Explains A Lot

Nationwide, about forty percent of convicted prisoners released from jail re-offend within three years.

The bad news?:

Minnesota led all states with a 61 percent recidivism rate.

“It must be the budget cuts!”

Well, no – Minnesota spends at around the middle of the pack (here’s an http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/spe01.pdf on the subject), a:nd recidivism would seem to be almost perfectly evenly divided…

Wyoming and Oregon had the lowest overall recidivism rates for offenders released in 2004, with rates hovering below 25 percent.

Minnesota had the highest — more than 61 percent — while Alaska, California, Illinois, Missouri and Vermont all topped 50 percent.

…between low and  high-tax states.

The recidivism rate in Kansas dropped by more than 22 percent between 1999 and 2004, while it jumped by about 35 percent in South Dakota over the same period.

7 thoughts on “Explains A Lot

  1. All kinds of good stuff here. First of all, the cost of incarceration is far lower than the cost of education, so we can discard the canard “pay for education or jails,” I think. Also, Minnesota’s spending per inmate is far higher than other Midwestern states–the only region that is close to this is the Northeast.

    Now perhaps the higher recidivism rate may have something to do with how long we keep inmates in prison–I’m guessing we might be “softer” on crime than some other states–but another factor might be that, at $36,000 plus per inmate, we’re failing to communicate the idea that committing crime is a bad thing. Maybe it’s time to cut the cable TV, turn down the thermostat a few degrees in winter, and shift the prison diet a bit closer to bread and water.

    To draw a picture, I have friends who work at the federal prison here in Waseca, and occasionally they get to buy the “prison food” if it fails to meet some arbitrary quality standards. You go to dinner with them, and you get third pound burgers, fairly large chicken breast, etc..

    Now keep in mind that this is a WOMEN’s prison–they have nowhere near the caloric needs that the men do, so this kind of thing is really overkill for their diet. I’d have to wonder if the same thing holds for our state prisons–the guys get there, and they are better fed and more comfortable than they have been in their life. So they don’t exactly mind coming back.

  2. Given the voting proclivities of felons ad ex-cons we know from the First Ringers post below that these criminals have different brain structures than us law-abiding folks.

  3. Here in Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are above average and the guy who was caught and convicted for robbing you last year just did the same thing to your neighbor.

  4. A couple of thoughts on recidivism. First, with the economy what it is, finding legitimate work is not easy. Every prospective employer will ask you if you have ever been convicted of a misdemeanor or a felony. That’s an automatic strike against the convict.
    Second, most criminals are not the brightest people in society. If they were smarter they would have A) found honest ways to make money, or B) not been caught. Add to this the much higher instance of alcoholism and drug addiction.
    None of this story surprises me, however it is surprising that those recidivism numbers aren’t actually higher.

  5. Back a few decades when I was studying criminology, the consensus was that deterrence — of commission of a crime, whether or not recidivistically — was the likelihood of credible punishment.

    I think there’s a clue there.

  6. I once saw a list of professions ranked by IQ in the US. It was interesting, jobs stacked up about like you’d think — sextons lowest, physicians highest, everyone else in between. The IQ spread in occupations was interesting as well. For example the average for salesmen was about in the middle, but the range was quite wide.
    Cops came in a little above average, detectives a little higher than cops. There was no category for criminals, but I think that it fair to assume that common wisdom is true, to be a cop you just have to be a little smarter than the criminals.

  7. In the old days, in order to do an okay job, a cop didn’t have to be very smart. (Which isn’t to say that additional IQ points didn’t help; they did, and there’s no particular reason an old time street cop needed to be stupid anymore than a longshoreman — you know, like Eric Hoffer? — did.)

    These days, both the law and tech around the basic job of patrol and responding to calls is much, much more complicated than it used to be, and the only way a cop without a well-above-average IQ can appear to do a decent job is to fake it. (When, for example, he really does have to wait for a warrant isn’t obvious, simple, or stable; it keeps changing.)

    Which is, I think, among the reason that we have so many dishonest cops — the job filters for folks who will either put in a lot of time looking stuff up and thinking stuff through ahead of time, and then making high-octane judgments on the spot (and there’s not a lot of those at all, and many prefer better-paying professions). . . or will simply memorize a convenient set of fibs, and hope that they don’t get caught on tape too often.

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