most of the 20th century) muscle bound. For most marginal offenders, the choice in punishment is a choice between doing too little and doing too much. The "too much" is prison, and the "too little" seems to be everything else. We have made some efforts in the intermediate punishment area lately, but we don't believe in the credibility of our efforts to create real punishments that aren't imprisonment, if we look at how our sentencing commissions behave. What that meant with the Federal effort was that the way to constrain judicial discretion on the in-out decision was to create a presumption. What kind of presumption? In the Federal sentencing guidelines/standards, that is one of the world's easiest questions to answer: It was a presumption of penal confinement. With that, what you worry about is that discretions, when displaced, can be displaced with excess punitiveness because of the conservativeness of any decisionmaker. That is, the decisionmaker has to worry about two kinds of mistakes: punishing serious crimes not seriously enough and punishing not-serious crimes too seriously. When forced to a choice in a politically responsive environment, if they need a general rule, they are going to punish more seriously and more severely than they would if they had unconstrained discretion. We have learned in 25 years that the choice of displacing in-out discretion is a tradeoff between allowing like cases to be treated in nonalike ways with high degrees of individual discretion, and a system that is excessively severe for many, if not most, of its cases. If the question then is, which of those two evils would I select? I think I'd go for the former. Nick Turner, State Sentencing and Corrections Project, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, New York: You made reference to the fact that this new politics of criminal punishment and the shift of punishment determination from the professionals to the politicians was an unintended consequence. The push for determinate sentences was from people who were concerned about disparity, racial and otherwise, and the consequences were unintended and perhaps unwelcome as well. Do you think there is another unintended consequence of this new politics-- the extreme fiscal burdens it has placed upon States? One example is California, where spending on prisons and corrections has outpaced or surpassed spending on secondary education. On the flip side, States like Georgia or Alabama are considering setting up sentencing commissions to address these cost expenditures. Can you comment on this as a consequence of the new politics? F.Z.: Well, what I'd like to do is buy a postponement. I'd like to wait 10 years to answer the question of whether the costs of prison are an important restraint on excessive imprisonment. I think it's largely an untested notion--particularly in periods of great State and local prosperity. I'm from California and I probably have the same conflict of interest that the prison guards union has. The reason they are rooting for mandatory minimum punishments is rather obvious. They get paid a lot more than school teachers, and the more prison sentences there are, the more members are going to be hired. My obvious conflict of interest is that I'm an employee of the State university system (although lately we have become almost private). It's not true that California now spends more money on corrections than on secondary education. It does, however, now spend more money on its prison system than it spends on the University of California. And that happens to be the branch of government I work for. The reason I know that difference is because secondary education and junior colleges are protected by a State constitutional initiative and will always get their share of the budget. In times of scarcity, it turns out that the prison system and the university system are competing for the same very limited dollars, and so far, the prison system has done a lot better. It is a now $4 billion system in that single American State. I think we have about $2.6 billion in State support in the university system. I'm not sure that California has now entered the biblical "7 fat years." It can't keep many fiscal reserves because the same initiative system that gave us three strikes makes the State issue refunds if it accidently happens to collect too much in taxes. The problem with prosperity is that it makes prison space seem a good deal more affordable than it would otherwise be and that is one reason I'd like to find out how great the fiscal bite is in the longer term. The other problem with assuming that fiscal factors will slow down prison growth is that we also are learning that there are many political shortcuts to make expenditures (particularly capital expenditures) seem pain free. In California, because of the Proposition 13 and Proposition 9 reforms, it looked like bond measures would have to be approved by citizens. The problem was that even during the new politics of punishment, citizens would vote down bond measures. Do we say that will be the way to keep them from building prisons? Not quite. What we do instead is issue a lot of revenue bonds to build prisons. How can you build prisons on revenue bonds? How are you going to get the revenue? Are you going to charge the prisoners? Well, the same legalese that we taught my students to use for the government to justify school expenditures in the context of these constraints works just as well when you are justifying prisons. I think good can flow from the fact that imprisonment is expensive. From the standpoint of worrying about "overimprisonment," one useful law reform strategy is to try to make imprisonment more expensive. It is a lot more expensive in California than in Texas. But I'm not sure that the decisive battles on imprisonment policy are going to be won on fiscal grounds. I think a couple of principles and some notion of limit in the punishment game would help the fiscal arguments a lot. Michael Siegel, Federal Judicial Center, Washington, D.C.: I appreciate your comments about the difficulty of fighting on the symbolic front. However, one, if we cede this ground too easily, are we making the lives of the operators very difficult? Two, are we sure we are going to get the right operators there, particularly in States where judges are elected rather than appointed? Three, I want to offer the possibility that one leverage area is the media. If you watch a week of television news, you do not know that crime is going down in this country. F.Z.: Let me start with the last. That's right; crime hasn't gone down on television. Jeremy mentioned that I did a study for the MacArthur Foundation on American youth violence, and we found one of the great split-personality situations of all time. Homicide arrests have fallen by half among kids between ages 13 and 17 in the United States over the past 6 years. That's the fastest drop we have ever had for any age group that I have ever observed. On the other hand, I don't pick up any media or political coverage that suggests anything other than the notion that youth violence is going up. So, if we can defy gravity when the statistics show that American youth violence has dropped as fast all over the country as lethal violence has dropped in New York, and nobody is noticing, there is a lot to the notion that propaganda on crime rates and crime risks must be countered if the political pressure is to be resisted. Do we risk leaving operating personnel undefended if we don't fight the good fight symbolically? Yes. Is there a problem if the wrong people then are put in charge? Yes. But again, the point I would make is that with whatever political energy and intellectual capital you have, it is very important to be extremely sophisticated about the structural nature of the operational impacts of legislation and to exploit the area between the symbolic and the actual. Because, you see, the symbolic gap and the punitiveness of populism are not American characteristics and not 1990s characteristics. Those are part of the basic operating principles of the governance of punishment in any modern democracy, and they probably always have been. Learning to play by the rules and play off those effects is going to be a lot more promising than trying to win the hearts and minds of the general population. ------------------ Does the Booming Economy Help Explain the Fall in Crime? Presentation by Richard B. Freeman Professor National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University and Professor Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics February 23, 2000 Washington, D.C. Starting in the mid-1990s, the United States has been experiencing a great economic boom, as reflected in the rapid growth of some of the major indicators of economic health, such as the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, rising employment, and low inflation. Unemployment fell to levels that just a few years earlier most experts had thought impossible in a noninflationary economy. In addition, after two decades or so of decline, the real earnings of the less skilled men disproportionately involved in crime began to rise. Over roughly the same period, the rate of crime reported in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) fell, while crime reported in the National Victimization Survey continued the downward trend begun in the 1970s. Such well-defined crimes as homicides dropped substantially. Although in 1998 UCR crime rates still exceeded their early 1960s figures, they were 30 percent below the peak rates of the 1980s.