Category: Studies and Statistics

Some years ago, we began tracking the trends in crime in California versus the country as a whole. California has been more aggressive than most states in the “criminal justice reform” movement, a euphemism for reducing the consequences of crime to criminals. See prior posts on the archive blog here and here. (See tech note below if you have difficulties.)

With the release of the 2022 national crime data (see this post), it seemed like a good time to update the data.

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Fresh FBI data for 2022 indicate that nationally the rate of violent crime dropped slightly.  In California violent crime increased by 5.7% with   aggravated assault accounting for 67%.  Property crime nationally increased by 7.1% while California’s increase was 5.9%.  Matt Delaney of The Washington Times reports that motor vehicle theft continued to increase both nationally and in California, where thefts have increased by 31.6% since 2019.  A report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that the California counties with the sharpest increases in violent crimes were the bay area counties of Contra Costa, San Mateo and San Francisco.  Sacramento, Riverside, Alameda and Orange counties also saw significant increases.  Major property crime increases were seen in Fresno, Alameda, Santa Clara, Orange and San Bernardino Counties.  One positive note, homicides were down by 6.1% after significant increases in 2020 and 2021.

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Do the usual explanations of statistics, and especially regression analysis, make your eyes glaze over? If so, join the very large club. Help is here from the Manhattan Institute. George Borjas has this article in the City Journal giving a nontechnical description of the use of regression in claims of discrimination, its difficulties, and why different experts can find different results from the same raw data.

The article discusses claims that Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants, the subject of a recent Supreme Court decision. The same principles apply to discrimination claims in criminal cases, including McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) and states with misguided and misnamed Racial Justice Acts. Continue reading . . .

Here is a very worthwhile event, available online at the Heritage Foundation. Barry Latzer and Rafael Mangual will speak on the topic above at noon EST on Thursday, January 26. We have quoted both Latzer and Mangual often on this blog. Our friend Cully Stimson is the host.

In criminal justice, as the old saying goes, it’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble; it’s what we know for a fact that just is not so. We can expect Latzer and Mangual to expose many “woke” myths at this event.

We previously announced a working paper, Sentence Length and Recidivism: A Review of the Research, in May 2021 and announced an update last June. We are pleased to announce that the review has now been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Federal Sentencing Reporter, in the October issue. (Vol. 35, No. 1) The permanent link to the published version is https://doi.org/10.1525/fsr.2022.35.1.59. The paper is also available on CJLF’s website.

Here is the abstract:

In response to prison overcrowding concerns in recent years, many U.S. officials have undertaken efforts to reduce sentence lengths for certain crimes. However, it is unclear how these changes affect recidivism rates. Among the research on incarceration and recidivism, the majority of studies compare custodial with noncustodial sentences, while fewer examine the impact of varying incarceration lengths. This article reviews the research on the latter. Overall, the effect of incarceration length on recidivism appears too heterogeneous to draw universal conclusions, and findings are inconsistent across studies due to methodological limitations. For example, many study samples are skewed toward people with shorter sentences while others include confounds that render results invalid. Of the studies reviewed, some suggested that longer sentences provide additional deterrent benefits in the aggregate, though some studies also had null effects. None suggested a strong aggregate-level criminogenic effect. We argue that a conclusion that longer sentences have a substantial criminogenic effect, large enough to offset incapacitative effects, cannot be justified by the existing literature.

That last sentence is important. Continue reading . . .

In debates over criminal justice policy, people are constantly referring to crime indexes for the question of whether crime is up or down and by how much. But there are problems with the official indexes. One of them is that indexes tend to be dominated by the least serious crime chosen for inclusion in the particular index. Crimes are simply counted, and because the frequency of crimes tends to be inversely related to their severity, the less serious crimes dominate.

For example, the FBI’s index of violent crime includes murder (and voluntary manslaughter), rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Murder is the most serious, followed by rape, but the other two are much more common. As a result, the violent crime index is largely a measure of robbery and aggravated assault, and it relatively insensitive to changes in the rates of murder and rape.

One alternative is an index with crimes weighted according to their severity. I have seen such indexes in other countries and for some jurisdictions within the United States, but none for the United States as a whole. Here is a first cut at a severity-weighted index of violent crime in the United States. Continue reading . . .