As most of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s criminal justice reforms as legislation heads to his desk for his signature into law, Louisiana’s political left is working overtime to cast aspersions on measures reversing the ethos behind changes predecessor Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards had enticed, despite data showing very much such assertions are baseless.
In essence, Landry’s reforms increase severity of sentences for some crimes, for 17-year-olds convicted of some crimes, and lengthens incarceration time for many convicts. Edwards’ had done the opposite, on the theory that the existing measures were cost ineffective, or that any reduction in crime was more than offset by costs involved. Indeed, more vocal advocates of the so-called “smart on crime” approach actually argued that you could have it both ways, reduced crime and costs.
At the very least, the left wishes to delegitimize Landry’s restoration with claims along the lines that being “tougher” on crime won’t make much of a difference, if not make matters worse, and certainly would cost more. A typical leftist view on the philosophy behind his package is “there is no firm empirical evidence that confirms” that “more stringent punitive measures [are] a criminal deterrent.”
That view betrays ignorance, whether willful out of a desire to cherry-pick evidence to support views often limited to those of researchers with a compatible agenda (and much of it flawed), of the actual data. In reality, the most comprehensive and recent analysis demonstrate that more and longer incarceration as a whole reduces crimes.
Penalties create two disincentives to criminal behavior. One is deterrence, by increasing the expected cost to a miscreant for such behavior. The more severe the penalty, in terms of sentencing conditioned by time actually served and in prison, all other things equal, the less of that behavior occurs.
However, “all other things equal” rarely are and can be extremely difficult to disaggregate in analyses of deterrence. Principally, variance occurs around the probability of apprehension and prosecution to the fullest sense of the law. Capital punishment provides an excellent example of the latter and how that can affect analyses of its deterrent impact. In the aggregate, research provides somewhat of a mixed picture for whether executions prevent murders (by legal definition, premeditated and heinous).
But that’s because of the guerilla warfare that has developed by anti-capital punishment interests to prevent executions deliberately designed to water down the deterrent effect, essentially vacating the sentences and breaking society’s pact with victims to carry out that punishment. Parsing out that – in other words, when authorities are able and willing to carry out death sentences in a reasonably timely fashion – the evidence is quite clear: executions save innocent lives.
Yet perhaps more trenchantly, punishment is but the output of a criminal justice system. The input is prosecutorial conduct. For example, “progressive” prosecutors willing to file less severe charges and/or ask for less severe sentencing, if they even bother to prosecute, entirely subvert the deterrence impact of sentences written into law.
In short, the presence of such confounding variables makes it difficult to assess empirically any relationship between sentencing and crime commission. Still, behavioral theory dictates that there must be casual covariance where stiffer punishment reduces criminal activity. After all, if jaywalking is made a capital crime, even as people know it is rarely reported and even more rarely enforced, the penalty is so severe that in terms of expected outcomes it will deter jaywalking, for the penalty is so harsh that for many even the tiniest odds of being caught don’t reduce the expected negative value of the punishment enough to go below the expected positive value of saving a few steps by not using a crosswalk.
Fortunately, the other disincentive is much easier to measure: if incarcerated (unless corrupt authorities are involved), a person cannot commit criminal activity among the public. Simply, as data show and especially for serious crimes, most of those incarcerated will commit more crime when not imprisoned. By keeping them imprisoned for longer periods, through a combination of sentencing and lower levels of reducing the time served or of having access to parole and probation, predators are off the streets. In fact, longer times served in prison for a crime are associated with reduced levels of recidivism, so a double bonus is enjoyed by society.
And, as crime data show, after Edwards’ changes went into effect, in Louisiana crime increased relative to the rest of the country and region. Costs may increase with Landry’s agenda in place, such as by keeping more convicts imprisoned, but the payoff in reduced crime will be worth it.
Landry’s restoration from these solidly follows the evidence (as it does also with the issue of charging 17-year-olds as adults and making it administratively easier to carry out capital sentences). Suggestions to the contrary don’t inform, but instead mislead.