[1] To what extent, if at all, has the booming economy contributed to the drop in crime? To what extent, if at all, did the fall in pay for less skilled workers and weak overall job market of the 1980s help maintain a high level of crime, despite the mass incarceration of offenders? The economic model of crime predicts that individuals will choose between crime and legitimate work, depending on the chances of getting a job and the wages in the legitimate market compared with opportunities for illegal earnings and the risk of apprehension and incarceration or other penalties for illegal activity. It is hard to argue a priori against this formulation of the decision to engage in crime, for it simply assumes that, on the margin, criminals respond rationally to differential opportunities. In the extreme, moreover, economic factors have to matter for some crimes. If we were all billionaires, why would anyone commit property crime? If our families were starving, who would not consider stealing food? But economic incentives change more modestly than from billionaire to pauper. In the 1990s boom, unemployment fell by 3 percentage points or so and real wages rose modestly, while income inequality roughly stabilized. Were these changes enough to affect crime in a substantial way? This essay argues that the answer to this question is yes. The evidence is not unequivocal, and there are empirical problems that create some uncertainty, but the preponderance of studies, particularly the most recent econometric work, supports the claim that the booming economy helped reduce the crime rate. This essay first presents the facts about the economic boom and level of crime and examines the predictions of the economic model about the economic rewards of crime and the supply of persons committing crimes. It then makes the case that economic factors have played a substantial role in the 1990s decline in crime. The next section argues against the case that economic factors played an important role in the decline in crime, as it might be presented by a noneconomist. The essay concludes by linking the effects of the economy and other contending explanations to the change in crime over the past half-century. The Economy and Crime "Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts." --Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department, "Dragnet" television series, circa 1960 The 1990s boom was the longest in the 20th century. It brought the U.S. rate of employment per adult to an all-time high and reversed both the decline in real wages for regular workers and the rising inequality that was the hallmark of the previous decade or two. Exhibits 1 and 2 show how the 1990s' boom affected the major indicators of the job market. Exhibit 1 documents the rise in the ratio of employment to population to more than 64 percent and the fall in the unemployment rate to about 4 percent by the end of 1999. The less educated young men and minority young men who are disproportionately involved in crime benefited substantially from the boom. Among out-of-school young black men with high school or less education, the unemployment rate fell more than the unemployment rate in the overall economy (Freeman and Rodgers 1999). Exhibit 2 shows the pattern of wage change in the 1980s and 1990s. The real hourly earnings of all male workers, including the young men who make up the bulk of offenders, rose in the late 1990s after having dropped in the previous two decades. The gains in wages included those with the least skills, due in part to an increase in the minimum wage but due largely to the tight labor market. Although the upswing in earnings occurred later than the upswing in employment and seems more fragile, if the unemployment and wage statistics are combined by multiplying the chance of getting a job (1 minus the unemployment rate) by wages to yield an expected return from labor market activity, clear improvement is found in opportunities in the legitimate economy for all workers, men, and less educated men. Exhibits 3, 4, and 5 present the crime part of the story. They record the UCR rates of crime, property victimization, and homicide. All measures fell in the 1990s, but the timing and extent of the changes from the 1970s to the 1990s differ. The UCR rises through the late 1970s, drops in the early 1980s, then rises again until the 1990s. (See exhibit 3.) The victimization survey shows a different pattern: Victimizations drop in the late 1970s and early 1980s, level off in the mid-1980s, and fall again in the 1990s. (See exhibit 4.) While the UCR crime rate in 1999 was 20 percent below its peak, the rate of property crime victimization in 1999 was less than half the rate in the late 1970s. Homicides, a more clearly defined measure of crime, follow the UCR pattern for the most part. (See exhibit 5.) Because unemployment was high and real wages fell for less educated men in the 1970s and 1980s, the UCR data crudely follow the pattern of change in legitimate market incentives. The victimization data, however, move so differently as to create a problem for economic analysis and, for that matter, for any other effort to account for the changing pattern of crime over time. If explanatory factors fit the UCR time pattern, they will have trouble fitting the victimization time pattern, and the converse is true. But in the 1990s, on which this essay focuses, the two series move in tandem. Many social factors beyond economic calculation affect crime (Wilson 1983; Wilson and Petersilia 1994). Some of these factors changed greatly in the period under study--as much as or more than the legitimate labor market. Incarceration increased massively from the 1970s to 2000, with huge proportions of men in the high-crime demographic groups imprisoned. The parents of young Americans were better educated than in the past. (Among blacks, this reflects the civil rights revolution, which opened educational opportunities in the 1960s.) Also, young Americans came from smaller families (partly the result of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion) (Donahue and Levitt 1999). The age distribution of the population changed. Policing strategies changed. The number of police per capita increased in the 1990s. Finally, the market for drugs, which greatly affects illegal income opportunities, changed. The economics model holds fixed all factors beyond those that affect the monetary incentive to commit crime and asks the following question: How do the financial returns from crime--as opposed to legal work--affect decisions to engage in crime? Formally, if in the formula below "Wc" is the hourly earnings from successful crime, "p" is the probability of apprehension, "S" is the extent of punishment, "W" is the hourly earnings from legitimate work, and "e" is the probability of getting a legal job, the individual will choose to commit crimes rather than take a legitimate job when the utility ("U") from crime exceeds the utility from work: (1-p) U(Wc) - pU(S) > U(eW) This equation has several implications for empirical analysis. It implies that crime should pay a higher wage than legitimate activities (Wc > W). Although reliable data on the rewards of crime are lacking, the limited known information supports this expectation. Hourly rates of pay from crime appear to be higher than from legitimate activity for criminals, but most people who commit crime do not earn that much annually from it. (See exhibit 6.) Most crime is sporadic, and many people combine legal and illegal work to make a living. The model also implies that attitudes toward risk, measured by the curvature of U, are an important element in the decision to commit crime. The risk averse will respond more to changes in the probability of apprehension than to changes in the difference in wages from crime and legitimate work. Most important, the formula shows that the major determinants of decisions to commit crime--the legal job market, illegal opportunities, and sanctions--are intrinsically related. If the rational model is accepted as a valid description of behavior, it cannot be claimed either that tougher penalties reduce crime while a better labor market does not, or the converse. The individual decision to commit crime is, of course, only the first part of any economic analysis. To measure the supply of crime in society, the decisions of all people must be aggregated to produce a schedule that links the total amount of crime to the incentives. One simple way to represent the aggregate relation is to use p, W, e, Wc, and S (where S is measured in dollars) to form the expected return to crime: (1-p)Wc -pS-eW This return becomes the price in a standard labor supply schedule. The shape of this schedule is critical for assessing the way economic and other factors affect crime. Exhibit 7 shows three supply schedules--(A) a standard upward sloping supply schedule, (B) a vertical or inelastic schedule with no economic responsiveness, and (C) a horizontal or infinitely elastic supply schedule. Exhibit 7 also depicts the "demand for crime," measured by opportunities to earn money from crime relative to legitimate activities. This schedule is a downward sloping relation. More crimes reduce the earnings potential due to the declining marginal productivity of crime. The marginal productivity of crime falls for several reasons: the likelihood that criminals pick off easy targets first, the increased effort that citizens are likely to make to protect themselves and their property as crime grows, the likely expansion of policing and harsher penalties in a crime wave, and the greater risk of competition from other criminals. When the supply schedule is inelastic, one way in which criminal justice policy can reduce crime-- incapacitation--operates with complete efficiency. Every criminal incarcerated reduces the number of crimes by the exactly the number of crimes that the criminal would have committed had he been at large. By contrast, when the supply schedule is elastic, incapacitation has no effect on the amount of crime. When Joe is incarcerated, his neighbor Bill sees the opportunity to make money and commits Joe's crimes. Because evidence on the returns to crime is spotty at best, it is difficult to get a handle on the supply-of-crime schedule. One way to assess the potential shape of the schedule is to examine how increased incapacitation affects crime over a given period. Assume, as a first approximation, that the demand and supply schedules for crime are roughly constant in a given period. Then calculate how much crime should change when more or fewer people are incarcerated. If the actual crime rate falls by that amount, the supply of crime is inelastic. If, by contrast, crime falls hardly at all, the supply of crime must be elastic. The apparent failure of incarceration to reduce the rate of crime by anything like the magnitudes predicted by any model of incapacitation (Zimring and Hawkins 1991; Freeman 1996) implies, crudely, that the elasticity of crime is rather high. The weakness of this argument is the assumption that the demand and supply of crime schedules are unchanged. Given the swings in the drug trade, demand for crime surely rose in the 1980s. There also may have been shifts in the supply of people who commit crime due to changing mores and other factors. Perhaps moral values fell in the 1980s. The abortion-induced decline in unwanted births in the 1970s may have reduced the supply of young people with a propensity for crime in the 1990s (Donahue and Levitt). If both demand and supply schedules shift, no inferences can be made about the shape of the schedules without additional data on those shifts. Some insight into the supply-to-crime relation can be gained from an incapacitation model. Given the huge rise in incarceration, UCR data should have shown a drop in crime from the 1970s through the 1980s. However, crime rose, then stabilized. One plausible interpretation is that the supply curve to crime is relatively elastic, so mass incarceration had little effect on the level of crime. The drop in crime in the 1990s was consistent with an improved economy reducing the incentive for crime. At minimum, the evidence shows that there is much more complex behavior in the pattern of crime than a simple "lock them up" criminal justice policy would recognize. To examine the hypothesis that the legitimate labor