Pubdate: Thu, 02 Feb 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Richard Morin, Columnist
Note: Relevant part of a longer column.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

TIME IN AND TIME OUT

Maybe it's time to get soft on crime.

That's because many criminals are more likely to go astray once they 
get out of prison if they faced longer sentences and more punitive 
conditions in the slammer, claim economists M. Keith Chen of Yale 
University and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago.

"Harsher prison conditions are associated with significantly more 
post-release crime," they report in their updated working paper 
posted on the university Web sites, a finding that suggests doing 
hard time often may only produce more hard-core crooks.

For their study, Shapiro and Chen looked at convicts with virtually 
identical criminal histories and examined the "security risk" score 
each federal prisoner is given before entering prison. The rating, 
which ranges from zero to 36, is based on the prisoner's rap sheet, 
predisposition to violence and other factors. (The score determines 
whether an inmate is assigned to a "minimum-," "low-," "medium-" or 
"maximum-" security prison.)

The researchers focused on inmates who had ratings within a few 
points of each other but were assigned to different security levels 
because they were just under or over a cutoff. Chen and Shapiro 
reasoned that roughly similar criminals should have roughly equal 
probabilities of committing crimes once they were released.

Scratch that theory: Offenders who scored barely under the cutoff 
point and served time in a minimum-security environment were only 
half as likely to commit crimes in the three years after release as 
those unfortunates who scored just high enough to be sentenced to the 
next-higher security class. The same general pattern appeared to hold 
true at other cutoffs.

So why were those crooks who did harder time twice as likely to get 
into trouble again? Shapiro and Chen suspect that those who fall into 
the higher security class are housed with more hard-core, violent 
criminals who may school them in the dark arts or otherwise encourage 
them to resume their lives of crime.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake