March 6, 2013
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How economists think about crime
JDN 2456358 EDT 16:00.
A review of When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman.
Kleiman is one of the few self-identified centrists who actually seems really centrist to me. Unlike someone like Shermer, he isn’t ideologically committed to the idea that liberals and conservatives are equally right and equally wrong. Instead, Kleiman has few ideological commitments, and seeks pragmatic solutions to problems. He agrees with liberal views when the data supports them, and conservative views when the data supports them instead. It’s a refreshingly nuanced approach. I’m also thrilled to see science applied to moral questions; I want to see more of this.
Kleiman is a professor of public policy, but he’s also really a criminologist and a behavioral economist. He analyzes the problem of crime and incarceration in the United States in behavioral economic terms, asking how much harm crime does and how much it would cost to fix it by various means. His basic methodology is “let’s look at the data and see what is most cost-effective, and then do that”; it’s pretty hard to disagree with frankly. Ironically, it’s also vastly different from the standard approaches, which are bound up in ideological assumptions.
The pragmatic approach does have some flaws, though, as it fails to create a unified vision to follow and risks being reduced to a series of unrelated bullet points. Indeed, the last chapter is literally a list of bullet points, without much to connect them. The closest Kleiman gets to unifying principles are “treat arrests and punishments as costs, not benefits” and “shift the mix of correctional budgets away from prisons to community corrections”. Beyond that, he gives a long list of ideas to implement, most of which sound pretty good; but the whole thing doesn’t feel like a cohesive vision.
He also has a tendency to qualify his own statements, never making them as forceful as they should be. “Yes, if the jails delivered more infectious-disease control and the health-care system more anti-violence efforts, we might end up both healthier and safer. But we might also wind up with worse-managed jails and hospitals as a result of divided managerial attention.” (p.170) This sort of “it might work, it might not” hedging is a good way to never be proven wrong, but it’s not a good way to make policy. Are we reorganizing hospitals or not? Doing it halfway could well be worse than not doing it at all. (My favorite joke about false compromise is becoming perilously close to reality: The Republicans want to build a pipeline, the Democrats don’t, so we’ll compromise and build half a pipeline.)
Most of his suggestions just seem like common sense, which is alas not so common in our political system: “Add police to areas that are under-policed”, “Prosecute felonies committed by parolees as new crimes, rather than allowing them to be treated as mere parole violations”, “Stop tolerating inmate-on-inmate violence”, “reward good behavior as well as punishing bad behavior”; who could possibly disagree with those?
A few of his suggestions are notable for being bold in our political climate, yet well supported by the scientific data: “The movement toward for-profit prisons has not been noticeably successful”, “Some of the features which make prison most horrible–especially inmate-on-inmate violence–may not make them more aversive to offenders”, “Assertive Community Therapy can improve the lives of probationers and parolees with serious mental-health problems”, “raise alcohol taxes and abolish age restrictions”, and “permit the private production and use of cannabis, but not its commercialization” are all backed by sound research and could make a lot of people’s lives better.
In general, I’d like to see some policymakers read this book and apply its suggestions. As Kleiman himself admits, they might not work; but they might work, and they could offer us the chance to have less crime with fewer people imprisoned and less spent on incarceration. Who could disagree with that?
Comments (1)
He is a very sensible man. Unfortunately, common sense tends to be trumped by short-sighted, “Show us the money”, policies. The real way to generate revenue has always involved some near-term sacrifice, otherwise known as investment.