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Are Americans Becoming More Violent?
I spent the weekend in North Carolina, with a friend who works for the North Carolina prison system. He was discussing the complexity prisons face, in providing for the needs of different types of prisoners. He said that they used to have a special prison for violent offenders, which had more staffing, more elaborate security systems, more doctors, psychologists, and so on. He said that because of all this, violent offenders were much more expensive to house.
He then cited an interesting statistic. Twenty-five years ago, violent offenders (those serving time for a crime of violence against another person) made up 27% of the NC prison population. Now it is 70%. This incredible and rapid transformation of their clientele has put an enormous strain on the prison system. Most of their facilities are just not designed for this population. It occurs to me that our society was not designed for this population, either.
A free society, based on personal liberty and personal responsibility, does not function well with such citizens. One wonders: what happened? Where did all these people come from? Where were they before? People aren’t any different now than they were 25 years ago. Not genetically, anyway. So why are they so different?
This would not appear to be due to the emptying of the mental hospitals – that happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Twenty-five years ago was 1994. Something has happened recently. And very, very rapidly.
Is this trend likely to continue? Will our society continue to become increasingly violent?
What’s strange is that our violent crime rate is falling, and has been for years. Could it be that we’re just so efficient at identifying, capturing, and convicting violent criminals that we now have lots of violent prisoners and fewer violent free citizens? That seems unlikely to me, although I guess I don’t know.
Maybe prison overcrowding has led authorities to release all but the most dangerous criminals, so the only ones left in prison are the most violent offenders. Again, I don’t know.
So what do you think?
- Why is our prison population becoming more violent so quickly?
- Why is our violent crime rate falling at the same time?
- Will these trends continue?
These seem like enormous changes in society. But I really don’t understand what’s going on.
Any help would be appreciated.
Published in General
Don’t we need more numbers to understand the picture?
Over the 25 year period:
Change in the North Carolina total population
Change in the total in the prisons
Numbers that reflect the total and percentage of violent crimes resulting in imprisonment
Maybe some others, then we could do some analysis.
Today’s prisoners represent the violence of years or decades ago. Perhaps the non-violent people are not in prison anymore. Property crimes and drug crimes are not prosecuted like the used to be.
Less crack.
Our prison systems are poorly designed. They do a very poor job of turning bad people into good responsible productive citizens.
Because just the percentage is noted, it’s hard for me to hazard a guess as to what’s going on.
Don’t know about other states, but here in California, “non violent” crimes have been redefined, as have misdemeanors and felonies. Cops have have explained to me that many perpetrators are routinely released or not given jail time.
Which means that as a percentage, the “violent” criminals would be significantly higher.
Edited to add: all of which you noted in your OP, but that would be my guess.
Most certainly, yes.
He just mentioned this statistic in conversation, and I got to thinking about it on the drive home.
But I have no expertise in this field. I was hoping to find someone who does.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.
Dr. B – Can you cite the study or studies you’re referencing? How does the prison population break down demographically:
# of illegal aliens vs citizens
# ethnicities
# drug-related offenses
# drug cartel related offenses
# sexual predators
# serial killers
# murderers
# rapists
# those on death row
# in solitary confinement
Also geographic state by state concentration. Federal vs state institutions.
# juvenile vs adult offenders
No, I can’t. This was just a casual conversation with my friend, who is an administrator in the NC prison system. He was just complaining about the fact that his job was impossible, because they weren’t equipped to care for such difficult prisoners. I presume their internal data is correct, but I don’t know for sure.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.
I am not convinced this should be the purpose of prisons, but be that as it may: How would you propose making such a change?
@ltpwfdcm?
not the sole purpose. prisons also act as a deterrent, a separation of the bad from the good, and as a symbol of justice. I would separate prisoners from each other at all times. It is hard to make bad people into good people, if they are always under the influence of bad people. Dreadful. Then, I take an inspiration from A Clockwork Orange. Everybody gets 8 hours of day of video training on marketable skills, remedial education, history, civics, and morality. Mental health is important too.
I’ll think about this and have some thoughts tomorrow at work. Off the top of my head I’d say there’s a trend of trying to keep low-level non-violent offenders out of prison through diversion programs, mental health/drug courts, probation etc as the research tends to show that housing low-risk offenders with medium-risk makes the low-risk guys worse off but when medium-risk are places with high-risk the same increase doesn’t usually happen. The incentive therefore is to find alternate punishment than prison etc. So, incarcerating only the medium- to high-risk offenders would seem to leave a higher proportion of violent prisoner than in years past. This is just a rough assertion unsupported by stats at this point.
