Criminal Law & Process – Page 41 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Violence in the Heartland, 1960-2012–Part One

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:December 2, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Legal History Public Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

Despite their geographical proximity and economic and cultural similarities, the states of the Midwest have had very different rates of violent crime over the past five decades. Moreover, through periods of dramatic increases and decreases in violent crime, the relative positions of the states have remained fairly stable. The low-violence states in 1960 remain at the low end today, while the high-violence states in 1960 remain at the high end today. However, the gap between the high states and low states has been slowly diminishing for many years. In another decade, the state that has historically had the highest rate of violence, Illinois, may conceivably fall to about the same level as the state that has historically had the lowest, Iowa.

Readers of this Blog may know that I have previously written a series of posts on crime and punishment in three midwestern states, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (e.g., here and here). With this post, I begin a new series that will explore regional trends more broadly. With violent crime such a staple of local news coverage, I think it’s helpful to be able to place the crime du jour within a wider spatial and temporal context; perhaps this bigger-picture view may lessen the tendency to adopt hastily conceived policy responses to whatever happens to be the latest outrage.

Here are the rates of reported violent crime (per 100,000 residents) in the midwestern states and the U.S. as a whole since 1960:

Truth in Sentencing and Early Release: A Follow Up

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:November 20, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

Last week, I spoke on truth in sentencing at Marquette Law School as part of Mike Gousha’s “On the Issues” series. My PowerPoint slides and a video of the event are available here. Alan Borsuk summarized some of the key points in this blog post.

If you watch the video, you will see that time constraints caused me to skip over a couple of slides. I’ll fill in those gaps here and then suggest where I would like to see Wisconsin go with early release.

First, I think one of the most interesting and puzzling aspects of our polling research is that many Wisconsin voters say they support both truth in sentencing (“TIS”) and release from prison when an offender can demonstrate that he is no longer a threat to public safety, even though these two policies are in tension with one another.

Truth in Sentencing, Early Release Options Both Have Appeal, O’Hear Says

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:November 17, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Judges & Judicial Process Public Speakers at Marquette

While truth in sentencing is highly popular with Wisconsin voters, some options that could allow prisoners to be released before serving their full sentences also have majority support, Marquette Law School Professor Michael O’Hear told an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” audience last week. Wisconsin may want to give renewed attention to such ideas in the pursuit of prison policies that are both morally appealing and fiscally wise.

O’Hear, who is associate dean for research at the Law School, summarized Wisconsin’s trends in incarceration in the last four decades, including increased prison populations, abolition of the parole board, and adoption of “truth in sentencing,” which makes a judge’s sentence close to the final word on how long a prisoner will serve. Changes that eased the truth in sentencing practices, including creation in 2009 of an Earned Release Commission, were largely reversed under Gov. Scott Walker in recent years.

The number of people in the Wisconsin prisons went from about 2,000 in 1973 to about 23,000 in 2004, O’Hear said. The total has leveled off since then. Strong political momentum to get tough on crime, including not letting prisoners out before they served their full sentences, underlay the trends, and Wisconsin’s boom in prison population was in line with what occurred in much of the nation, O’Hear said.