The Fog Around Cost‐of‐Crime Studies May Finally Be Clearing

• Author: Michael Tonry
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12170
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Date: 01 November 2015

COMMENTARY

ROLE OF THE COST-OF-CRIME

LITERATURE

The Fog Around Cost-of-Crime Studies May

Finally Be Clearing

Prisoners and Their Kids Suffer Too

Michael Tonry

University of Minnesota

There are some mysteries about the period 1984–1996 in American history that may

never be satisfactorily solved. Like the island society of Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1956

novel, The Tribe that Lost its Head, American society and politics behaved in ways

that defy rational explanation. Exaggerated fears, emotional overreactions, and political

cynicism led to policies and actions that are in retrospect almost unimaginable in their

cruelty and their failure to acknowledge complexities of human life. As examples, people

who study crime or work in the criminal justice system will think first of sentencing laws—

three strikes, life without parole (LWOP), truth in sentencing—but that is parochial. Those

laws in their severity and overbreadth caused enormous unnecessary human suffering, but

they were paralleled by similar developments concerning other disturbing social problems.

Here are a handful.

rThe federal “war” on drugs was formally launched in the late 1980s, despite

sharp declines in drug use beginning in 1979, and long after the prisons

began to fill with drug offenders and after drug arrest rates of Black people

sextupled (Tonry, 1995).

rThe age jurisdictions of juvenile courts were lowered, waivers to adult courts

were made easier, and many offenses were made automatically subject to

adult court jurisdiction whatever the alleged offender’s age. “Do the crime,

do the time” and “Adult time for adult crime” were common explana-

tory slogans. Adult court prosecutions even of 12- to 14-year-olds became

Direct correspondence to Michael Tonry, University of Minnesota, Walter F. Mondale Hall, 229-19th Avenue

South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (e-mail: tonry001@umn.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12170 C2015 American Society of Criminology 653

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 14 rIssue 4

Commentary Role of the Cost-of-Crime Literature

commonplace, and many received decades-long and life sentences, including

LWOPs for homicide and other offenses (Tanenhaus and Zimring, 2014).

rHysteria about sexual offenses led to enactment of “sexual predator,” preven-

tive detention, and sex offender registration and notification laws (Jenkins,

1998). The federal government, using financial threats, coerced states to

enact Megan’s Laws that createdsex offender registries. Many states enacted

residency laws that made it a criminal offense for sex offenders to live in their

homes and sometimes even in the towns they came from (Logan, 2009).

rThe “repressed memory” hysteria during which counsellors prompted trou-

bled women to “retrieve” false memories of sexual abuse led to countless

wrongful accusations and prosecutions and tore families apart (Loftus and

Ketcham, 1994).

rFears of Satanism and rampant sexual abuse of children in nursery schools

resulted in the infamous McMaster case and many similar wrongful prose-

cutions of innocent people (Beck, 2015).

Many of these things were done with moral fervor and without empathy for the often

troubled people whose lives they would affect and sometimes ruin. Many laws were drafted

broadly, including California’s three-strikes law in which some property misdemeanors

counted as third strikes, and its sexual predator/preventive detention law that potentially

covered thousands of people per year. Drug laws ensnared hundreds of thousands of dis-

advantaged minority teenagers. Megan’sLaws resulted in teenagers convicted of consensual

“statutory rape” being listed for life in sex offender registries. The Kafkaesque image of

encampments of sex offenders living under bridges because they were legally forbidden to

live anywhere else became not common but also not extraordinary.

Almost everyone—Newt Gingrich, Right on Crime, Koch Industries, the Prison Fel-

lowship, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Open Society Foundation,major founda-

tions, and many politicians left and right—now says that many of those laws are cruel and

unjust, and describe the mass incarceration, ruined lives, and collateral damage they caused

as tragic.

The cost–benefit studies of sentencing and punishment policies based in part on

monetary estimates of intangible “socialcosts of criminal victimization” that Dom´

ınguez and

Raphael (2015) discuss are simply another manifestation of the out-of-control emotionalism

and mean-spiritedness of that period. Mark Cohen, the most active and influential scholar

of the subject, has written that he “would almost admit” that his work on intangible

victimization costs “was a crusade” and—his motivation—that failure to take account of

such costs by punishing offenders more severely “was tantamount to balancing the state

budget on the backs of crime victims” (Cohen, 2005: xii–xiii).

Studies such as Cohen’s (1988, 2005) are at a dead end of a road that should never

have been taken. Like three-strikes, LWOP, and similar laws, they should be cast aside as an

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