Archive for the ‘Wisconsin Sentencing Law’ Category

« Older Entries

Imprisonment Trends in the Heartland

Wednesday, January 9th, 2013

A draft of my new article, “Mass Incarceration in the Three Midwestern States: Origins and Trends,” is now available on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

This Article considers how the mass incarceration story has played out over the past forty years in three medium-sized Midwestern states, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The three stories are similar in many respects, but notable differences are also apparent. For instance, Minnesota’s imprisonment rate is less than half that of the other two states, while Indiana imprisons more than twice as many drug offenders as either of its peers. The Article seeks to unpack these and other imprisonment trends and to relate them to crime and arrest data over time, focusing particularly on the relative importance of violent crime and drug enforcement as drivers of imprisonment growth.

The article builds on my series of “Tale of Three States” blog posts from about a year ago.  It will appear in print later this year in a symposium issue of the Valparaiso Law Review.

 

Print Friendly

Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Three-State Comparison, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

Wisconsin Prisoners, c. 1960

Saturday, December 22nd, 2012

As part of my ongoing research into the origins of mass incarceration, I’ve been spending some 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 prison population of then and now:   (more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Empirical Research, Prison Administration, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

Is Wisconsin Ready for Another Sentencing Commission?

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

Wisconsin has already had two sentencing commissions, now both defunct.  Is it time to think about a third?  Sentencing commissions have proven their worth over the long haul in a number of other states, including Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia.  A successful sentencing commission promulgates guidelines that channel judicial sentencing discretion and reduce sentencing disparities, collects and analyzes sentencing data in order to support evidence-based decision making, and provides information and recommendations to the legislature than can help to blunt some of the political system’s tendencies to excessive harshness.  Although it is certainly not cost-free, a good commission may ultimately save the state far more than is required to fund its operations.

With these considerations in mind, the latest edition of the Marquette University Law School Poll asked respondents their views of commissions and of judicial sentencing discretion.  (For my earlier posts on the Poll, see here and here.)  The results indicate that there is substantial support for a commission, but that Wisconsinites also appreciate what their locally elected judges bring to the table as sentencers.   (more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Empirical Research, Evidence-Based Decision Making, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

For Punishment, Do Costs Count?

Friday, July 20th, 2012

In my previous post, I discussed some of the fascinating results from the recent Marquette University Law School Poll, in which about 700 Wisconsin residents were asked various questions about crime and punishment.  In this post, I’ll consider what the Poll results have to say about a crucial question for sentencing policy and politics: do costs matter, or are the interests served by punishment of such overriding social importance that expense is no object at sentencing?

This question is related to another question I raised in the previous post: is punishment valued more in instrumental or symbolic terms?  If people look to punishment primarily as a way to decrease crime and increase public safety (the instrumental approach), then costs seem to have a natural place in the equation.  As much as we value our safety, there are always limits to what we are willing to spend to protect ourselves.    Few of us hire body guards, or purchase bulletproof vests, or build panic rooms in our homes — the small reductions in risk that we would enjoy simply do not seem worth the cost and inconvenience, and there seems nothing odd about thinking of risk in these sorts of cost-benefit terms.  But if punishment is instead viewed in symbolic terms — as making a statement about who we are as a people and what our deepest moral values are — then cost considerations seem out of place.  It would make us uncomfortable to say, “X is the right thing to do, but I’m not going to do it because it is too expensive.”

The Poll did not ask the big philosophical question about costs directly, but several questions seem to get at it indirectly.  The answers suggest some real ambivalence and division in public attitudes.

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Cost of Incarceration, Empirical Research, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Psychology of Punishment, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

Wisconsinites Like Truth-in-Sentencing . . . Sort Of

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

The latest edition of the Marquette University Law School Poll includes some interesting data on sentencing policy.  I’m grateful to Professor Charles Franklin for collaborating with me in putting the questions together.  The results are here (note that the sentencing questions start at Q25a).

