Why Following the Rules Should Get You Out of Prison Early

I have a new paper on SSRN entitled “Solving the Good Time Puzzle: Why Following the Rules Should Get You Out of Prison Early.” Most U.S. jurisdictions permit inmates to obtain credit toward early release based on good behavior in prison. It’s not immediately clear, though, why the severity of a prison sentence should vary depending on how well an offender follows the rules while incarcerated. No amount of good or bad conduct in prison is capable of changing the seriousness of the underlying crime for which the offender is being punished.

The most common justification for good time is probably that it makes the job of prison administrators easier by giving them an additional set of incentives and sanctions to hold over inmates. Critics question, however, whether the potential loss of good time really does add anything to the deterrent effect of much more immediate sanctions, such as disciplinary segregation. Critics also object that the loss of good time — functionally an extension of the prison term — is not a just and proportionate response to rules violations that may be relatively technical and harmless and that need not be proven through formal trial-type proceedings.

In the paper, I argue that good time can thought of and justified in a different light. In essence, I suggest that good conduct in prison can be conceptualized as a form of partial atonement for the underlying crime. If seen in this way, good-time credits can be justified as a way of recognizing atonement, which seems to me an appropriate objective for the criminal-justice system.

Cross posted at Life Sentences.

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A Tale of Three States, Part One

In this post from a few months ago, I offered a preliminary assessment of the wide disparity in incarceration rates between Wisconsin and Minnesota.  I had just enough data then to raise some interesting questions.  Now, with the capable help of a research assistant, Garrett Soberalski, I’ve assembled a much more extensive body of data, which I expect to analyze in a series of posts.  Among other things, I thought it would be helpful to add a third state to the mix, so Indiana will also be included in the comparison.  Another medium-sized midwestern state, Indiana has incarceration numbers that are even higher than Wisconsin’s.

In this initial post, though, I will focus just on the basics of the Wisconsin-Minnesota comparison.

So, here’s the essential story (as detailed in the chart that appears after the jump): Wisconsin incarcerates many more people than Minnesota, while Minnesota puts many more individuals on probation.  The two states have about equal levels of crime, and Minnesota actually has a larger percentage of its population under supervision (that is, either incarcerated or on probation or parole release).  However, because incarceration is so much more expensive than community supervision, Minnesota’s corrections budget is much smaller than Wisconsin’s (about $99 per resident, versus Wisconsin’s $234 per resident).  Given the similarity of the two states’ crime rates, it appears that Minnesota’s probation-based strategy is delivering more bang for the buck than Wisconsin’s.

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Police Stops Go Up, Citizen Complaints Go Down — What Gives?

The Milwaukee Police Department has just released some new data on traffic and subject stops. There is a fascinating story here on policing strategy. Since 2007, Milwaukee has experiened a dramatic increase in the number of stops: both traffic and subject stops are up close to 250%. This has been part of a deliberate strategy to increase the number of police-citizen contacts, especially in high-crime neighborhoods. (The MPD has also been very active over the past four years in promoting uncoerced police-citizen contacts, too.) The objectives are to gather intelligence, disrupt criminal activity, and enhance community perceptions of safety in public spaces.

As hoped, crime has indeed gone down considerably since 2007: violent crime is down 24%, and property crime is down 21%. Whether and to what extent the increased-stops strategy has caused the crime drop is uncertain — the MPD has also made some other significant changes in the past four years, and, in any event, crime has been dropping nationwide — but the causal claim strikes me as at least facially plausible. Providing some additional support is a month-by-month breakdown of auto theft and robbery data: in general, in months when stops have lagged, auto thefts and robberies have gone up; in months when stops have increased, auto thefts and robberies have dropped.

But safety has a cost.

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