New Prisoner Data Released: As Goes California . . . Well, Never Mind

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released the latest installment in its annual series on imprisonment in the United States, Prisoners in 2011. The BJS report is a treasure trove of data, but what does it all add up to?  The authors make clear from the start what they see as the lead “story” in the numbers:

During 2011, the number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities declined by 0.9%, from 1,613,803 to 1,598,780.  This decline represented the second consecutive year the prison population in the United States decreased.

As one reads on, however, it becomes clear that this declining prison population story is really just a California story.  Over calendar year 2011, California’s prison population dropped by 15,493 inmates.  During that same time, the overall U.S. drop was 15,023.  Absent California, then, the real national story is one of stability in imprisonment, not decline.

That California is a bellwether for the rest of the nation is a familiar cliche, but there is little evidence that the rest of the nation is following the Golden State’s lead in this area.  

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Which Cities Have the Largest Sentencing Disparities?

For a generation, federal sentencing policy-makers have been preoccupied by the ideal of national uniformity — the ideal that federal judges in Milwaukee and Miami should sentence the same as federal judges in Michigan and Maine.  I’m a long-time skeptic of this ideal; since most of the impact of most crime is local, why shouldn’t local needs and values determine the punishment?  But even I am troubled by judge-to-judge disparities within a single federal courthouse.  The random assignment of a case to one judge instead of another should not govern the punishment.

Although there has been a great deal of anecdotal evidence of such local disparity, it has been very hard to quantify because of a longstanding agreement between the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the federal judiciary that blocks the release of judge-specific setencing data.  However, thanks to a great deal of painstaking effort by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, it is now possible to analyze the sentencing practices of individual judges.

Earlier this year, TRAC made waves with a public announcement of which districts had the greatest inter-judge disparity.  However, TRAC’s methodology was sharply criticized, and with good reason.  More recently, TRAC published a new and improved version of its report at 25 Fed. Sent. Rep. 6 (2012).

So, which cities have the greatest disparities?  

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Wisconsin Prisoners, c. 1960

As part of my ongoing research into the origins of mass incarceration, I’ve been spending some quality time recently with a voluminous, fifty-year-old government report by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Characteristics of State Prisoners, 1960.  This was a once-a-decade production by the BOP in those days, and it contains a wealth of information.

I find it fascinating to have this window into 1960, for at that time — unbeknownst to the report’s authors, of course — everything in American criminal justice was just about to change forever.  In fact, crime was already on the rise in the Northeast United States, foreshadowing a nationwide swell of violence that would continue to gather force until well into the 1970′s.  Even today, we have yet to return to the historically low levels of criminal violence of the mid-twentieth century.  And then, on the heels of the crime wave, came the great imprisonment boom — a period of unprecedented growth in American incarceration that began in about 1975 and continued uninterrupted for more than three decades.

Yes, it is easy to imagine 1960 as a more innocent time!

Using the state breakdowns from the 1960 report, I’ve drawn some comparisons between the Wisconsin of then and now:  

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