Nice as it would be if Congress would pass legislation eliminating federal mandatory minimum sentencing, it would do little overall to reduce our incarceration rate, which continues to be the highest in the world. Even if we eliminated all federal prisoners from our overall incarceration numbers, we would not have to vacate our leadership role in imprisoning a greater percentage of our citizens than any other nation on earth.
According to the most recent report which includes data up to 2013, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), of the 193,775 federal prisoners serving sentences of over one year, 98,200—or 50.7 percent—are serving sentences for drug crimes. Only 7 percent are incarcerated for violent crimes, with an additional 6 percent serving time for property crimes. Second only to drug crimes as a cause for federal incarceration are public order crimes which, at 35.7 percent, include immigration and weapons violations.
The picture is completely reversed within our state prison systems, where there were 1,314,900 people serving sentences that exceeded one year as of December 31, 2012. Of those, 707,500, or 53.8 percent, were incarcerated for violent crimes, and only 16 percent, or 210,200, were serving time for drug offenses, due perhaps to the fact that many states have already changed their drug laws and sentencing guidelines.
If further steps must be taken to reduce this population, the question is, which ones? Even if we released everyone convicted of a drug offense, we would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world, so clearly, we have to look elsewhere if we are ever to reverse the situation. Fortunately, the researchers at the Urban Institute have developed a tool that may help policymakers find possible solutions. Please follow below for a look at it.
With 1.6 million serving time in state and federal institutions, and an additional 600,000 in local jails, the $80 billion burden has become great enough that the time has come to reduce this population. Ryan King, Bryce Peterson, Brian Elderbroom, and Elizabeth Pelletier of the Urban Institute have developed an interactive Prison Population Forecaster. Using statistics supplied by 15 states, any user can test out a variety of steps to reduce state prison populations.
The offenses included in the forecaster are violent, nonviolent, property, and drug offenses, as well as parole/probation revocations. You can examine the impact of two policy choices, reduction in prison admissions and reduction of length of sentence, on any or all of these offenses. The reductions can be tweaked to show results at 5, 15, 25 and 50 percent. You can also examine the results across all 15 states, or within an individual state.
The forecaster produces some interesting results when using all 15 states. Reducing prison admissions by 50 percent for drug offenses would only reduce the population by 7 percent. Reducing admissions for all offenses by 50 percent would result in a reduction of the prison population by 37 percent.
Reducing the length of all offenses by 50 percent reduces the population by 39 percent. There would be a 23-percent reduction in prison population as a result of decreasing the sentences for nonviolent offenses by 50 percent.
Since there are currently only 15 states included, it is not possible to see what impact reductions would have in California, which has been working to reduce its prison population, or in Louisiana, which leads the nation in incarcerating 870 per 100,000 of its residents.
But if the state of Kentucky, which is included, could reduce its nonviolent admissions by 50 percent, it would enjoy an overall reduction in prison population of 32 percent, while New York would only see an 18 percent reduction in overall population if it cut nonviolent admissions by 50 percent. Which demonstrates why prison reform will have to be done on the state level, regardless of what Congress does or doesn't do in Washington, DC.
It doesn't hurt to keep in mind that while only 16 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons are there for drug offenses, it is likely that some of the nonviolent and property crimes were related to drug use. According to BJS:
In 2002 about a quarter of convicted property and drug offenders in local jails had committed their crimes to get money for drugs, compared to 5% of violent and public order offenders. Among state prisoners in 2004 the pattern was similar, with property (30%) and drug offenders (26%) more likely to commit their crimes for drug money than violent (10%) and public-order offenders (7%). In federal prisons property offenders (11%) were less than half as likely as drug offenders (25%) to report drug money as a motive in their offenses.
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Our forecasting tool sheds some light on the effects of potential reforms. However, no single policy change is sufficient to make meaningful reductions in the prison population, so policymakers will need to explore a combination of reforms. For now, our forecaster cannot model multiple scenarios simultaneously—such as what would happen if states cut admissions for drug offenses by 25 percent and for property offenses by 15 percent—but we plan to include this capability, more states, and demographic data in the next version.
Pairing further reductions in admissions for drug and property offenses with reductions in lengths of stay for violent offenses is the surest way to meaningfully and sustainably reduce the prison population. The forecaster shines a bright light on that reality and drives home the point that significant across-the-board policy changes are necessary to reduce mass incarceration.