Felony Prosecutions Are Cheap

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest data from its periodic national surveys of prosecutors’ offices.  The report contains a lot of interesting information (albeit perhaps a bit dated — the survey was from 2007).

The number that struck me the most was $2,792 — what BJS reported as the average cost per felony prosecution in large jurisdictions.  This seems to me a remarkably low number in light of the very high stakes in a felony prosecution, both for the defendant and the community (incarceration costs, for instance, may average in the neighborhood of $30,000 per inmate per year).  Is $2,792 in prosecutorial costs really enough to ensure reliable decisionmaking at the charging and adjudication stages of a criminal case? For the cost of a family vacation to Disney World, we are deciding to send people to prison for five, ten, twenty years or more?

From the standpoint of private litigation practice anyway, this would be a rather small legal bill.  Admittedly, the comparison is problematic in many respects, but I don’t think it entirely irrelevant.

To be sure, the $2,792 both overstates and understates the costs in important ways.

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A Visit From the Ghost of Jury Service Past

What do you remember about November 29, 1995? That was the day when one of the jurors in Jesse Webster’s drug trafficking trial was out sick. The next day, with all twelve jurors again present, Webster was convicted. Many years later, Webster claimed in a petition for post-conviction relief that the eleven jurors who showed up on November 29 improperly proceeded with deliberations that day at the direction of a rogue bailiff.

In response to the petition, an investigator tracked down the jurors to ask them what they recalled about November 29, 1995. The interviews took place between 2001 and 2006. (Evidently, the investigation was not exactly a high priority.) The results, as the Seventh Circuit put it with considerable understatement in an opinion last week, were a “mixed bag”:

The first question was: “The court records show that on one day one of the jurors did not appear. Do you recall any such time when that might have occurred?” Seven jurors said they did not recall a juror being absent; four jurors said they did. Of the four who did remember a juror’s absence, three recalled that an alternate juror replaced the absent juror, a claim wholly unsubstantiated by court records. One of the four thought the juror was absent on the day before Thanksgiving; another claimed the juror was absent on the first two days of deliberations. Two correctly recalled that the absent juror was male; one said the absent juror was female. The second question was: “Do you recall being sent home early because of this juror’s absence?” The jurors answered either “no” or that they did not recall.

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A Tale of Three States, Part 5: The Effect of Truth in Sentencing in Wisconsin

Previous posts in this series have examined the latest available incarceration data from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This post considers historical data. I’m particularly interested in the impact of a major change in sentencing law that was adopted in Wisconsin in 1998. Under the “truth in sentencing” law, parole was abolished for crimes committed on or after December 31, 1999. What impact did this have on the size of the state’s prison population? Two hypotheses occur to me. First, if judges continued to impose the same nominal sentences that they had been imposing, one would expect the prison population to grow because offenders would be serving longer real sentences. Alternatively, judges might have reduced their nominal sentences to account for the loss of parole release options, attempting thereby to achieve the same real sentences as before TIS; such discounting would presumably lead to stability in the imprisonment rate.

The data, set forth in the table below, seem to support the latter hypothesis, with the current rate of imprisonment almost exactly matching that of 2000, the first full year after TIS took effect. Indeed, since 1999, the state’s imprisonment rate has been remarkably stable. The single largest annual change since 1999 was a 5.8% drop in 2005. This makes for quite a contrast with the volatile 1992-1999 time period, when annual increases averaged 12%.

The picture becomes even more interesting if we focus on Wisconsin’s imprisonment rate relative to that of peer states Indiana and Minnesota.

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