market can explain some of that behavior and that the booming economy reduced crime in the 1990s, it is necessary to look directly at the relationship between economic incentives and crime. The Case That Economic Factors Matter The first piece of evidence that economic factors matter is that the population of offenders consists disproportionately of people who have low legitimate job market opportunities (Bernstein and Houston 2000). Whatever the source of data on crime-- prisoners, arrestees, self-reports of criminal activity--the less skilled invariably are disproportionately represented. Indeed, U.S. prisons are filled with young men, roughly half from minority groups, who have less than a high school education and score low on written tests, which places them at the bottom of the job market in earnings potential. The contrast with virtually every other aspect of social life, where the educated and skilled are more active in politics, church attendance, volunteering, and so on, is striking. Although the overrepresentation of people with low earnings in crime could reflect psychological or decisionmaking problems among this population, studies show that people who commit crimes are more likely to be unemployed (or idle when they are of school age) than others with comparable skills and that the same person is more likely to commit a crime when jobless than when employed (Freeman 1999). The second piece of evidence is geographic. Nearly all studies of crime rates among several areas, including those focused on non-labor-market factors, contain unemployment in the local job market as a covariate. Many studies include measures of earnings, incomes, or earnings inequality. In 1983 I reviewed the cross-area evidence and concluded that it supported the claim that unemployment affected crime, but not strongly. Ensuing work provides stronger evidence that crime and unemployment across areas are inversely related. Studies that pool cross-section and time-series data across States or metropolitan statistical areas in the 1990s offer particularly powerful evidence of the crime/job market trade-off. These studies include area dummy variables that eliminate any unmeasured fixed-area factors and year dummies that eliminate any overall trends and thus base conclusions on how differential changes in unemployment or wages across areas affect differential changes in crime across areas. As exhibit 8 shows, the three most recent studies find a substantial relationship between unemployment and crime, with a 1-percent change in unemployment associated with an approximate 2-percent change in crime rates. They also find a relationship between wages of less educated workers/workers in retail trade and crime, with an elasticity that averages about -0.5. Studies of the effect on crime of area earnings or inequality give a wider range of estimates of the supply response, possibly because there is no single wage or inequality measure across or even within studies. The third piece of evidence comes from analyses that relate reports of individual crimes or ensuing criminal justice activities to their reported legal or illegal income. These studies look for positive relationships between the extent of individual crime and earnings. One study (Grogger 1997) uses a formal structural model to estimate an elasticity of supply of time to crime of about 1. The 1980 module of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth contained a question about the proportion of total income that young people who committed crimes earned from crime. The share of income from illegal sources has six values: zero and five nonzero values (very little, to which I assign the value 0.05, about a quarter [0.25], about half [0.50], about three-quarters [0.75] and nearly all [0.95]). Using this numeric scale, the variable has a mean value of 0.17 for out-of-school youth who said they earned illegal income. Conditional on the number of crimes committed and amount of time worked, the share of income from illegal sources varies with the relative rewards of crime (Wc/W). Columns 1 and 2 in exhibit 9 estimate the link between incarceration and share of illegal income (conditional on age, race, Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score, weeks worked, and years of schooling). Note first that the chance of committing enough crimes to be incarcerated is positively related to age, negatively related to schooling and AFQT score, and negatively related to weeks worked. The column 1 estimate of the effect of relative income on criminal behavior is huge, implying an elasticity of crime to relative earnings of more than 1.5.[2] In column 2, I added a control for the number of crimes the youth committed. This reduces the effect of the share of income from illegal sources because it is necessarily highly correlated with the number of crimes committed in 1979. Still, the relative income variable has a powerful and highly significant impact, with an elasticity in the range of those estimated by researchers Gould, Weinberg, and Mustard (1998) using area data. The final piece of evidence comes from national time-series data. A modest cyclical link is found between rates of crime and the state of the economy, conditional on trend factors. But the fact that crime rates rose rapidly from the 1960s through the 1980s while unemployment trended up only modestly and the economy grew makes it clear that changes in legitimate market opportunities are not the sole or predominant factor at work. The long time-series analysis is a reminder that changes in the legitimate economy are only part of the story of changes in crime rates. In addition to the direct evidence of the relationship between measures of the job market and rates of crime, evidence from studies of the effect of sanctions on crime also favors the rational decision framework. Indeed, most empirical analyses find that measures of the probability of apprehension or sanctions have more consistent and statistically stronger impacts on crime than unemployment and wages in the legitimate market. Many analysts view labor market factors and sanction factors as competing: Those with a liberal bent want the labor market to matter more while those of a conservative bent want sanctions to matter more. I view this as a false dichotomy. The economics model implies that both factors work through the same decision calculus. Incapacitation aside, sanctions work by affecting incentives, just as legitimate and illegitimate earnings opportunities do. It may be that the generally stronger results obtained with measures of sanctions reflect the fact that we have better measures of them than of the pecuniary rewards from crime, given our inadequate indicators of the actual earnings from crime. I conclude that the preponderance of evidence supports the claim that the job market affects the supply of crime. The order of magnitude of the estimated response parameters suggests, moreover, that economics matters quite a bit. Gould, Weinberg, and Mustard (1998) estimate that economic incentives explain 7 to 18 percent of the increase in particular crimes from 1979 to 1989, with the major factor being the fall in real wages for less skilled workers over the period. Others estimate that the fall in unemployment explains 40 percent of the drop in crime from 1992 to 1997 (Raphael and Winter-Ebmer 2000). With crime changing rapidly, however, the proportion of the trends that economic factors can explain depends on the time period studied. If an elasticity of crime to unemployment of 2.0 is combined with a 3.5-percent drop in unemployment from 1992 to 1999, the booming economy reduced the rate of crime by 7 percent, which compares with an actual drop of about 27 percent. The rise in real wages of less skilled workers at the very end of the 1990s may have contributed an additional 2 percent or so to the fall in crime, bringing the contribution of changes in the legitimate market to one-third of the overall change. Because none of these estimates includes estimates of changes in illegal earnings opportunities, moreover, they potentially understate the total contribution of changing economic incentives to the drop in crime. In this period at least, the evidence suggests that the economy is an 800-pound gorilla in the crime market. The Case Against the Economics Case How much faith should any sensible soul put in what economists say about crime? Economists are honorable folk, but consider their track record in their own domain. A few years ago, they thought the United States could never combine full employment and stable prices. The Federal Reserve Board claimed that the natural rate of unemployment was around 6 percent and denounced those who thought otherwise as irresponsible radicals. How can we explain today's booming economy? A figment of the imagination of the economically unwashed! A few years ago, economists also thought that the Federal deficit would go on and on and on. How can we explain today's budget surplus? Impossible! Unthinkable! Yes, economists are honorable folk, but they cannot explain much of the change in productivity, inequality, or stock market prices. And when they take their theories to the real world, what do we see? The collapse of long-term capital management, gangster capitalism in Russia. The notion that the job market is an 800-pound gorilla affecting crime is pure hubris and chutzpah. Let us look more closely at the alleged evidence. Consider first the timing of changes in crime and the economy. Over the long run, the economy has improved; real wages rose for most of the 20th century. By the standards of 1900, we are all quite well off, with cars, color TVs, telephones, CDs, and more. Only a few of us are billionaires but we are almost all far from paupers who need to rob to feed our families. Has crime fallen during this long period? No. Unemployment was far lower in the 1980s than in the Great Depression. Is crime lower? No. We do not have to go back in history to find flaws in the economists' case. When did the U.S. crime rate begin to rise? In the early 1960s. What was the state of the job market then? Full employment with the real wage of less skilled workers increasing. The UCR crime rate doubled from 1960 to 1969 while GDP per capita grew by more than 2 percent a year. Even in the 1990s, the timing of the drop in crime and the improvement in the economy is not quite right: The UCR index began falling in 1992 while unemployment rose to its peak 1990s level. Much recent economic evidence comes from comparisons of changes in crime and economic conditions area to area. But in which city did crime fall the most in the 1990s? New York City, whose economy was at best sluggardly. Compare the Big Apple and Seattle. In 1998 New York City had an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent while Seattle had an unemployment rate of nearly 3 percent. But the rate of crime for the New York metropolitan statistical area was 4,208 per 100,000, while that for Seattle was 6,208 per 100,000. Whatever accounts for the low crime in New York City--Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Police Commissioner William Bratton's heralded policing policies, the success of the Yankees, changes in the drug business, or the influx of immigrants--it is not a low unemployment rate.