Law and Economics

Firearms and Violence

There is a fascinating post by Stuart Benjamin on The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog I highly recommend and that is available here, on the Lott-Mustard study of the inverse relationship between concealed-carry laws and crime.  Stuart links to many commentaries on the study, including those forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and notes that the National Research Council has just published a very critical study of the Lott study entitled Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, available from the National Academies Press here. 

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More Inmates

As everyone knows, the US jail and prison populations have increased dramatically in the past 25 years -- rising, roughly, from 500,000 around 1980 to over 2 million in 2002.  And there is evidence that this rise had a discernible impact on the significant declines in property and violent crimes that began in the early 1990s.  (See Steve Levitt's recent summary article on this and other factors in the decline in crime in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.) 

In early November The New York Times summarized a new report on the number of prisoners by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice.  Here are some of the highlights: 

"The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose by 2.1 percent last year.  ...  At the end of 2003, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and federal prisons in the United States.  [Including those in city and county jails and all incarcerated juvenile offenders,] the total number of Americans behind bars was 2,212,475 on December 31, 2003." 

"The report estimated that 44 percent of state and federal prisoners in 2003 were black, compared with 35 percent who were white, 19 percent who were Hispanic, and 2 percent who were of other races.  The numbers have changed little in the last decade."   Alfred Blumstein a distinguished criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said "that almost 10 percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison." 

"The number of women in prison is growing fast, rising 3.6 percent in 2003.  But at a total of 101,179, they are just 6.9 percent of the prison population." 

"[T]he average time served by prison inmates rose from 23 months in 1995 to 30 months in 2001." 

"Several states with small prison systems had particularly large increases in new inmates, led by North Dakota, up 11.4 percent, and Minnesota, up 10.3 percent." 

Like the US population as a whole, the prison population is aging noticeably.  "[M]iddle-aged inmates, those 40 to 54, account for about half the increase in the prison population since 1995."  But the elderly -- those over the age of 65 -- accounted for only 1 percent of the prison population in 2003. 

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Death Penalty

In mid-September The New York Times reported on a report to be issued today by the Death Penalty Information Center. (You can read more about the Center here.)  The Center reports that “[juries] imposed far fewer death sentences in each of the last four years than they did on average over the previous decade.” The Center attributes this decline “to growing public awareness of death-row exonerations and concerns that innocent people might be sentenced to die.”   

During the 1990s all juries and judges in the US sentenced an average of 290 people per year to death.  Between 2000 and 2004, the average has fallen to 174.  Professor James S. Liebman of Columbia University School of Law, a leading expert on the death penalty and author of an important new empirical study mentioned below, says, "This is the single most interesting fact about the death penalty in the United States in the last two or three decades." 

The data come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and ar not in dispute.  The Center's linking of the decline in jury death sentences to an increasing awareness of wrongful convictions and its finding that 116 people have been released from death row since 1973 are, however, disputed.  Other students of these matters, including Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, claim that the number of those who served time on death row in recent decades and were "indisputably innocent" is closer to 30. 

Those who are critical of the Center's linking of jury reluctance to issue death sentences and their awareness of wrongful convictions suggest that there may be other reasons for the recent decline in death sentences.  For example, capital cases have become much more expensive, partly because of increased safeguards against wrongful convictions, and that has made prosecutors increasingly reluctant to ask for capital punishment.  Additionally, as others have documented and as Bob Cooter and I stressed in Chapter 12 of our text, Law and Economics, there has been a 40 percent decline in homicides in the past 10-15 years in the US, meaning that there are fewer opportunities for juries to impose death sentences.  The Center points out that this factor may not be important in that while the decline in homicides is at least 10 years old, the reluctance of juries to impose death sentences is far more recent, occurring only in the last four years.  Third, defense lawyers may be becoming more sophisticated in defending death-eligible clients, and, therefore, becoming more successful at avoiding death sentences than were defense lawyers in similar cases in the past. 

You can read the entire Liebman, et al., study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.  See Andrew Gelman, James S. Liebman, Valerie West, and Alexander Kiss, "A Broken System: The Persistent Patterns of Reversals of Death Sentences in the United States," 1 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 209 (2004). 

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