The Micro and Macro Causes of Prison Growth
| Publication year | 2010 |
Georgia State University Law Review
Article 9
4-3-2013
The Micro and Macro Causes of Prison Growth
John F. Pfaff
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Recommended Citation
Pfaff, John F. (2011) "The Micro and Macro Causes of Prison Growth," Georgia State University Law Review: Vol. 28: Iss. 4, Article 9. Available at: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol28/iss4/9
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THE MICRO AND MACRO CAUSES OF PRISON
GROWTH
John F. Pfaff*
Over the past four decades, prison populations in the United States have exploded. As Figure 1 demonstrates, from the 1920s (when reliable statistics first become available) through the mid-1970s, the incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000 people.1 These rates were so stable that a leading criminologist argued in 1979 that political pressures would continue to keep the rate around 100 per 100,000.2 Thus, the subsequent quintupling of the incarceration rate over the next forty years, with the prison population growing by over 1.3 million inmates, was an unexpected and unprecedented development.3
Moreover, this boom was unique to the United States. While home to only about 5% of the world's population, the United States currently contains nearly 25% of the world's prisoners.4 And the
Associate Professor, Fordham Law School. My thanks to Craig Langley at the Census Bureau for providing me with the complete Annual Survey of Government Finances data set, and to participants at the Georgia State University Law Review 2012 Symposium for helpful comments and questions. All errors are my own.
1. Unless otherwise stated, "incarceration rate" refers to the prison incarceration rate, not the aggregate prison-and-jail incarceration rate. In Figure 1, "in custody" and "under jurisdiction" refer to two ways the Bureau of Justice Statistics counts inmates. A change in methods in 1977 led to a slight discontinuous jump in that year.
2. Alfred Blumstein & Soumyo Moitra, An Analysis of the Time Series of the Imprisonment Rate in the States of the United States: A Further Test of the Stability of Punishment Hypothesis, 70 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 376, 376 (1979). Specifically, they state that as prison populations rise, "police can choose not to arrest, prosecutors can choose not to press charges, judges can choose not to imprison, or parole boards can choose to [sic] deny requests." Id. at 377.
3. Paul Guerino, Paige M. Harrison & William J. Sabol, Prisoners in 2010, at 14 (2011). It should be pointed out that there is substantial variation across states in rates of prison growth. In particular, five states (Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York) saw average annual declines in prison populations over the entire 2000s. Id. at 3 fig.3.
4. Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List (8th ed. 2010). This list focuses on the prison-and-jail incarceration rate, rather than the prison-specific rate. In 2010, inmates in jail made up approximately 33% of all inmates (748,728 out of 2,266,832). See Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, available at http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t612010.pdf. Only China, however, also has more than one million people in prison and jails combined: the United States prison population is thus larger than the prison-and-jail populations in all other countries (except perhaps China). Walmsley, supra, at 4.
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company we keep is troubling. Figure 2 compares the U.S. prison-and-jail incarceration rate to other high-incarceration countries as well as to a sample of our political and cultural allies. Our incarceration "peers" are countries such as Russia, Cuba, and Kazakhstan, while our allies have rates often six or seven times lowers than ours.
o o m
o o
o o
CO
o o
CM
o o
1920
Figure 1: US Incarceration Rate
1922 - 2008
1940
1960 1980 Year
2000
In Custody---Under Jurisdiction
Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Prisoner Statistics and Historical Statistics on Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions
2020
In this Article, I want to examine what we know—and what we do not know—about the causes behind this remarkable development. In particular, I want to focus on two distinct questions, the micro and the macro. The micro question is the "who" question. The criminal justice system is not a coherent "system" of actors but a sprawling web of competing institutions: police, prosecutors, judges, legislators, governors, and parole boards, all of whom respond to different constituencies and have different incentives. It is thus important to ask which actors are driving prison populations upwards.
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United States Russia Cuba Belarus Belize Georgia Kazakhstan Suriname South Africa Botswana Israel Ukraine
Chile
Latvia Mexico United Kingdom Australia China Canada France Germany
Figure 2: Select Incarceration Rates, 2008
153 129 119 116
96 89
531
■ 468
455
415
378
333556 329
I 326 1
323
■ 305
288
207
756
629
0 200 400 600
mean of Rate
Data from Walmsley. Rate includes both prisons and jails
800
The macro question is the "why" question. Clearly, something must have changed in the 1970s to cause prison populations to increase so dramatically. Was the spike just a natural response to rising crime rates during the 1960s and 1970s, or was there a deeper cause—a change in economic conditions or in politics, or perhaps a reaction against the civil rights movement? If we want to understand how we got where we are and where we can go, it is essential to understand not just who got us here, but why.
As I show below, we know the answer to the micro question much better than that to the macro. On the micro side, data indicate that at least since 1994, prison growth has been driven primarily by prosecutors increasing the rate at which they file charges against arrestees. None of the other possible sources seems to matter: arrests (and arrests per crime), prison admissions per felony filing, and time served have generally been flat or falling over that time. Due to limitations in the data, it is harder to assign responsibility prior to 1994, but the data we have suggest that time served in prison was still mostly flat during that time, and that at least a chunk of the increase in admissions was due to rising crime rates.
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It is harder to make such concrete statements about the macro factors. Changes in crime rates, economic conditions (in particular state fiscal capacity), political attitudes, and racial policies all certainly played roles in driving up prison populations. Trends in crime and state resources have been important. But we have less solid quantitative evidence concerning the political and racial factors. Of course, these complex social phenomena do not lend themselves to easy quantification. However, a less obvious problem exists: studies examining these issues tend to focus on national and state-level actors, despite the fact that it appears county prosecutors bear the largest responsibility. Although it will be possible to tease out some of the theories' implications for county-level officials, these will unfortunately be somewhat speculative.
This Article proceeds as follows. Part 1 discusses the micro causes of prison growth, and Part 2 the macro causes and their implications for reform efforts.
1. The Micro Causes of Prison Growth
In order to understand why prison populations have grown, it is first essential to figure out where the growth has occurred. To start, two major "locations" for growth exist: the number of prison admissions and length of time served. In this section, I will first show that longer sentences do not explain United States prison growth— ours is an admissions-driven boom. In the second part of this section, I will thus examine where in the admissions process growth is occurring. After all, the growth in admissions can be driven by changes in crimes, arrests per crime, felony filings per arrest, convictions per filing, and admissions per conviction; my results indicate that, at least since the 1990s, increases in filing-per-arrest have been the most important source of growth.
1.1 The Story Is Not One of Increasing Severity
The conventional perception of punishment in the United States is that we are imposing increasingly longer sentences on offenders. For
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example, Franklin Zimring has stated that since the 1990s our criminal justice system has focused on "throw[ing] away the key."5 The media often provides stories of low-level offenders receiving severe sentences, and state legislatures have passed a rash of punitive laws, such as three-strikes and truth-in-sentencing laws.6
But in practice, sentence lengths have generally remained relatively short, and evidence suggests that sentence lengths do not explain much of the increase in the U.S. prison population. For example, I have shown that in eleven predominantly northern states (chosen solely due to limitations in the data) median time spent in prison hovered around one year from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, with lows of six months in states like California and Illinois.7 Moreover, data from these states clearly demonstrate that trends in admissions, not releases, drove their prison growth. Changes in sentence lengths had no noticeable effects on prison populations in these states, but prison populations in all eleven states would have flattened, and sometimes even fallen, by the mid- to late-1990s had admissions levels not grown.
Furthermore, in a recent paper I...
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