[3] Indeed, economic factors do not come close to explaining the variation in crime rates among different areas. Cities, precincts within cities, and blocks within precincts have vastly different rates of crime that cannot possibly be attributed to economic incentives (Glaeser, Sacerdote, Sheinkman 1995). And if we are looking at geographic data, do not forget that there are other countries in the world. Inequality in Europe is much lower than in the United States. Is property crime lower? No. Finally, consider the data on individual crimes. The very notion that there is a tradeoff between crime and legitimate work far exaggerates the evidence. Fagan and Freeman (1999) point out the porous boundary between legitimate and illegitimate work. The mugger or drug dealer may hold a regular job while committing crime or may switch from month to month between crime and legal work. If that is the world of crime, why should anyone believe that a tighter labor market reduces crime? But what is most disingenuous about the economists' claim that the tight job market explains so much of the 1990s drop in crime is that they do not run their analytical calculations against any other possible explanations. Where are the estimates of the effect of changes in social attitudes, or policing practices in the 1990s, or the drug market? The rational calculus model may treat illegal earnings, legitimate opportunities, and sanctions in one unified framework, but there is a difference between changes in wage and employment opportunities and better policing or greater sanctions or changes in the drug trade. There is surely a place for economic incentives in criminal behavior, but it's more like a lemur or rhesus monkey than an 800-pound gorilla. Economic Factors in a Consistent Narrative The problem with assessing the economics case is that, rhetoric aside, the evidence is by no means uniform. The case against economics makes valid points. Economic factors cannot explain large parts of observed patterns, and they seem inconsistent with the rise in crime in the 1960s. But the same is true of most other univariate explanations. That the UCR crime rate did not decline in the 1970s and 1980s despite mass incarceration can be interpreted as evidence either that incarceration does not reduce crime or that it can, but its effect is dwarfed by other factors. Demographic trends fail to explain much of the fluctuations in crime rates, although young men are the major offenders. Some analysts believe that new policing strategies have worked, and it is difficult to explain the pattern among different cities without considering local criminal justice policies. But crime fell in areas with very different policing strategies. Changes in the size of families and reductions in the number of unwanted children due to abortion may explain some of the drop in crime, but proponents of this hypothesis do not claim that this is the entire story. If you think that any single factor can explain a multifaceted social phenomenon like crime, you are not a social scientist assaying the evidence. But this does not mean that we are left with a huge "residual" in our effort to explain changes in crime rates over time. We can weave a consistent story of the swings in the 1990s and earlier. This story is not a story solely of job market incentives, although incentives play a significant part. My "narrative" contains four factors that affect crime: social mores and the way citizens view illegal behavior, demand for drugs and other illegal activities, criminal justice policies, and the job market. As best I can tell, crime rose in the 1960s and 1970s despite full employment because of (1) a shift in attitudes toward legal authority--evinced, for example, in race riots and protests against the war in Vietnam--which made citizens more willing to commit crime and produced less effective policing, and (2) growing demand for illegal drugs. The mass incarceration of the 1970s and 1980s stabilized but failed to reduce the rate of crime because the job market for less skilled young men was poor. Finally, crime fell in the 1990s because of the strong job market, combined with criminal justice policies including continued incarceration of criminals, to lower the economic incentives to commit crime.[4] To be sure, this narrative has enough factors operating to fit almost any pattern of change (economists can get anywhere in the positive price-quantity quadrant by shifting supply and demand), but it is not empty because it directs attention at factors that are quantifiable. Question-and-Answer Session Michael E. Siegel, Federal Judicial Center, Washington, D.C.: I am a political scientist. Do you have any sense of or data on the effect of employment on white-collar crime? R.F.: No. Mostly I would break it down between property crime and violent crime. You would expect that the economic factors should matter in property crime but not so much, if at all, in violent crime. If you look at the tables for some of my estimates, they say "property crime." In fact, you will always get a bigger response of property crime to economic incentives than of violent crime to those incentives. Devon Brown, Office of the Corrections Trustee, District of Columbia Government, Washington, D.C.: I am a behavioral scientist. Do you have any data on whether offenders were employed or underemployed at the time they committed their criminal act? R.F.: Yes. We have some data on that. First, the prison inmates' survey asks questions such as, "What were you doing before you were arrested?" They show that offenders do have a much higher unemployment rate than nonoffenders with, for example, similar skills and low education. Several years ago David Farrington and coworkers in the U.K. followed people for a certain period of their life (Farrington et al. 1986). They found that someone who, for example, committed 10 crimes over 5 years was more likely to commit those crimes when unemployed than when holding a job. The evidence is overwhelming. A. Franklin Burgess, Superior Court of the District of Columbia: I'm from the legal profession. What about the Depression in the 1930s? Did it tell you anything statistically about the relationship between the economy and crime? R.F.: Crime was zooming, but I think Prohibition was overwhelming any Depression effect on crime. When you calculate national time series (analyses in which I don't put much faith), you have to add trend or period variables to control for noneconomic factors. You see a pattern of high unemployment and more crime, but you have to look at the other things happening during the same periods. Marie Provine, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.: I'm a political scientist and temporary bureaucrat. Do drug crimes follow any pattern that is different from property crimes, or do you put them in the same category as property crimes? What would you hypothesize, and what do you find in that area? R.F.: The most striking thing about drug crimes is their elasticity of supply. It is very high and that's why I use them as an example. When a drug dealer is arrested, the gang or business that sells drugs will just recruit somebody else. The situation with drug crimes today is similar to the situation in Prohibition: People want a commodity that is illegal. Economists will say that it is very hard to reduce drug crimes because of their elasticity effect. I did no special analysis of drug crimes. Studies of the drug trade in particular cities have come out pretty strongly in support of the economics explanation. Drugs are probably the best case for an economics explanation. If people decided they didn't want these drugs, the demand would die off, and the people who were supplying them would have to make a living in some other way. Beatrix Hamburg, Cornell University Medical College, New York, New York: I'm a behavioral scientist. I was interested that you mentioned England. Also I was hoping that you could give us some policy implications of your talk. It is my impression that in Europe the acceptable unemployment rate has been much lower than in the United States. However, I suspect that there have been some changes in the acceptable rates by reason of the vicissitudes of their own economies. Have you done international comparisons? Should we change our conventional wisdom about acceptable rates here? R.F.: The crime rate in England has been going up in the past year or so--much to the surprise and unhappiness of the people. When you compare Europe with the United States, the property crime rates are very similar. The only place we as a country beat out the Europeans is in violent crime. Europe (including the United Kingdom) currently has higher unemployment than the United States. On the other hand, European countries have less wage inequality and the earnings of the people at the bottom 10 or 20 percent are quite a bit higher; they earn more in real terms adjusted for prices. They don't have as many billionaires as we have, but they take care of the poor, low-wage workers, and other such groups. As far as I can tell, the higher wages and higher unemployment offset each other, and most European countries end up with a crime rate similar to the U.S. rate. They have not had a drop in crime, as we have. Instead, it has gone up a bit in some places. So I don't think that we have anything to learn in that sense from the Europeans. The British do a lot of policing and activity that is space related: putting more police in place and giving locks to people who have been robbed a number of times. Property crime seems to be very localized. They have done quite a number of experiments getting the police and the anticrime strategies in the right place at the right time (a British specialty). But violent crime is different: You get into the issues of guns and other tools used by society that contribute to violent crime. As for policy, if you believe the economics story, you might favor extending the earned income tax credit so that it goes to young men without family responsibilities or raising the minimum wage to deter crime. Increasing the minimum wage hasn't cost any jobs, but at some point it will. Extending the earned income tax credit to these young men says to them, "Your wages are not high because you are a high school dropout or did not do well in school, but society is going to give you some extra money for being a hardworking person who earns a living legitimately." Of course, the costs of such a policy must then be considered. Vincent Schiraldi, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Washington, D.C.: You said that in Europe the wages for the bottom levels