At my prison there is a fairly distinct sorting of the three big offender groups: non-violent to semi-violent sex offenders (sex with a minor, child porn types etc) drug-related charges, and the ‘violent’ offenders (include rapes, aggravated sexual assault etc). (There’s a smaller group aside from those like fraud/white-collar guys, but they’d mostly be lumped in with the SO’s.
The recidivism rate for an armed offender is around 73%. As far as catch and release is concerned advocates on the Left believe in the collective. Catch and release should be based upon investigation of an individual’s actions, to include their disciplinary record while incarcerated.
So with you on this.
Much like hospitals, prisons are a place where we concentrate pathologies so we can fix them or at least keep an eye on them; but the pathologies become more effectual in the concentrated environment.
Dr. Bastiat:
So what do you think?
Because of a shift in our culture toward greater acceptance of violence as a legitimate means of politics on the left since the 60s, accompanied by ever-increasingly graphic depictions of violence in our culture- i.e. TV, movies, video games, music (rap, of course, but not just rap) and a the dominance of a mind set in the social worker set that excuses socially pathological behavior rather than strengthening barriers against it.
Because the violent criminals are largely a subset of men aged 17 to 35 and that demographic has declined in number in the last 30 years.
Probably. But which ones do you mean? All of them? Violent crime will likely continue to decline with demographics but the cultural angle could stand some more analysis.
The general answer is no. Absolutely not.
The number of young people today who have never been in a fist fight is certainly larger than previous generations; for one thing, I think a lot of the talk about bullying today has more to do with kids being relatively weak than bullying being especially intolerable today. However, among a small portion of the population, erratic, violent behavior has become more pervasive. There are a number of depraved subcultures which are unknown to normal Americans until they manifest themselves in objectively reprehensible ways.
That’s an interesting point. I wonder if in today’s America there is essentially no midlevel slight violence to push back against the extreme violence. For many years I’ve had a theory that in some of the third-world countries like Haiti, the reason the violent thugs end up in control is that there’s no middle-class midlevel violent people to thwart them. The countries’ populations run to the two extremes of very placid and passive and very violent and aggressive–no one in the middle.
That would seem to me to be an extremely difficult task.
This is from my perspective as a mental health therapist working in corrections (Disclaimer: speaking for myself and not representing the Utah Dept of Corrections).
The table below shows publicly available statistics for the currently incarcerated inmates in Utah. In general the “violent” crimes here would be murder (obviously), people crimes, and the 1st and 2nd Degree Sex/Registerable; we can add in the Weapons categories as well, though many of those are basically “felon in possession” of a restricted weapon. That’s a total of 4425 out of 6825 or 65% being violent crimes as described above, similar to the rate in North Carolina. I don’t know what the rate used to be, but it has been relatively stable the last few years proportion-wise. I would say that the change is rate is mostly attributable to what I said last night – the weeding out of low-level, non-violent offenders from prison into less-restrictive options, which has been a trend lately. Yesterday, in fact, Oklahoma released 462 non-violent inmates from prison yesterday as part of that same trend.
As far as the 2nd part of the OP, talking about the strain on the resources, Utah has been fortunate in that they are building a new main prison in Salt Lake City and are able to incorporate the current best-practices as far as safety and correctional rehabilitation are concerned. Even things such as maximizing daylight in the sections and structuring the layout to provide for appropriate medical and mental health access. At the secondary facility where I work, we actually do a good job of offering mental health access to the inmates – we have 4 therapists covering the 1700-ish inmates and I can usually see most inmates who want regular therapy on a weekly basis. They used to have 2 therapists until about 3 years ago when they hired additional staff to provide better coverage. The number of crisis calls has dropped dramatically (it used to consume the majority of the day as a therapist) as well as the number of inmates reporting suicidal ideation. Seems like this ounce of prevention is better than the pounds of cure.
Just some thoughts…
So that means that 73% of them are caught breaking another law, correct? So, presumably, some of them break laws later and are not caught, correct?
So that depressing statistic of 73% is probably much worse than it appears, correct?
