Why Ken Clarke is a tit!

I hesitate to call Ken Clarke a tit because, as you all know, I am rather fond of tits, but in his case I use the word as a derogatory term.  Quite apart from anything else, the time is long overdue for him to do the decent thing and join the 'il-Lib-non-Dems' since his Tory days have disappeared as his incipient senility has increased.  He is our so-called Justice Minister and as far as I can tell he wants to release as many prisoners as possible and instruct the 'Cocklecarrots' not to lock up any more than they absolutely have to.  The idiocy of this policy, or 'dereliction of duty' as I prefer to think of it, is obvious but it is useful to have some facts and figures backed by some keen intelligence on the subject.  Thus, I was pleased to read this piece by Charles Murray on The American Enterprise site:

He concentrates on violent crime as opposed to soft crime aimed at property.  The figures for property crime have dropped and almost certainly this has something to do with the hardening of security measures:

It’s impossible to steal most new cars this day because there is no way to get the engine started without the key. Hot-wiring is futile. Try to burgle a home in a neighborhood where homes have much worth stealing, and you’d better be prepared to get in and out before the high-tech security system brings the cops. If you’re in a commercial area, you’ve got omnipresent surveillance cameras to worry about along with the security systems.  The effect of these innovations on violent crime has been much spottier. Yes, it can be harder to rob a convenience store (robbery is classified as a violent crime), but for the most part, robbery, homicide, aggravated assault, and rape are not technically more difficult to commit than they used to be.

However, as Murray shows, the incidence of violent crime in the States has dropped like a stone as the number of prisoners has gone up:     

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, FBI Uniform Crime Reports. “Prisoners” refers to inmates of state and federal prisons and does not include persons in jail

When crime gets safer, crime goes up very quickly as a response. In the late 1950s, the “prison only makes people into smarter criminals”  school became dominant in criminal justice circles. By the early 1960s, imprisonment rates were plummeting. For that matter, even the raw number of prisoners fell.

From 1960 to the mid '90s, violent crime nearly quadrupled.  However, beginning around 1980 the imprisonment rate began to go up.  As always there was a time lag before more and more of the criminal fraternity began to realise that crime doesn't always pay but, as the message was received and experienced by more and more of them, the crime rate began to drop.  Murray refers to the “dirty 7 percent” of offenders who commit about 50 percent of all crime" and points out that a high percentage of them would have fallen foul of the 'new improved' sentencing policy and that their incarceration would have had a large effect on crime rates.  Murray finishes with this summary:

So how much of the reduction in violent crime was produced by increased incarceration? This kind of analysis doesn’t tell us. But neither am I sure that the armory of social science quantitative techniques adequately models what has gone on. Here is my simple-minded thought: Suppose we had maintained imprisonment for violent crime at the rate that applied in 1974. In that case, we would have had 276,769 state and federal prisoners in 2010 instead of the 1,518,104 we actually had. Suppose tomorrow we freed 1.2 million inmates from state and federal prisons. Do we really think violent crime would continue to drop at a somewhat slower pace?

In one sense, it is a silly question, as all counter-factuals must be. And I’m not saying that our current incarceration rates are appropriate. We may very well have been in a state of diminishing returns to incarceration for the last decade, as the experts DiIulio [an academic crimonologist] cites have argued. But I continue to harbor the belief that without the massive increases in incarceration after the mid 1970s, crime rates wouldn’t have turned around at all. Higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime.

If anyone knows Ken Clarke, feel free to pass this on to him!

 

Comments

[Whyaxye]

Good stuff!
Falling crime rates also correlate with increased access to abortion, and the ageing population. Gloomy though its implications might be, we are (even in this country) a bit safer than before, due to the underclass producing fewer children, and there being fewer 16-24 year olds in general.
Also interesting how crime rocketed up during a time of affluence. People don't commit crimes because they are poor (as anyone who lived through the great depression could have told us). They commit crimes because they are bad people.
Unfortunately, Ken needs to save money, as well as being an old softie. Insufficient money for prisons. I bet a cost-benefit analysis of flogging would be a real eye-opener...

[David Duff]

You may be right, 'W', but I saw or heard somewhere recently that the birth rate was shooting up again - immigrants, perhaps. Also there was a statistic floating around about how many thousands of extra school places are going to be needed fairly shortly. Sorry, I can't quote exactitudes on this.

[Whyaxye]

Yes, this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/13/more-midwives-birth-rate-40-year-high

is from the Guardian, so they will be downplaying any link between immigration and birth rate, and more especially criminality!

But expect more trouble in 16 years' time, when the little beggars will be big enough to climb over your windowsill or chuck bottles around your local bus stop.

[David Duff]

In 16 years time I won't give a damn - it will all be down to you young chaps! Er, best of luck and all that . . .