are higher and unemployment rates are higher than in the United States, so it is a wash. That might explain why we have similar property crime rates, but the United States has about six or seven times as many people locked up. In the property crime category, we should be doing a lot better than the Europeans, forgetting violent crime. R.F.: Yes, that is correct. It is a sad thing that we have to do so much more to maintain a rate of property crime comparable to theirs. I stand corrected. Wayne Miller, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Washington, D.C.: Boston has been held up as a model of effective community policing. Did your study look at Boston in terms of reducing violent crime and the economic impact there? R.F.: I did not study Boston, but I know about the studies of Boston. I talked both to the police and the police union people who were involved. Getting guns out of the hands of the kids was the priority. They said to the young guys, "No guns. If we catch you with a gun, we're going to throw you away forever. We're really going to be tough on you." They didn't say, "Go sell your drugs," but they said, "Do your normal business (which meant go sell your drugs). If we catch you, we catch you, but we are not going to look for you or target you in a particular way." There was a strong policing component and the support of the community, particularly the black community, but the white community as well. The police brought in the gang kids, and they would have a "lineup" with several police officers, a district attorney, and church leaders. Everyone sent the same message: "Don't you dare use guns. You will have no support in this community if you use guns." Black kids were targeted (it was profiling in a real sense). If I walked down the street and I was 18, white, and middle class, they presumably wouldn't hassle me. If I was a black kid in the neighborhood, they would hassle me and if they found anything suspicious--a bulge or something--they'd check for the gun. This strategy had the support of the community because the community was being terrorized. One kid got shot outside a school by marauding gangs fighting over something. There was a uniform statement that this society of adults was as one: You are not going to use guns. It turned out that a lot of the kids in the gangs agreed with the adults. Rather than, "I have a gun and you have a gun. I could shoot you and you could shoot me," now, it is "neither of us has guns." (Crime European style!) In Boston it was not just the community doing its part; it was very focused on the message: We want the guns out of the hands of the kids so we don't have the homicides. Everybody understood that. They didn't send the message, "We are going to stop the drug trade." There is so much money to be made in drugs, and that is where the elasticity of supply is great. A situation developed where all the interests (including the kids, in the end) were aligned. And that was the reason for the success in Boston. Boston did not have quite as big a decline in crime as New York, but it was one of the leading cities in terms of the decline of crime. References Bernstein, Jared, and Ellen Houston, "Falling Crime Rates in the 1990s: The Role of the Low-Wage Labor Market," February 2000, Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Donahue, John J., and Steven D. Levitt, "Legalized Abortion and Crime," Stanford Law School Working Paper, Stanford, CA, June 24, 1999. Fagan, Jeffrey J., and Richard B. Freeman, "Crime and Work," in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, ed. Michael Tonry, Volume 25, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 113-178. Fagan, Jeffrey J., Franklin E. Zimring, and June Kim, "Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two Trends," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88 (4) (Summer 1998): 1277-1324. Farrington, David P., Bernard Gallagher, Lyndia Morley, Raymond J. St. Ledger, and Donald J. West, "Unemployment, School Leaving, and Crime," British Journal of Criminology 26 (1986): 335-356. Freeman, Richard B., "Disadvantaged Young Men and Crime," in Youth Employment and Joblessness in Advanced Countries, eds. David Blanchflower and Richard Freeman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 2000: Ch. 5. Freeman, Richard B., "The Economics of Crime," in Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 3c (general series editors, K. Arrow and M.D. Intriligator), eds. Orley Ashenfelter and David Card, Amsterdam, Netherlands: North Holland Publishers, 1999: Ch. 52. Freeman, Richard B., "Why Do So Many Young American Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do About It?," Journal of Economic Perspectives 10 (1) (Winter 1996): 25-42. Freeman, Richard B., and William Rodgers, "Area Economic Conditions and the Labor Market Outcomes of Young Men in the 1990s Expansion," Working paper no. 7073, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 1999. Glaeser, Edward, Bruce Sacerdote, and Jos‚ Sheinkman, "Crime and Social Interactions," Quarterly Journal of Economics 110 (2) (May 1995): 507-548. Gould, Eric, Bruce Weinberg, and David Mustard, "Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States, 1979-1995," Paper presented to the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute Workshop, Cambridge, MA, July 6, 1998. Grogger, Jeffrey, "Market Wages and Youth Crime," Working paper no. 5983, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 1997. Raphael, Steven, and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, "Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime," mimeo, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, January 2000. Wilson, James Q., and Joan Petersilia, eds. Crime, San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994. Wilson, James Q., ed. Crime and Public Policy, San Francisco: ICS Press, 1983. Zimring, Franklin E., and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Notes 1. The peak total crime index was 5950 in 1980. The crime index in 1998 was 4616. On the basis of data from the period January to June 1999, it will be about 4,154 in 1999, for a decline of 30 percent. See Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, November 21, 1999. 2. The logistic equation does not immediately give the elasticity of supply to crime because both the dependent variable and the independent variable are a bit more complicated than a regression of ln quantity on ln price. The logistic can be thought of as a log odds ratio regression, linking to independent variables the log of the ratio of the chance of going to prison to the chance of not going. The share of income from crime varies with the ratio of criminal to legal wages, but also depends on the amount of legal and illegal work. As a result, the coefficients in the table must be reduced modestly to obtain the elasticity. See Freeman 2000. 3. Fagan, Zimring, and Kim (1999) look at homicides in New York over a longer period and tell a more detailed story about "contagion effects" in violence. 4. Changes in the drug market may have also played a role here. ------------------ Exhibit 1: Employment/Population Ratio and Unemployment Rate, 1980-2000 Source: Council of Economic Advisers, The 1999 Economic Report of the President, updated. Exhibit 2: Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers, 1980-2000 Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, various editions. Exhibit 3: Uniform Crime Reporting Rate of Index Offenses per 100,000 Inhabitants Source: Tabulated from Maguire, Kathleen, and Ann L. Pastore, eds, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996, Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997, NCJ 165361, Table 3.106, with 1996 update from the Sourcebook Web site: www.albany.edu/sourcebook. Exhibit 4: Property Crime Victimization Rate per 1,000 Households Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs. Exhibit 5: Homicide Victimization Rate per 100,000 Population Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs. Exhibit 6: Estimates of Illegal Wages Source: Fagan, Jeffrey, and Richard Freeman, "Crime and Work," in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 25, Michael Tonry, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 225-290. Exhibit 7: Elasticity of Supply and Incapacitation of Crime Exhibit 8: Estimates of the Impact of Job Market Conditions on Crime Using Cross-Area Difference in Difference Models Sources: Gould, Eric, Bruce Weinberg, and David Mustard, "Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States, 1979-1995," July 6, 1998, National Bureau of Economic Research, Summer Institute, Cambridge, MA; Freeman, Richard, and William Rodgers, "Area Economic Conditions and the Labor Market Outcomes of Young Men in the 1990's Expansion," National Bureau of Economic Research, WP 7073; and Raphael, Steven, and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, "Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime," Journal of Law and Economics, forthcoming. Exhibit 9: Logistic Curve Estimates of the Effect of the Illegal Share of Income and Numbers of Crimes Committed in 1979 on Ever Being Incarcerated, 1979- 1996 Source: Tabulated from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, U.S. Department of Labor. ------------------ A Profile of Crime, Violence, and Drug Use Among Mexican Immigrants Presentation by William A. Vega Professor of Psychiatry Robert Wood Johnson Medical School University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey March 15, 2000 Washington, D.C. We are a nation of immigrants and immigrant struggles are part of the American cultural mystique. Ironically, the treatment of immigrants in the media, public policy, and political discourse is often aggressive and harsh. The history of 20th-century America often was punctuated with periods of acute hostility toward immigrants. It began with rancor and pejorative descriptions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants as they forged their way into urban centers in the East and Middle West. Less noticed in the Eastern United States was the considerable emigration and resettlement of Mexicans into the Southwest, Far West, and Chicago during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. These new urban and rural settlement areas became the templates for continuing Mexican immigration throughout the century, during which periods of particularly intense immigration alternated with periods of voluntary and involuntary repatriation to Mexico. Occasional outbreaks of overt anti-Mexican hostility also occurred, such as the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles during World War II--a period when segregation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans was common practice in the Southwestern U.S. In the mid-1950s more than 1 million Mexicans were deported under Operation Wetback. The most recent and vivid example of anti-Mexican immigrant hostility was seen in California in the 1990s during the tenure of Governor Pete Wilson. This period instigated anti-immigrant legislation to limit health, social, and educational services to immigrants, such as Proposition 187, a precursor to the abolition of affirmative action in California. Mexican immigration greatly increased during the final two decades of the 20th century. Problems with the Mexican economy, vigorous U.S. economic growth, and the strong demand for labor in U.S. agriculture, services, and construction industries were powerful stimulants for peak migration and immigration. In 1980 only about 2.2 million of the 8.7 million people of Mexican origin residing in the United States were immigrants. The number of Mexican immigrants doubled by 1990 to 4.3 million, and by 1997 it had accelerated to about 7 million immigrants.