Sorry for the simplistic questions. They sound confrontational, but they’re not. I just don’t know much about this sort of thing, and I’m trying to make sure I understand this properly…
This is a great point.
I would also point out that when schools started “No Tolerance” policies for fighting, and calling the police when grade school boys get in a playground scuffle, they basically prevented decent kids from protecting themselves from bullies. Which would, predictably, give bullies more freedom to be twits. A lot of bullying could be fixed with a simple pop in the nose from a 4th grader. Then it’s no big deal. Fixes itself.
So well-meaning “No Tolerance” rules about violence result in various unintended consequences, like more bullying. This is not the first time that well-meaning do-gooderism has made things worse in some way.
Separation makes lots of sense. But I don’t see how an education alone, regardless of content, makes bad people into good people. Maybe we aren’t together on the definitions of bad vs. good people.
This sounds like a pretty good argument for capital punishment. I only skimmed the other comments but it is pretty clear from genetics that violent criminals produce more violent criminals. Capital punishment has been abolished effectively. Housing a larger and larger population of violent criminals is going to be expensive. Places like New York City seem determined to relearn lessons once accepted, like “Broken Windows” policing. The learning will be painful.
This just showed up today, about the “Chicken Wars”. I’m 70, and I don’t remember many of my contemporaries getting murdered in line at a fast-food restaurant.
Those are all good questions.
It is also true that in order to justify the huge cost of building the expensive super max prisons, there has to be warm bodies inside them.
People housed in such who end up getting out explain that one day they are sitting in a normal prison in a normal prison cell, and about to finish a letter home, when guards show up and escort them to a super max facility. Sure, their initial crime was a bit intense – let’s say they had participated in an armed robbery in which no one was killed, but laws about gun use in crime are very strict. (Which they should be.)
Decades ago, the prisoner would have been in a normal prison until they served their time. Now prisoners get shifted around to make the ever expanding expense of housing prisoners inside a “super max” more likely than before.
While I support capital punishment, I also think we should offer juries the option of “castration plus life imprisonment”. There are a few offenses I can think of that would call for castration plus capital punishment.
Actually, pedophiles in California asked for the option of castration and were turned down. It does reduce their dreams and fantasies but I think there is now some drug therapy approved. Maybe they can become trannies. The problem with long term imprisonment is that the prison population grows and the left, as in the famous Fox Butterfield quote, “why is crime down but we have so many in prison ?” is uninformed. Capital Punishment was common in days when prisons were not available and the community was poor.
In fact, as pointed out by others, recidivism is common, over 70%, and violent criminals tend to be unaffected by “rehabilitation.” The famous case of the writer of “In the Belly of the Beast” whose parole was facilitated by writer Norman Mailer is a cautionary tale. The recent book by Plomin about the genetics of behavior suggests that by adulthood, 50% of behavior is genetic.
https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-How-DNA-Makes-Press-ebook/dp/B07TD7DMJB/.
There are some good graphs about incarceration at Wikipedia, here.
Incarceration greatly increased in the 1980s and 1990s, as a reaction to increased crime rates. From the Wikipedia graphs:
So overall, we’re incarcerating about 4-4.5 times as many people as we were in 1975. The big increase was between 1980 and 2000.
I do not have data on the breakdown of incarceration between violent and non-violent offenses over this entire period.
Here is a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on federal and state incarceration, reporting data from 2016. The total incarceration figures are lower (I think because these include prison, but not jail). 55% of state prisoners were incarcerated for violent crimes, compared to 8% of federal prisoners. There were far more state prisoners (about 1.3 million vs. about 166,000 in federal prison), so the weighted average for violent convicts was about 50%. This is consistent with the OP.
Based on this limited data, my tentative conclusion is that the violent crime rate dropped significantly because of increased incarceration of violent criminals.
Very much agree that once you lock up the people who are career criminals, there is a drop in certain types of crime.
This is worth considering as well:
Over the time period of the mid 1970’s to now, certain crimes require incarceration that formerly did not.
When a best friend was killed by a drunk driver in June of 1975, she was the fifth recorded instance of the guy driving drunk. He got six months in jail and then probation.
Same thing happening now would require a major bit of time in prison. Maybe as much as five years or more.
It would be good if there was a study that had jail and prison time both included in the statistics.
Manslaughter due to drunk driving would probably get somebody 10 to 20 nowadays.