John Lott is an empirical scholar of great talent. He does not allow moral theorizing to be bold without backup. Thus he is skeptical of Loury’s characterization of the American criminal justice system as racist because the hard facts seem to tell a different story.
The facts are these:
1. Blacks commit the majority of crimes against other blacks.
2. If we assume that too many people are in prisons, then the easiest way to lower that number is by cutting back the war on drugs.
3. Society imposes non-incarceration punishments on criminals in biased ways against whites.
4. Death penalties DO deter violent crime.
5. Modern police training is failing compared to the past.
One gets the impression that for Lott the evidence should be enough to inform and update the criminal justice system. But Loury’s perspective is a popular one not only among formal commentators and academics but also amongst significant portions of minority citizen groups. My remaining question for Lott (perhaps more of a concern), is how does one ensure the implementation of sound – empirically informed – criminal justice policy amidst current political structures? Does the current political system possess the incentives necessary to implement or preserve good criminal justice policies as Lott sees them?
My recommendation for Loury was to read more Hayek whereas Lott could perhaps benefit from reading more transition economics. Pete Boettke’s post on the stickiness of institutions related to culture comes to mind. If different cultural groups and settings hold different preferences for retribution, restitution, rehabilitation, vengeance, etc (as recent studies would suggest), then a one size fits all approach to criminal punishments may lead to political cycling or systematic bias.
The Imprisoner's Dilemma
comments on political economy, punishment theory and mass incarceration
Ok — so let me try this out:
Unemployment and Crime (not what you think)
In Europe unemployment rates are really high, so high that many have argued that there is a culture of unemployment where being on the government payrolls is no longer a social stigma – when an entire community exists which shares the status of unemployed, who would stigmatize. This is the institutional insulation theory of persistent unemployment.
So, if blacks in the US are culturally embracing the life-style of the “thug” the same argument should apply, there is no social disapprobation for imprisonment – “the man is just out to get me” so incarceration is not an evaluation of the individual, but rather it is transformed into a critique of the system.
To the extent that we buy the socialized unemployment story, we should also buy the socialized incarceration story. The bias is there, it was created a long time ago — so fixing the problem cannot simply be corrected by making the system fair now.
In the unemployment scenario attempts to force welfare participant to train have not been successful in Scotland at least. So if we can’t fix the unemployment problem, which has been approached by multiple different countries from a variety of angles — what is the prospect for fixing the relatively unique problem of incarceration here?
Do we wash our hands, or do we simply hope that things like the first black attorney general, the first black president, and Bill Cosby are enough to cause a momentum shift to young blacks giving up the institutionalized insulation against disapprobation. Can we “uncle Tom” our way out of this divergent social norm?
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