[1] These figures document that the number of recent immigrants has significantly increased. I estimate that the 2000 U.S. Census will enumerate about 20 million people of Mexican origin residing in the United States; 40 percent of them will be immigrants. Although this population continues to be disproportionately concentrated in California and Texas, the new immigrant streams are truly national, with Mexican immigrant populations now rapidly developing in the New York-New Jersey area and the Middle Western and Southern States. This increase in numbers of new immigrants has had, and continues to have, a powerful impact on public opinion and the criminal justice system. Media Images Versus Documented Realities It is clear that anti-Mexican feelings have played a consistent and important role in shaping immigrant policy in past decades, and public antipathy regarding the "dilution" of American culture and income transfers to immigrants is now a major public concern. Media images, including political ads, in recent years have portrayed an incessant stream of illiterate Mexicans swamping the border regions, overwhelming the limited resources of the U.S. Border Patrol and making a mockery of immigration policy. Coinciding with these images have been stories of rampant narcotics trafficking on the border, the use of immigrants to import illicit drugs, and Mexican immigrant communities across the United States being used as Trojan horses for the deployment of drug distribution networks. Mexican immigrants are also blamed for challenging local law enforcement agencies with gang activity, increasing levels of violence and theft, and overburdening health and educational institutions. Despite the media-fueled specter of invasion, the United States continues to offer pragmatic reasons for the continuing influx of immigrants. The integration of economic activity under the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994, has not created disincentives to Mexican immigration in the face of the demographic explosion south of the border, the lack of jobs in many rural areas of Mexico, and the low wages for unskilled and semiskilled workers in the urban centers of central and northern Mexico. As Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has remarked on several occasions, the most important long-range threat to U.S. economic growth is a shortage of workers, as U.S. population growth declines. Indeed, Mexican-Americans have among the highest rates of employment of any ethnic group. Although there is an apparent concentration of high-tech growth in the United States, this increasing national affluence has been accompanied by a demand for service and construction workers. Given that the economic disparity between the United States and Mexico is unlikely to change in the decades ahead, it is not too risky to predict a continuing high volume of Mexican immigration into the United States. Only a very serious stall in U.S. economic expansion is likely to offset this trend. Immigration studies have shown that new immigrants will follow the paths of previous family members to established ethnic enclaves and to employment, ultimately reestablishing family networks. With a pattern of accelerating Mexican immigration and settlement in all regions of the United States, it is worth focusing on their documented patterns of behavior rather than depending on the imagery from media reports of sensational incidents or contentious political debates about immigration control. My purpose is to present survey information of importance to criminal justice, law enforcement, and public health officials in formulating their policies and programs. This information is derived from a large field survey of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans residing in urban and rural areas of central California conducted in 1996.[2] (Data gathering and analysis were supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.) The primary goals of the survey were to gather information about the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and substance abuse problems and to determine patterns of health services utilization. The survey, designed as an epidemiological study, uses a scientifically viable sampling strategy and household interviews to gather information about 4,000 people between ages 19 and 59. The respondents were representative of the population from which they were selected: low income and disproportionately low education. Immigrants averaged only a grade school education. The crime-related behavior patterns of Mexican immigrants with Mexican-Americans born in the United States are compared. This is self-reported information, gathered through the use of a fully structured interview and a high-quality survey process. Indications of Criminal Behavior Certain behaviors of interest to law enforcement were compared, including nativity (place of origin) differences in who carried a weapon (defined as a gun, knife, or club) in the 30 days before the survey, who had been arrested in the 5 years before the survey (other than those arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS]), who had been in a fight serious enough to cause injury, who had used illicit drugs in their lifetime, and who had a diagnosis of lifetime drug abuse or dependence. Immigrants had lower rates than U.S.-born Mexican-Americans on every indicator. Males were much more likely than females to engage in these behaviors, and the differences among males were dramatic. For example, rates for U.S.-born Mexican-American males were about 30 percent greater than those for immigrants for arrests, 150 percent greater for carrying a weapon, 300 percent greater for fighting, 100 percent greater for any illegal drug use in their lifetime, and 300 percent greater for lifetime drug abuse or dependence. The criminal behavior profiles for women were distinctive because their overall rates were much lower than those for men and the rates for immigrant women were negligible. It is precisely for these reasons that the relative differences in drug use between U.S.-born and immigrant women were so striking. Immigrant women had very little illicit drug use, but U.S.-born women had a rate of 45 percent. The lifetime abuse or dependence rate for U.S.-born women was 700 percent higher than for immigrant women and 100 percent higher than for immigrant men. U.S.-born female arrest rates, although very low, were about five times higher than for immigrant women. Rates of fighting were similarly low for both groups of women. The pattern that emerged was very clear. Immigrants, whether male or female, had a much lower likelihood of engaging in these behaviors than did their U.S.-born co-ethnics. These comparisons beg the questions, Is there any evidence of change over time in these behaviors among immigrants? Do things get worse the longer immigrants reside in this country and, if so, for which behaviors? To answer these questions, the study compared those who had resided less than 14 years in the United States with those who had resided 14 years or more, as well as comparing them with the U.S.-born sample. Again, a stable pattern emerged. Immigrants residing in the United States 14 years or more had higher rates overall, a pattern reflected in almost every age group. This pattern was more general for men than women, because immigrant women had such low rates of these behaviors. What is striking about this information, however, is that immigrant men who had come to the United States as children had high rates of arrests and carrying weapons. Also, long-staying immigrants were much more likely to carry weapons even in middle age compared with shorter residence immigrants. Although immigrant women had very low arrest rates, women who entered the United States as girls also had higher rates of carrying weapons than those who entered as adults. (See exhibit 1.) The only instance in which immigrant women with less than 14 years residence had higher rates of negative indicators than long-staying immigrants was in regard to physical and sexual abuse by a current partner. (Of course, in this instance the women were victims, not perpetrators.) This outcome suggests that these households were stressed by their social adaptation to the United States, economic situation, and heightened marital tensions. Declining physical abuse rates suggest that these problems subsided over time. It is interesting that no similar pattern was found for verbal abuse or threats. Law enforcement practices also were assessed by examining the disposition of arrests among immigrants and the U.S.-born. To reiterate, the U.S.-born had higher overall arrest rates, and Mexican immigrant women had negligible criminal arrests. Among immigrants arrested, almost half were detained for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), whereas one-quarter of the U.S.-born were detained for this reason. The proportions that proceeded to prosecution were similar among immigrants and the U.S.-born (about 40 percent). About half of U.S.-born women were convicted, as were about two-thirds of U.S.-born men and three-quarters of immigrants. The higher immigrant conviction rates may be due to a greater likelihood of conviction for DUI. Incarceration rates were similar for the U.S.-born and immigrants (about 80 percent of those convicted). These comparisons do not suggest a criminal justice system bias favoring or disfavoring immigrants. The only issue of note was the relatively high arrest rates for DUI among immigrants. (See exhibit 2.) A second way to look at this issue is to compare U.S.-born rates with immigrant rates for persons with a diagnosis of drug abuse or dependence who were arrested. Again, there were no differences between immigrants and the U.S.-born, with about half of each having been arrested in the year before the survey. Although this information reveals nothing about fairness in law enforcement practices toward Mexican-born people as a group, immigrant status per se does not appear to inordinately increase arrest rates. Overall these results correspond with the analyses of two decades of institutionalization rates. Butcher and Piehl estimated that "if natives had the same institutionalization probabilities as immigrants, our jails and prisons would have one-third fewer inmates."