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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Intent and the Eighth Amendment: New Restrictions on Sentencing in Cases of Felony Murder?

The felony-murder rule is perhaps the most troubling and controversial surviving relic of the common law of homicide, branding felons as murderers notwithstanding an absence of the sort of culpability otherwise required for a murder conviction.

If we are not going to make culpability-based distinctions in these cases at the guilt stage, then we ought to do so at sentencing, reserving the most severe sentences for those felony-murderers who actually intended to kill.  Some states do indeed recognize this distinction for sentencing purposes, but others do not.  For those in the latter category, the Eighth Amendment might conceivably provide some protection for relatively low-culpability felony-murderers.  The Supreme Court seemed to be moving in this direction in Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), but then in Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987), essentially limited Enmund to felony-murderers who lacked any culpability as to the killing and were not even physically present at the time it occurred.

With the Enmund/Tison line of decisions in mind, I thought it quite interesting that the Supreme Court granted cert. last month in two new Eighth Amendment cases presenting contrasting fact patterns that might provide a good platform for further regulation of felony-murder sentencing.

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A Tale of Three States, Part 4: The Racial Threat Hypothesis

In the previous post in this series, I highlighted a wide gap in the incarceration rates of Indiana and Minnesota, with Wisconsin in the middle.  The ordering of the three states from highest incarceration rate to lowest corresponds with the ordering from highest rate of violent crime to lowest.  However, for reasons I explained in the previous post, I don’t think  we ought to end our analysis with the simple assertion that high crime drives high incarceration.  For one thing, there is Minnesota: with a crime rate only a little lower than Wisconsin’s, Minnesota has an incarceration rate that is much lower.  There must be other factors at play besides just the crime rate to account for Minnesota’s incarceration rate.  For another, to focus on the crime-incarceration connection begs the question of what drives the very different crime rates of the three states.

In this post, I’ll explore another possible way of accounting for differences in the three states’ incarceration rates, the racial threat hypothesis.  The basic idea is this: a larger racial minority population causes the majority to feel more threatened by the minority and consequently to prefer to stronger social control measures.

Here are the relevant numbers from Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota:

IN

  WI

  MN

Black Population (2010)

591,397

359,148

274,412

Blacks as Percentage of Total Population (2010)

9.1%

6.3%

5.2%

Imprisonment Rate (2010, per 100,000)

459.9

387.2

177.8

 

As you can see, the incarceration-rate order tracks the order based on the size of the each state’s black population.

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