In The Blogs

Chart of the Day - 2.20.2009

| Fri Feb. 20, 2009 9:22 AM PST

John Pfaff had an article in Slate yesterday that takes on "five myths" about prison reform. I don't have much to say about the article in general, but it did have one very interesting factlet about America's sky-high incarceration rate:

More strikingly, if we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s. In other words, we're not locking up a greater percentage of the population so much as locking people up in prisons rather than mental hospitals.

This comes from a paper written a couple of years ago by Bernard Harcourt, who says that it's only half true to say that American incarceration rates skyrocketed starting in the 70s. What really happened, he says, is that we've had high incarceration rates for most of the 20th century, but it was originally split between a small number of people in prisons and a much larger number of people in mental institutions. In the 60s we suddenly emptied the mental hospitals, crime soared, and then in the 70s we started putting more people in prison. The end result is an inversion: the incarceration rate today is about the same as it was in the 50s, but we have a small number of people in mental hospitals and much larger number of people in prison.

Harcourt discussed these findings in a series of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy back in 2007, making the point that social science research that focuses strictly on the prison population might be missing the larger picture: "Since practically none of our studies on prisons, guns, abortion, education, unemployment, capital punishment, etc., controls for institutionalization writ large, most of what we claim to know about these effects may be on shaky ground."

If you're interested in this kind of thing, the whole discussion is worth reading. I don't have the background to endorse Harcourt's findings one way or the other, but the raw data is pretty interesting. It's worth a look.

UPDATE: Crime and punishment expert Mark Kleiman responds here. He says there's much less to this than meets the eye, and adds, via email: "The explosion of drive-by shootings 1985-1994 simply can't be blamed on de-institutionalization. More generally, adult homicide has been falling since the early 1970s; it's youth homicide that surged and receded."

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Comments

War on Drugs = Full Prisons

Submitted by thersites on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 10:22 AM PST.

Also ignored, IMO, are the distorting effects of the bogus "war on drugs" which incarcerates small-time drug offenders. You're as likely to meet seriously mentally ill individuals on the street (or wherever Field Marshall Giuliani swept them away to) as in prison. These circumstances are a national disgrace.

Same people?

Submitted by BigTom (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 10:23 AM PST.

Those graphs tell an amazing story. But how many of those in prison would have been in mental institutions 50 years ago? Are we simply using prisons as substitute mental institutions? Or, have we substantially reduced the severity of mental illness within society, but acquired a new criminal justice problem? A good chunk of these new prisoners are drugs offenders. Would they have been in mental institutions in the past? The correlation could be accidental.

Who's making-up the difference?

Submitted by rusrus (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 10:53 AM PST.

I believe fewer people would need to be in the loony bin because of better treatment options, but the minor drug charges are making-up the difference.

what about race?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 11:01 AM PST.

these charts are very interesting. but currently, a huge percentage of the incarcerated population is racial minorities, esp. black males. it doesn't seem likely that the mental institutions were full of black males in the '50s. so i think there's more going on here. still, this is extremely interesting.

Homeless rates also

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 11:10 AM PST.

Back in the "good old days" you could commit people against their will for being "weird," providing them with housing for the rest of their lives. Not anymore, so you end up with homeless on the streets, or more people in jail when they actively misbehave, until you release them into homelessness.

The demographics changed a lot

Submitted by stefan on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 11:51 AM PST.

I read the Harcourt paper when it came out and my memory is that the high incarceration rate in mental institutions was very much about older whites, especially women.

I thought we emptied the

Submitted by Horatio Parker (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 12:18 PM PST.

I thought we emptied the mental hospitals in 80s.

"I thought we emptied the

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 2:25 PM PST.

"I thought we emptied the mental hospitals in 80s. " Yeah - about the time Reagan and his cronies got into office

This is a fantastic post and

Submitted by GA-Sen Watcher (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 4:54 PM PST.

tagged as:

This is a fantastic post and it makes me I want to read Harcourt's book very much. I like the rigor of comparing to the null hypothesis of replacing actuarial prediction in criminal justice with randomness, and I'm not surprised that decades of paying D.A.s and the police so much more than public defenders has led to the documented results of the counter-effectual justice system. I propose raising the standards of what is considered fair justice to level that playing field. Then we could see whether it causes an improvement.

That explains a lot about the 1960s!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 5:12 PM PST.

In 1939, Robert A. Heinlein predicted that the 1960s-1970s would go down in future history as "The Crazy Years."

Imprisonment rates

Submitted by Steve Sailer (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 5:15 PM PST.

Clearly, increasing the imprisonment rate, with the subsequent large fall in crime rate, is the leading success of social policy in recent decades.

Not convinced

Submitted by The Mother Jones Cleaning Staff (not verified) on Fri Feb. 20, 2009 5:46 PM PST.

Right at the top of the linked thread, Harcourt admits that the institutionalized demographic was completely different than the population of our prisons today (e.g., hospitals: 44% female, prisons: 95% male). I think this somewhat eviscerates the argument that our current high incarceration rate is just a reflection of "more sick people behind bars, rather than hospitals". At least Harcourt admits this, while Pfaff seems to sweep it under the rug. There might be some kind of second-order effect here, but I don't see it. And if that's what's going on, then you have to do better than show us some graphs. Harcourt also notes that a lot of these people were institutionalized for some pretty questionable reasons: e.g., institutions for epileptics, institutionalizing women for "hysteria", etc. Many, many people were legitimately sick, but when you subtract the bad diagnoses & non-crime-committing types, I imagine the numbers would be much, much smaller. I suppose there's an argument that if we still had a "functioning" mental health system (meaning, a system with '50s-level commitment powers) we might be applying it in different ways that would reduce the incarceration rate. Perhaps we'd be classifying drug offenders as mentally ill or something. If anything, I imagine that the upshot of this is that Americans are very comfortable locking people up. We stopped doing it in the '70s and maybe that led to some crime, or maybe it was just bad economic times. Now we're back at it.