[3] Therefore, they observed, immigrants were "assimilating to the (higher) criminal propensities of natives." Implications for Policymaking The seemingly inexhaustible demand for mobile, low-cost labor in the United States will continue to attract millions of Mexican nationals. Many will settle in this Nation, begin new lives, and start families. What do the results of this and other studies tell us about their impact on the law enforcement and criminal justice systems? --The INS faces immediate resource problems and policy issues regarding physically controlling the border, limiting production and distribution of fraudulent documents, and regulating employers. --Narcotics traffickers will continue using relatively small groups of individuals, including established Mexican-American gangs, to foster drug importation and distribution, and immigrant enclaves will be used for clandestine marketing. The problem in this instance is not primarily immigrants but the infiltration of the immigrant stream by traffickers to conduct their business with less risk. --Despite low rates of arrest, drug use, and violent behavior among immigrants, their greater numbers are increasing the burden of law enforcement, judicial, and correctional resources. This is an example of a low crime rate becoming a major problem when the population increases dramatically. --The major impact on the criminal justice system is long range: The problem of delinquency and drug use among Mexican-Americans will vastly increase in magnitude if current trends continue. People who are born in the United States or who enter the United States during childhood or adolescence will have much higher rates of delinquency, arrest, and substance abuse in their lifetime than adult immigrants. The intergenerational shift to higher rates was concentrated among U.S.-born Mexican-American women who were arrested and have substance abuse problems. Without major changes in the educational and income structure of Mexican-Americans, these statistics on crime and substance abuse can be predicted with a high degree of certainty. California juvenile arrest data show that, as early as 1993, Hispanic youths had 100 percent more felony arrests than African-Americans and Hispanic youths were involved in more than half of all status offenses reported in the State.[4] Perhaps the most powerful finding from the growing body of research about Hispanic adolescents and adults is that poverty is a much more significant factor in increasing criminal behavior and drug use within U.S. communities among Hispanics born in the U.S. than among immigrants. Long-range solutions must address core determinants such as education and academic achievement and the vitality, safety, and cohesiveness of low-income communities. Although school-based prevention programs to reduce drug abuse and crime are important, their effectiveness depends on improving key indicators of population and community prosperity. The profile of intergenerational economic mobility for Mexican-Americans indicates a substantial improvement in income between the immigrant generation and the first generation born in the United States.[5] However, there is no improvement in the second generation's median income. No doubt this stagnation is attributable in large part to the lack of secondary school completion among 35 percent of the Mexican-American population. The second generation is isolated in low-income areas, is at high risk for drug abuse and criminal behavior, and is more likely than Mexican immigrants to come in contact with law enforcement, criminal justice, and correctional systems as juveniles--and later as adults. Question-and-Answer Session Luis A. Payan, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.: These are interesting observations, but what do they mean? Have you done any thinking on a more philosophical level? What do they mean for the economy, for politics, for justice issues? At the end of your talk you began to address the causes: not enough Mexican-Americans go to school and on to higher education--perhaps they don't graduate. I'm sure there are other causes. Is it because this is a relatively violent society? Is it because they acquire these traits from society? And second, what about the solutions? What does it mean for us who are working in the different communities--justice communities, immigrant communities, and so forth? What are we to learn from this? W.V.: We are a violent society; we have the highest rates of violence of any Western industrialized nation. We have the highest rates of substance abuse, experimentation, and addiction of any society on earth. Immigrants move from a society that is very different and has minimal illicit drug use problems. Even though there is trafficking in Mexico, the levels of drug use are very low, except in the border regions, where trafficking is most intense and there is a high confluence from the two sides. I have thought a great deal about the question of whether it is possible to intervene in this process meaningfully, outside basic economic/educational determinants. I don't think you can do it without engaging the educational and economic systems, but is there something you can do above and beyond addressing the problems that create communities of vulnerability? Can you do something about the issue of weakened families and social networks? I have been asked this in forum after forum. I'm caught in the situation of judging whether this is an existential dilemma of people changing societies and changing cultures. Must they adapt to the new environment? Is there an iron law that says they must conform to American expectations and norms (which includes such things as higher levels of drug use and crime)? Or can we find a way to stop this process-- through carefully thought-out interventions at multiple levels--by buttressing these families' strengths, values, and methods of socializing children to be more law abiding adults? That is the next concrete step. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and National Institute of Mental Health experiment with those kinds of approaches. Some of the issues inherent in such approaches include the scope of interventions possible, the generalizability of these interventions, and the question of how to get them accepted and implemented throughout the Nation. Enormous resources would be involved, along with the need to integrate Federal Government incentives and local and State coordination to implement, disseminate, and maintain these programs over the long haul. We have yet to see a track record that proves it can be done in the United States (not just for Mexican-Americans but for adolescents from all groups). We need to develop interventions that work, are based on scientific evaluation, and can be implemented by people other than the experts who designed them. Resources to sustain these interventions must be available over decades because it takes decades to change a culture. Carol Wilder, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.: In underdeveloped countries all over the world, people have left the rural, less densely populated areas and poured into urban areas. They leave behind the social constructs that help them obey societal rules. They are "at sea" in the cities and their crime rates soar, especially among the second generation. This pattern does not occur just among Hispanics moving into the United States and is not a result of the "evilness" of the United States. The breaking up of family and community constraints is, I believe, the prime determinant. We also need to look at poverty; we need to look at the two factors you talked about--education and community material well-being--so that people have opportunities and can break out of negative environments. I think that is much more important. I think your last suggestion of working to maintain the old culture, keeping what's good and helpful, is a losing battle. I think this other is a far, far greater determinant. W.V.: Research has definitely shown that the healthy kids are the bicultural kids, the kids who have mastered and positively identified with both cultures--especially Mexican-Americans in the United States. The issue of positive identity development for Mexican-American, African-American, and Puerto Rican children is fundamental. Each must perceive his or her color positively, not internalize self-hate, and not accept external definitions of self. Color variation should be normal and positive. I agree that there are many examples around the world where populations go through this process. However, if you look at the Mexican example (other than Mexico City), crime rates have not increased in the other cities the way they have soared among Mexican immigrants in the United States. This issue is becoming more confusing because many migrants return to Mexico from the United States and take back a lot of U.S. behaviors and styles. Mexico is beginning a rapid transformation in expectations for both men and women. Richard Stana, Administration of Justice Issues, General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C.: What is your opinion about the Los Angeles Police Department's "Rampart" scandal? Is it an isolated incident? Do you see task forces going "across the line" like that in other cities? What should local, State, and Federal law enforcement do to make sure that ethnic groups get a fair shake in the criminal justice system? M.V.: That breaks down into two issues. One has to do with the aggressive culture of law enforcement in Los Angeles, which has been well known for a very long time by those who have lived there. I grew up in East Los Angeles so I can tell you from firsthand experience. The extent and magnitude of the problem is different from place to place. Places like San Diego have done a very good job of overcoming some of those problems. Other places like Los Angeles, perhaps because of the sheer size of the police department, have had much more resistant enclaves. We see the same thing in New York City. Large police departments in general have difficulty implementing new goals and standards of conduct. It is difficult to maintain consistency in professionalism, especially in segments of the department that are given the "leading edge" in tough enforcement practices, such as gang and narcotics enforcement units. High morale and professional standards must be reinforced in these units especially. Additional support for drug courts, drug rehabilitation, and educational programs in the correctional system is needed to help offenders. Otherwise, juveniles will be released and involved in criminal activity again. A proposition was passed in California during the 2000 election that made offenders ages 14 and older criminally liable. This is a very serious problem that will disproportionately bring more and more Mexican-origin youths into the criminal justice system. They will fill the adult system as well because they will graduate very early in the criminal justice system and ensure a population for the adult prison system. Doris M. Provine, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.: Based on your arrest and dispositional data, it sounded like you said that the criminal justice system is not treating Mexican-Americans differently from the native-born. However, I noticed there were some interesting differences between the two groups regarding arrested persons who were illegal drug users. Did you conclude that there is less drug use among Mexican-Americans? Can you speak about who gets arrested and for what? Are there other differences and similarities within your arrest data? W.V.: Frankly, the arrests of immigrants are so dominated by DUI offenses (50 percent) that the other categories don't provide much of a comparison. The U.S.