When President Obama, the Koch Brothers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Newt Gingrich all agree on an issue, you know that something important may be happening.
And you also know that there must be a catch, or maybe three.
“Criminal justice reform” — cutting back on a rate of incarceration that jumped fourfold in four decades — has become a bipartisan buzzword. Many people of different political stripes agree that too many Americans are being imprisoned for too long, with too little rehabilitation, consuming public budgets and hollowing out African-American communities in particular.
Although the number of people held in state and federal prisons appears to have leveled off at about 1.6 million — 2.2 million if those in local jails are counted — some scholars and activists are calling for far more ambitious change. They ask: Why not reduce the prison population by a quarter or even by half? (That would still leave it far higher than it was a few decades back, when crime was more rampant than today.)
President Obama won wide praise last month when he said to the N.A.A.C.P. that while violent criminals need to be kept behind bars, “Over the last few decades we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before,” adding, “And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”
Congress is bubbling with bipartisan bills that would scale back mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug crimes and strengthen rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders.
But the president and Congress can have a direct impact only on federal prisons, which hold one in seven of the country’s prisoners. There has been little of the bottom-up number-crunching of state data needed to see what changes in enforcement and sentencing, for what kinds of crimes, it would take to scale back incarceration in a significant way.
A new interactive “prison population forecaster,” posted online Tuesday by the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, aims to help fill that void and yields some sobering conclusions.
The interactive program allows you to assess for yourself the impact of different policy changes. Cut in half the sentences for those convicted of property crimes? Inmates in 2021 are down by 10 percent.
What surprised me most in using the tool, as one who has followed the debate on criminal reform, is just how hard it will be to turn back the clock and achieve deep reductions in incarceration. Traffic tickets for pot smokers won’t take us there, and neither will making petty thieves sweep sidewalks or retroactively ending the wildly disparate sentences for crack possession.
Some findings are encouraging: In states including Kentucky, Missouri and Texas, there remains “low-hanging fruit,” in the words of Ryan King, an author of the new forecasting tool. These include relatively easy changes in low-level drug sentencing and parole revocations for minor violations that can make a serious dent in those states that have not already made them. In such states, reducing prison admissions for nonviolent crimes by half would cut the number of inmates in 2021 by more than 25 percent.
But in many other states, including Michigan, New Jersey and New York, drug sentences are already reduced. There is no avoiding the politically poisonous question of releasing violent offenders or reducing their long sentences. “We need to start what’s going to be a long and difficult conversation about violent crime,” Mr. King said.
I was startled by these calculations for New Jersey, for example: Cutting in half the number of people sent to prison for drug crimes would reduce the prison population at the end of 2021 by only 3 percent. By contrast, cutting the effective sentences, or time actually served, for violent offenders by just 15 percent would reduce the number of inmates in 2021 by 7 percent — more than twice as much, but still hardly the revolution many reformers seek.
New Jersey could reduce its prison population by 25 percent by 2021. But to do it, it would have to take the politically fraught step of cutting in half the effective sentences for violent offenders.
In other words, the real debate over how to deal with criminals has hardly begun. And that debate will inevitably have to be argued state by state on terms that may well cause the bipartisan agreement on the need for change, focused on nonviolent offenders, to break down.
It is true that because of long and often mandatory sentences, half of all federal prisoners are in for drug crimes, though how many should be considered nonviolent is in dispute. But in any case, federal prisons account for only 14 percent of the country’s prisoners, some 216,000 in 2013, the last year for which data are published.
State prisons hold the remaining 86 percent, about 1.4 million inmates. Only one in six of them are in for drug offenses, and that share is declining. The sentences are usually short, and those caught for simple possession are unlikely to go to prison. (Offenders still bear a heavy personal toll for a criminal conviction, reason enough for major reforms, but low-level drug arrests are not driving the incarceration numbers.)
Just over half of all state prisoners were convicted of violent crimes like assaults, gun crimes, robbery, rape and murder, with some people serving lengthy “habitual offender” sentences.
The inescapable facts revealed to anyone using with the Urban Institute tool: Big cuts in incarceration must come at the state level, and they will have to involve rethinking of sentences for violent criminals as well as unarmed drug users and burglars.
The Urban Institute researchers analyzed the 15 states with the best available prison data, which together account for 40 percent of the country’s state prison population. The researchers said their data was loosely representative of the national picture.
They found that with no further policy changes, the states’ prison population would decline by just 2 percent by 2021.
More salient today: Cutting drug admissions to half of their current level across the 15 states would shrink their prison population by 7 percent.
“Even if every person in state prison for a drug offense were released today, mass incarceration would persist,” the report said.
