During the 2010s, Fordham law professor John F. Pfaff made two important corrections to the “mass incarceration” debate. First, he showed that the role of the War on Drugs had been hugely exaggerated—a small share of America’s prisoners were locked up for drug offenses, while many more were incarcerated for violent crimes. Second, he highlighted the immense discretion that prosecutors wield, arguing that their growing use of felony charges contributed to the rising incarceration of the 1990s and 2000s.
A wave of “progressive prosecutors,” often backed by the left-wing billionaire (and conspiracy-theory magnet) George Soros, sought to harness this leeway. Their supporters hoped fewer people would get tossed in prison. Critics worried about hardened felons being turned loose and crime rising. After all, as Pfaff had shown, significantly reducing incarceration would require a new approach to serious offenders—not just going easy on your friendly neighborhood pot smokers.
In an important working paper—newly updated and much expanded from earlier versions—Amanda Y. Agan and several coauthors suggest a much more mundane reality. In their analysis, progressive prosecutors don’t seem to increase crime rates or drug-overdose deaths … but they don’t reduce the use of prison, either. Their leniency seems mostly restricted to nonviolent misdemeanors, which tended to be punished mildly even before they took office.
Agan et al. start with a list of prosecutors “from a non-profit organization that coordinates a network of reform-minded prosecutors,” though a previous study identified essentially the same group of people based on campaign platforms and policy choices. They then check to see what happened when these prosecutors took office, relative to trends elsewhere.
They run a few variations of their analysis, with results fluctuating somewhat. In general, though, misdemeanor charges fall somewhere in the ballpark of 15 percent with a progressive prosecutor in office, and the effect may be especially large for drug misdemeanors. There’s no effect, or at least none large enough to measure statistically, on felony charges or violent misdemeanors.
Pretty much by definition, nonviolent misdemeanors aren’t driving our prison numbers—they’re generally punishable by short jail stays at most—and leniency can sometimes be an appropriate response to minor crimes like these. It’s thus not so surprising that the changes progressive prosecutors implemented on average had effects on crime and imprisonment that were small enough to be hard to measure. The authors “find no statistically significant effects of the inauguration of a reform prosecutor on reported local crime rates for any offense type,” as well as “little to no reduction in prison incarceration rates.”
It’s worth noting that the authors lack data on shorter jail stays, as opposed to prison sentences—and that a different study found a 7% increase in property crime in progressive prosecutors’ jurisdictions relative to trends elsewhere, which is within the margin of error here. There’s more to be learned through further research, especially about what happens when certain individual progressive prosecutors make more drastic changes. But on average, at least, maybe progressive prosecutors have been less radical than many hoped or feared.
From the Manhattan Institute
Joseph Figliolia analyzes in detail the politicization of gender medicine at the Texas Medical Association.
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Other Papers of Note
Gallup has some new data on how Americans would prefer to cut the deficit. Spending cuts outperform tax hikes in the abstract, with about half of respondents wanting to “only” or “mostly” use the former, and another quarter wanting an even mix. However, the most popular concrete reform Gallup tested was “increasing income tax rates for upper-income Americans,” while the least popular was reforming Social Security and Medicare. I suspect what most people wanted to say was “someone else should pay for it”; don’t hike my taxes or cut programs I actually plan to use!
Speaking of the federal government’s finances, a new paper compares the U.S. with Italy in that regard. Italy has a worse debt-to-GDP ratio, and yet the U.S. fares worse under “generational accounting.” This method “calculates the lifetime net tax rate – lifetime taxes divided by lifetime labor earnings – facing future generations if current generations pay nothing more, on net, than current policy mandates.”
Durham, North Carolina, handles some nonviolent 911 calls with a civilian rather than police response. This reduces crime reports and arrests stemming from such calls without discouraging people from calling 911 in the future, a study finds. As my colleague Charles Fain Lehman would be keen to point out, though, only a small share of 911 calls are eligible to be handled this way (and the study doesn’t measure future crime impacts).
The RAND Corporation says we should plan better for scenarios where humans lose control of their AIs.
Do tax credits for lower-skilled workers encourage them to drop out of high school?
An international comparison of income taxes. (The U.S.’s are on the less-progressive side.)
Among “adults receiving federal disability insurance from 2006 to 2019, moves to states with higher rates of risky [opioid] use produce an immediate jump in the probability of risky use, followed by an additional gradual increase for the next several years.” (Risky use is inferred based on the quantity of opioids the individual has prescribed, with a threshold equivalent to 24 Vicodin pills per day over a three-month period. Ungated version of the study here.)
Meanwhile, why are employment rates for the disabled increasing?
Eugene Volokh, in a law-review article, draws a connection between today’s push for “viewpoint diversity” and the Fairness Doctrine for radio and TV broadcasts—the policy that the Reagan administration killed, paving the way for Rush Limbaugh.
Is there still more to learn from the “negative income tax” experiments of half a century ago?
Some states tax real-estate transfers, yet leave open an amusing loophole: The owner transfers the property to a shell company, and then the buyer purchases the company’s stock rather than buying the property directly.
Till next time!
Header photo courtesy Getty/Drew Hallowell.