-born are more likely to be involved in traditional property crimes or crimes against a person than are the immigrants. When the DUI rate is that high, it completely monopolizes any profile. That is not necessarily a negative, because DUI arrests may keep people away from criminal behavior and offer the opportunity for rehabilitation. They also keep people out of situations that lengthen their criminal sentences and produce three-time losers. The difference in my data between foreign-born and U.S.-born arrestee rates is 30 percent. The people who study institutionalization say the difference in institutionalization rates between the foreign-born and U.S.-born is about one-third. These two sets of findings match very closely. Doris M. Provine: What about the drug war? Could it be that the drug war is more aggressive toward, say, African-Americans and other minorities? W.V.: I don't think you can make any direct connection between the impact of the drug war and the data I have presented. My data are not from the border or places where primary importation takes place, such as Tijuana, San Diego, Juarez, and El Paso. My data are from areas removed from the border, in which there obviously is illicit drug traffic taking place. But it's clear that the foreign-born population is not participating as consumers to the same degree as Mexican-Americans. This is different from saying that narcotics traffickers are not using these communities to hide out, to be invisible in setting up manufacture and transportation of, for example, methamphetamine. I think that is in fact going on. I think that communities are aware of these things, but they are not participating in them. Marianne Pieper, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: You stated in your response to an earlier question that the most successful people had contact with both cultures. What is the impact of not allowing young children to speak in their native tongue (as in California elementary schools)--and not allowing them to learn English? What happens when we ask them to forget their native history? When we say, "You're not allowed to speak in your native tongue in school," does that have an effect? W.V.: In my mind, it has a tremendous impact symbolically. There's no question that the culture is going to be reinforced simply through population growth and the continuing immigration of Mexican-Americans. The media now offer the Spanish language on TV as well as on the radio, and last year was "Hispanic year" in the music industry. I think there is not a problem at the level of cultural icons and cultural reinforcement through the media. However, if you tell people, "Your language will no longer be taught," does it send a signal that they're worth less because they are from the culture represented by that language? On the other hand, I know from research I've done that the primary problem faced by adolescents who come into the country is language, a problem usually overcome in their first 4 or 5 years if they come as children. Mastering English quickly is to their advantage. This, however, begs a different question for a different seminar: Does simultaneously learning Spanish and English enhance or reduce the likelihood of learning effective English language skills and vocabulary? Victor Stone, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Could it be that your data reflect that the immigrant population is trying to not be visible, particularly because of the way our laws currently are structured? The INS may not arrest them, but that doesn't mean they don't fear that every traffic stop is going to turn into a deportation. Therefore, while they are immigrants, they are trying very hard not to be sent back. They came here to raise their standard of living, so they are very motivated to stay here. If an event scares them (even if it doesn't turn into an arrest or a conviction), they may disappear into another community to be less visible or go back to Mexico for fear that the system will deal with them unfairly. However, their children who are born here know they are U.S. citizens and can't be sent back; they don't have to remain invisible and they haven't experienced the different standard of living. I think this has been true for all immigrant groups, historically, in this country. The first generation born here doesn't know what the previous generation left, so the first generation is not as motivated to get ahead. Have you or do you plan to elicit that as a factor? W.V.: I think that is a very astute observation. It would be very difficult for me to say whether it's true. To some extent it probably is true. We also studied risk factors for depression among these populations in California. One of the most profound risk factors for depression we found among the U.S.-born (yes, the U.S.-born!) was fear of detention by the INS--fear of being asked to show papers, being taken away, or having to prove U.S. citizenship (or even worse, accidentally being sent to Mexico and having to make your way back somehow). So the cultural specter of enforcement affects both the U.S.-born and the foreign-born. However, only for immigrants is there danger that a contact with the criminal justice system could actually lead to deportation. This has been part of the culture of California from the mid-1990s to now. Notes 1. Schmidley, A. Dianne, and Campbell Gibson, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 1997, Current Population Reports, Series P23-195, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999. 2. Vega, William A., Bohdan Kolody, Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, Ethel Alderete, Ralph Catalano, Jorge Caraveo-Anduaga, "Lifetime Prevalence of DSM-III-R Psychiatric Disorders Among Rural and Urban Mexican-Americans in California," Archives of General Psychiatry 55 (1998): 771-778. 3. Butcher, Kristin F., and Anne Morrison Piehl, "Recent Immigrants: Unexpected Implications for Crime and Incarceration," Working paper no. 6067, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997. 4. California Department of Justice, 1993 juvenile justice statistics, unpublished data, Division of Law Enforcement Information Center, California Department of Justice, Sacramento, California, May 1994. 5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Profile of the United States: 1997, Current Population Reports, Series P23-194, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998. Exhibit 1: Conduct Problems by Gender and Birthplace Exhibit 2: 5-Year Criminal History of Arrestees by Gender and Birthplace ------------------ Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising Presentation by Lawrence W. Sherman Professor of Human Relations Fels Center of Government University of Pennsylvania April 5, 2000 Washington, D.C. The year 2000 has become a crucible for gun control. This year, more than ever before, the Nation has moved toward a policy of making guns "safer," with only "safer" people having guns. The Smith and Wesson agreement,[1] State legislative initiatives, and the President's Federal legislative proposals have captured the public imagination with this gun safety strategy. The continuing tragedies of children shooting children have made the "safe guns, safe people" approach seem all the more necessary and potentially effective. The opposition to these strategies comes largely from the political right, which resists any new legislation as unnecessary. It frames the alternative as more enforcement of existing laws, which would be so effective as to make any new laws unnecessary.[2] Almost buried in the debate is the opposition from the left, which advocates the policies of all other nations with advanced economies: virtual bans on the possession of handguns, with tight registration and control of a limited number of long guns.[3] As the window of opportunity for new gun policy grows wider, the year 2000 also has become a crucible for science and its role in making public policy. For as the gun debate has escalated, research on the effects of various gun policies has been left far behind. To the extent that research has been cited at all, it has appeared in the usually suspect pattern of selective invocation of the mantle of science to support one argument or another. Far too often, there simply has been no research to cite on the major policy proposals. This presentation reviews the research we have, the research we do not have, and how we can use the research we have to reduce gun violence. Also, new legislation supporting the research desperately needed is suggested. For while many experiments in enforcement strategies can be conducted without new legislation, most legislative proposals cannot be adequately tested without actually enacting legislation. It is smart policy to treat new legislation as an experiment and design it to optimize what is learned from each new law. Two Kinds of Research: Epidemiological and Experimental Two kinds of research methods are covered in this review: epidemiological and experimental. It is the experiments, or what some call quasi-experiments, that form the basis of this presentation and the University of Maryland's 1997 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Report, Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising: A Report to the United States Congress.[4] The program evaluations reviewed for the report fall into the category of "impact" research, which measures the effects of programs and practices on measures of crime--in this case, violence committed with guns. By contrast, the epidemiology of gun violence--which traces the patterns of risk factors associated with its incidence--provides the research essential for an equally important part of policymaking: "imagination" research. By this I do not mean that the research results are fabricated--although that can happen. Rather, seeing patterns among the risk factors for gun violence can prod the imagination to invent new, more effective policies than any we now have or any we are debating. The Parable of the Screwworm The pa