Macro Roundup

“….First, 23% of felons convicted of violent crimes are sentenced to no incarceration whatever. Second, nearly 80% of state prison inmates are released before serving their full terms. If we measure punishment by actual time served, the picture is not disturbing. Some might argue that America has an underpunishment problem. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that of inmates released in 2016 from state prisons in 44 states, the median murderer had served 13.4 years in prison. The median for those convicted of any violent crime—murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery or assault—was 2.4 years. The average time served is higher than the median—4.7 years—but the average is skewed upward by a small number of unusually long imprisonments. If we look at all state prisoners released in 2016 regardless of offense, the average stay was 2.6 years and the median was 1.3 years. Seventy-seven percent of state prisoners are freed after less than three years behind bars. While that doesn’t include time spent in jail before trial or while awaiting transfer to prison, the jail time is usually a matter of months and is credited toward the time served in prison….”

Barry Latzer, "Beware the Next Step on Criminal-Justice Reform,"Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-the-next-step-on-criminal-justice-reform-11545598957

Beware the Next Step on Criminal-Justice Reform

The First Step Act, which President Trump signed Friday, is a federal prisoner-leniency measure and a worthy reform. It grants a limited number of federal offenders rational and modest sentence reductions, incentives for rehabilitation, and some humane improvements while they serve their sentences. Yet it contains nothing radical to diminish the criminal-justice system or undermine public safety. The provisions for electronic monitoring of early-release prisoners are a welcome down-payment on the best hope for the future of criminal justice—technology.

But having passed the First Step Act, lawmakers should be cautious about the next step. Progressives believe that the U.S. overincarcerates and needs to cut back sharply on the number of people in jails and prisons. But the “mass incarceration” claim doesn’t withstand much scrutiny.

Even progressives must acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of prison inmates are guilty. Thus if it is true that they are overincarcerated, it must be because too many guilty criminals are locked up, because their punishments are excessive, or some combination of the two.

Since more than half of violent crimes go unreported and police solve only a small percentage of those that are (about 26% of reported robberies, for instance), it is difficult to argue that America incarcerates too many offenders. While perhaps an argument can be made for reducing low-level arrests (think possession of small amounts of marijuana), those offenders, when they are held at all, almost always go to jail, not prison, which is for serious and repeat offenders.

What about overpunishment? Are penalties so harsh that American prisons are filled with men and women who are languishing there for decades because of some youthful indiscretion? That is the image the disincarceration movement wants to conjure up. But it is false.

First, 23% of felons convicted of violent crimes are sentenced to no incarceration whatever. Second, nearly 80% of state prison inmates are released before serving their full terms. If we measure punishment by actual time served, the picture is not disturbing. Some might argue that America has an underpunishment problem.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that of inmates released in 2016 from state prisons in 44 states, the median murderer had served 13.4 years in prison. The median for those convicted of any violent crime—murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery or assault—was 2.4 years. The average time served is higher than the median—4.7 years—but the average is skewed upward by a small number of unusually long imprisonments.

If we look at all state prisoners released in 2016 regardless of offense, the average stay was 2.6 years and the median was 1.3 years. Seventy-seven percent of state prisoners are freed after less than three years behind bars. While that doesn’t include time spent in jail before trial or while awaiting transfer to prison, the jail time is usually a matter of months and is credited toward the time served in prison.

If these punishments don’t seem excessive, and the overwhelming number of people imprisoned deserve their fate, then what will the “second step” entail? Additional policy changes to accelerate disincarceration appear to be unnecessary. In the past decade, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics figures, nationwide incarceration rates have steadily declined and now are at their lowest rate since 1996.

Undoubtedly the decline reflects falling crime rates. Despite upticks since 2015, the U.S. murder rate—the most accurately counted crime, since there are few unreported murders—has been modest, especially compared with the early 1990s. The 2017 rate (5.4 murders per 100,000 Americans) is down 45% from the 1991 rate (9.8). In addition, since the recession of 2007-09, at least 20 states have cut back on criminal-justice expenditures, most likely as a means of cost-saving.

The risk in the second step of criminal-justice reform is that it goes too far. The justice system, flawed though it is, provides incentives to desist from crime. The weaker it gets, the greater the risk of a significant crime increase. That happened in the late 1960s: When the crime tsunami began, the system caved in. Police arrested fewer offenders, and courts imposed fewer and lighter punishments. That contributed to the 20th century’s worst sustained violent-crime wave.

The saver in all this may be that the First Step Act affects only federal prisoners, and each state can judge for itself whether or not—and how much—the system should be softened as a second step.

WSJ reports on a new Kansas City Fed study, "... Initial population has become a more significant determinant of employment and population growth in recent years than it was in previous decades, a Analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found. From 2000 to 2017, a majority of U.S. communities with fewer than 25,000 residents saw declining population and employment, while nearly all metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents saw their populations rise...“The relationship between size and growth became much more important after 2000,” author and senior economist Jordan Rappaport said....."