The primary purpose of the questions was to determine the attitudes of Wisconsin residents toward truth-in-sentencing, which was adopted by the state legislature in 1998.  The questions are timely in light of recent political debates over new early release opportunities for prison inmates, which were embraced by the legislature in 2009, but then repealed two years later.  Early release undercuts truth-in-sentencing by introducing uncertainty into the actual date that inmates will be released.  Indeed, critics of the 2009 reforms complained — in what was probably a bit of an overstatement — that the new early release mechanisms “gutted” truth-in-sentencing.

At first blush, the new poll seems to provide strong support for the 2011 repeal and the return to a purer form of truth-in-sentencing: a decisive 63% majority agreed that “truth in sentencing should continue to be the law in Wisconsin.”  (25c)  Moreover, only 27% agreed that “many of the people who are locked up in prison do not deserve to be there,” and only 37% agreed that “many of the people who are locked up in prison could be safely released without endangering the community.”  (27d, e)

But the story is a little more complicated than might first appear.  (more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Empirical Research, Parole, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Psychology of Punishment, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. 6: Happy Days

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

In the previous post in this series, I took the imprisonment data from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin back to 1991.  I’ve been interested, though, in pinpointing when exactly the Minnesota-Wisconsin imprisonment disparity arose, which requires going back further — much further, to the 1950′s.  Here are the numbers:

WI Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change MN Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change IN Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change
1950 58.7 n/a 63.0 n/a 120.4 n/a
1955 61.6 4.9% 61.6 -2.2% 103.1 -14.4%
1960 69.5 12.8% 60.3 -2.1% 116.4 12.9%
1965 68.3 -1.7% 49.1 -18.6% 91.1 -21.7%
1970 67.3 -1.5% 41.7 -15.1% 79.6 -12.6%
1975 65.0 -3.4% 42.0 0.7% 73.0 -8.3%
1980 85.0 30.8% 49.3 17.4% 114.0 56.2%
1985 113.6 33.6% 55.9 13.4% 182.3 60.0%
1990 152.6 34.3% 71.9 28.6% 229.7 26.0%
1995 218.6 43.3% 105.1 46.2% 277.7 20.9%
2000 386.9 77.0% 126.8 20.6% 331.0 19.2%
2005 392.9 1.6% 173.1 36.5% 399.5 (est) 20.7%
2010 387.2 -1.5% 177.8 2.7% 459.9 15.1%

The numbers tell a remarkable story.  Here are some of the parts of that story that stand out for me:

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Three-State Comparison, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | 1 Comment »

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

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

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.

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | 2 Comments »

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

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

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 key 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.

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Empirical Research, Racial Disparities, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. 3: Harsh Hoosiers

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

In the first post in this series, I explored the large gap between the incarceration rates of Minnesota and Wisconsin.  In the second, I discussed racial disparities in the incarcerated populations of the two states.  The disparities in both states are wide, although Wisconsin’s are somewhat larger.  In this entry, I add a third state, Indiana, to the statistical comparisons.  As another medium-sized midwestern state, one might expect that Indiana would have criminal-justice numbers that are similar to Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s.  Indiana’s numbers, however, point to a criminal-justice sustem that is much larger and harsher than those of its northern neighbors.

As detailed in the table that appears after the jump, Indiana’s imprisonment rate (about 460 per 100,000) easily outstrips Wisconsin’s (387) and dwarfs Minnesota’s (178).  Perhaps even more surprisingly, Indiana’s probation population also exceeds Minnesota’s.  My Minnesota-Wisconsin comparison suggested that Wisconsin imprisons many defendants who would get probation in Minnesota, leading to a much smaller probation population in the former than the latter.  But Indiana seems to incarcerate the same way that Wisconsin does, without any accompanying reduction in the probation numbers.

For that reason, Indiana’s total supervised population of 167,872 is the largest of the three states (although Minnesota, with the smallest overall population of three, still has a somewhat larger per capita supervised population, thanks to its enormous per capita probation number).

Indiana also leads the way in crime.

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Cost of Incarceration, Crime Data, Empirical Research, Politics of Crime and Punishment, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. I

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

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.

(more…)

Print Friendly

Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Racial Disparities, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

« Older Entries