Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered these remarks today at the 2018 Summer Conference for the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia. Much of what he said will sound familiar to those who have followed his public speeches, but today I was really struck by a certain logical disconnect in some of his standard rhetoric. Here are excerpts, with bold added to highlight key passages for follow-up comments:
From the early 1990s until 2014, the crime rate steadily came down across the country. But from 2014 to 2016, the trends reversed. The violent crime rate went up by nearly seven percent. Robberies went up. Assaults went up nearly 10 percent. Rape went up by nearly 11 percent. Murder shot up by more than 20 percent!...
We’ve got to get back on track. We must take these recent developments seriously and consider carefully what can be done about them. Yielding to these trends is not an option for America and certainly not to us in law enforcement. We have clear goals. From day one — I plainly stated our goal at DOJ — reduce crime, reduce homicides, reduce prescriptions, and reduce overdose deaths!...
We’ve got to be smart and fair about who we put behind bars and for how long. This is not mindless “mass incarceration”. But prison does play a role. Two months ago, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report on the recidivism rate of inmates released from state prisons in 30 states.
This is the longest-term study that BJS has ever done on recidivism and perhaps the largest. It was designed and started by the previous administration. The results are clear and very important — historic importance. The reality is confirms what experienced professionals like yourselves have seen.
The study found that 83 percent of 60,000 state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested again within nine years. That’s five out of every six.
The study shows that two-thirds of those — a full 68 percent — were arrested within the first three years. Almost half were arrested within a year — one year – of being released. The study estimates that the 400,000 state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested nearly 2 million times during the nine-year period — an average of five arrests each.
Virtually none of these released prisoners were arrested merely for probation or parole violations: 99 percent of those arrested during the 9-year follow-up period were arrested for something other than a probation or parole violation.
In many cases, former inmates were arrested for an offense at least as serious — if not more so — as the crime that got them in jail in the first place. It will not surprise you that this is often true for drug offenders. Many have thought that most drug offenders are young experimenters or persons who just made a mistake. But the study shows a deeper concern.
Seventy-seven percent of all released drug offenders were arrested for a non-drug crime within nine years. Presumably, many were arrested for drug crimes also. Importantly, nearly half of those arrests were for a violent crime. Sometimes arrests lead to treatment, drug courts — often the problem is more serious.
Recidivism is no little matter. It is a fact of life that must be understood. But overall, the good news is that the professionals in law enforcement know what works in crime. We’ve been studying this and working on this for 40 years.
As any prosecutor in this room can tell you, when a criminal knows with certainty that he is facing real time, he is a lot more willing to confess and cooperate with prosecutors. On the other hand, when the sentence is uncertain and up to the whims of the judge, criminals are a lot more willing to take a chance.
Our goal as prosecutors is not to fill up the courts or fill up the prisons. Our goal is not to manage crime or merely to punish crime. Our goal is to reduce crime in America....
Law enforcement is crime prevention. When we enforce our laws, we prevent new crimes from happening. As prosecutors, we have a difficult job, but our efforts at the federal, state, and local levels have a real impact. With every conviction we secure, we make our communities safer.
A blog post is an imperfect forum to work through all the particulars of AG Sessions' speech. But his extended discussion of the BJS recidivism data (which concerns only state prisoners) suggests that modern prisons — at least in the late 1990s and early 2000s — functionally operated to make a lot of criminals worse, which in turn suggests that sending more people to prison would be a recipe for making ever more aggravated criminals. Of course, this is what "professionals" generally know: time in prison tends to be criminogenic. As Professor Mark Kleiman puts it, brute force often fails and we ought to seek to (and likely can) achieve less crime with less punishment.
Put another way, the BJS recidivism data suggest we were doing something quite wrong with our prison policies even as crime was dropping from the early 1990s until 2014. And yet the tenor of this speech, and what seems to be AG Sessions' general disaffinity for any federal criminal justice reforms, suggest AG Sessions is ever eager to embrace and champion all the policies and practices that contributed to modern mass incarceration despite evidence that those "old-school" policies and practices produce startling recidivism rates.
The significant crime spike that preceded AG Sessions coming in to office will seemingly always serves as a foundation and justification for him to promote and justify ever more federal prosecutors bringing ever more federal prosecutions. But, as the title of this post hints, his old-school talk and thinking is tired and tiring, and likely disserves his presumably genuine commitment "to reduce crime in America."
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