Paul Kiernan, "For U.S. Cities, Size Increasingly Matters,"Wall Street Journal,December 24, 2018, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2018/12/24/for-u-s-cities-size-increasingly-matters/

"... In 2014 the Obama administration sent school districts “guidance” letters that essentially threatened federal action if black suspension rates weren’t reduced. The letter stated that even if a school’s suspension policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administrated in an evenhanded manner,” the district could still face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”..."

Jason Riley, "Obama’s Racial Preferences Made Schools Dangerous," Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-racial-preferences-made-schools-dangerous-11545767080

Obama’s Racial Preferences Made Schools Dangerous

There are some interviews a journalist never forgets. I remember the time a father in Harlem explained to me why he had pulled his son out of the neighborhood public school and enrolled him in a nearby charter school.

The father was tall and thin. He kept both hands in his pockets as we stood talking, but he had a very expressive face. I thought he was going to tell me that the charter school had smaller classes or better graduation rates. Instead, he wanted to talk about something most parents take for granted when they send Johnny and Susie off to school each morning: physical safety.

He didn’t take it for granted. He told me the atmosphere at the old school had been chaotic, that bullying was rampant, and that his son, a sixth-grader at the time, had become terrified of the place. One day the boy was attacked by other students in the school lavatory, and the father got a call to pick him up from the hospital. It was the final straw. “I didn’t know anything about charters,” said the father. “I was just looking for an escape.” After the new school assured him his child would not have to worry each day about being assaulted by his classmates, he was sold.

I thought about that family last week when news broke that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was revoking an Obama-era policy on school discipline. In 2014 the Obama administration sent school districts “guidance” letters that essentially threatened federal action if black suspension rates weren’t reduced. The letter stated that even if a school’s suspension policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administrated in an evenhanded manner,” the district could still face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

Put another way, the administration was demanding racial parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive, which is as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s committing crimes.

The result is that more schools have been disciplining fewer students in order to achieve racial balance in suspension rates and stay out of trouble with the federal government. Civil-rights lawsuits are embarrassing—to be accused of racial discrimination is often tantamount to being found guilty of it. They’re also expensive to fight, and the federal government has far more resources than any school district. The easier course for schools is to pretend that students from different racial and ethnic groups misbehave at similar rates. School safety becomes secondary.

In Oklahoma City, principals told teachers not to request a suspension “unless there was blood.” After school districts in Los Angeles and Chicago softened their policies to curb suspensions, teachers reported more disorder, and students reported feeling less safe. Following a similar move in Philadelphia, truancy increased and academic achievement fell. Schools in Wisconsin that followed the guidance also saw subsequent reductions in math and reading proficiency. Like other liberal advocates of school-discipline reform, Arne Duncan, who was serving as President Obama’s education secretary when the guidance was issued, insisted that blacks are suspended at higher rates than other groups only because school officials are racially biased. “It’s not caused by differences in children,” he said. “It is adult behavior that needs to change.”

Yet many of the schools where these uneven discipline rates persist have minority principals and no shortage of minority teachers and administrators. What would be their motive for singling out black and brown kids for suspensions and expulsions, unless those students’ behavior warrants it? And why shouldn’t we expect to find varying rates of misbehavior among racial and ethnic groups in school, when that is exactly what we find outside school?

The bigger problem with these antisuspension crusades is that they ultimately harm the groups they are supposed to help. After New York City made it more difficult to remove troublemakers from the classroom, schools with the highest percentages of minority students were more likely to experience an increase in fighting, gang activity and drug use. A federal report on school crime and safety released last year by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest proportion of any racial or ethnic group.

Some kids go to school to learn, while others go to generate disorder. If we want to narrow racial gaps in academic achievement, policies ought to prioritize the needs of the former—and a school stripped of its ability to effectively discipline students will be hard-pressed to effectively teach them. Don’t believe me? I know a father in Harlem you should talk to.

FRBSL finds gender pay gap is function of marriage status, even controlling for age

"...But when marital status is factored in, single men tend to earn roughly what single women and married women do, while married men far out earn the other three groups, according to a recent Economic Synopses essay. Research Officer and Economist Guillaume Vandenbroucke first broke down wages by men and women, focusing on employed people with at least a high school diploma.... Vandenbroucke’s first observation is that there was very little, if any, difference between single men and single women. Next was that single women and married women also earned similar wages. “This is surprising since married women may be more likely to have children than single women,” he noted. “Thus, this second point is not consistent with the view that the gender wage gap results from women having children earlier in life and losing ground in human capital accumulation relative to men.” Hisfinal observation was that married men earned significantly more than the other three categories. He cautioned that the data don’t imply that being married increases a man’s wage: “It might be that men with higher wages are more likely to marry; therefore, the average married man earns a higher wage than the average single man.”..."

Married Men Outearn Single Men (and Women as a Whole)," Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, December 25, 2018, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/december/married-men-outearn-single-men