The Criminal Lawyer

Those of us who work in the criminal justice system — whether lawyers, judges, social workers or whatever — are fairly cognizant of the fact that the vast majority of people who get arrested aren’t really a problem for society.  Depending on the stats you’re looking at, for something like 83% of the people who get arrested, that first contact with the criminal justice system is their last.  They don’t re-offend, period.  Maybe they’re good folks who just made a mistake.  Maybe they got scared straight.  Maybe their crime was the result of a circumstance that will never occur again.  Whatever the reason, we never see them again.

As we all pretty much recognize this, we tend to give first-timers (well, not murderers, obviously) some benefit of the doubt.  We give the first-arrest guy a chance to prove that, though he may have committed this crime, he’s not really a criminal.  Maybe he gets a consent decree/adjournment in contemplation of dismissal.  Or a conditional discharge, or some period of probation.  Community service.  Something, anything, other than jail.  Some kind of penance, whereupon we can confidently give our blessing and say “go forth and sin no more.”

But what about those who come back?  What about that 17% who re-offend?

They keep coming back, that’s what.  They may have gotten probation last time, but they’re soon going to find themselves in prison.  And once they get out, they tend to re-offend and get sent right back.  Usually within three years, but often within a single year.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation just released a thorough statistical analysis of these re-offenders.  You can check it out here.  It doesn’t really have much to say about why people re-offend, but it has some useful data on who re-offends.  Good breakdowns by various demographic categories such as age, race, sex, nature of offense, and mental illness.  Also some eye-opening stats on how soon they re-offend, how often, and how long they stay in prison.

A lot of conclusions can be drawn from these stats.  The wrong conclusions can be the most tempting — to (more…)

The respected journal Science will publish tomorrow a research study that suggests that the threat of punishment can keep people from getting in trouble. Stop the presses!

You’d think that this might have been studied before. But previous studies (focusing on freeloading vs. pro-social behavior) only focused on short-term outcomes. This new study, on the other hand, found in the long term the threat of punishment becomes deeply embedded in people’s subconscious, so that they come to fear getting in trouble.

You’d think this might have been too obvious to require study. But as Karl Sigmund of the University of Vienna explained to LiveScience.com, “the experimental work is extremely important and timely, as many researchers had voices concern whether punishment is not too costly a tool to promote cooperation.”

Clearly punishment isn’t the only tool out there to affect people’s behavior. Socialization, community involvement, and positive inducements are all strong factors. But we’re going to go out on a limb and say that, until something else comes along that satisfies society’s need for deterrence, removal (and, sadly, retribution), punishment’s going to remain part of our toolbox for a long long time.

[The research was performed by a team led by Simon Gächter at the University of Nottingham.]