Crime and Punishment

There is a story in a recent NYRB which goes roughly like this.

A while ago, say twenty years ago, there was a great deal of violent crime in the US, much of it involving poor blacks.

Everybody, especially the blacks, got rather fed up with this and so the government needed to do something.

The something was to set ferocious & mandatory custodial sentences for all kinds of crimes, and this worked out roughly like this.

Someone gets picked up, possibly because there has been a crime with a victim or possibly because the someone looks like a druggie. The someone is told by a civil servant that they have a choice between going to trial on charge A which will probably earn them 15 years in jail or pleading guilty to the lesser charge B which will certainly earn them 3 years in jail.

The someone in question is quite possibly a villain of some sort, but is also quite possibly dim, illiterate, socially isolated, mentally handicapped or mentally ill. Or some combination of same. He (or much less often she) gets frightened at the thought of 15 years in jail and settles for 3. The trial is a formality, costs very little and does wonders for the clear up rate. So far so splendid.

Furthermore, it comes to pass that there is a lot less violent crime.

There are three catches. First, the justice of a sort is being done behind closed doors, it is not being seen to be done in open court, with a jury. Plenty of scope for error or abuse among the civil servants in question. Second, the prison population is huge, far larger per-capita than anywhere else in the free world. Third, there are a lot of false positives. Maybe 5% of the people pleading guilty are not guilty of anything at all, at least not of the charges in question. So do we have a result?

In the olden days it used to be said that if an innocent person was hung by mistake he was fast-tracked to heaven and got his reward that way. But I am not sure that many of us would put much store by this line of argument now. So what proportion of false positives is acceptable? Unrealistic to go for zero.

Another angle is that I did not notice, on a quick & careless read, anything about demographics. My understanding is that a big determinant of crime is the size of the male 15-24 cohort. When you have lots of young men coming through the system, you get lots of crime. Does this provide the explanation in the fall in violent crime in question, rather than all the prisons?

PS: I don't know whether Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' would have thrown any light on my difficulty here. I rather doubt it, but in any event, I seem to have retired my copy, which I recall as having been old, battered and unlooked at for many years. But I do have a nice copy of 'The Idiot', in an edition reset or reprinted eight times since its original publication in 1913 and said to be a monument of post-war publishing. Sadly, while Constance Garnett was a very busy & able translator, I never managed to read this one all the way through.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Dostoevsky. No reading action recorded.