Stop throwing people in jail for "moral crimes" such as drug use, and we'd see a massive decline. Victimless crimes, such as contempt of court for not being "respectful" enough of a sitting judge, or the like should never send you to a cage either. One could make a massive list of the ridiculous uses of our criminal justice system, and sadly many don't see it as a problem.
A lot of repeat offenders are created when they can't have a real life after the first offense and double down on making a living out of crime. Someone who gets their first felony for possession with intent to sell might find that the least bad career option they have after prison is selling drugs. They when they get arrested the next time they have priors and they go away for longer.
This argument doesn't make any sense. What would be the reason for seeing more repeat offenders other than sending more people to jail in the first place? The statistic they're observing is a RESULT of prison growth, not the cause. Obviously they correlate, but without the incarceration rate going up first, this simply doesn't make any sense - the average # of prior offenses can't increase unless the rate of conviction increases first (and must lag by the average recidivism time), so average # of prior offenses is clearly not a leading cause.<p>In any case, you can easily see that the incarceration rate grew at a pace far in excess of the crime rates: <a href="http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/incarceration-vs-violent-crime-rate.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/...</a><p>The whole idea that the two are related in any way, including this one, is verkakte.
"If the United States wants to reduce the number of people in our prisons, King said these results suggest we need a new approach."<p>When states and municipalities are no longer incentivized to have large prison populations and the same for law enforcement and making arrests, maybe we'll see a reduction in the prison population.
Actually, the US prison population is declining in both relative and absolute numbers, and has been for the last six years.<p><a href="http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf</a>
Back in the day, it was hard to figure out if a person had ever been convicted of a crime -- you'd have to go down to the right courthouse and look through a bunch of dusty paper files. Public records were open, but you'd need to care enough to spend a lot of time if you wanted to snoop on whether a particular individual had a criminal history -- and the right records would have been even harder to find if they'd been convicted in a different county or a different state.<p>Now that we have computers that can index all those public records, doing background checks on individuals has become easy enough to do it. I think I've seen applications for even fast food jobs which ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony.<p>The result of this is that, in addition to prison time, our society is <i>de facto</i> penalizing felons for the rest of their lives by making it a lot harder to get many necessities -- such as employment, housing, and education. Not because any law has made it so, but because of new behavior patterns enabled by new technologies. It's not surprising that many one-time offenders turn to a life of crime -- not because they want to, but because they feel that's the only path left open to them.<p>The timeline in the article seems to fit with this narrative.
Many of the people coming in front of courts have a lengthy criminal history. What it says to me is that our criminal justice system is failing at one of its primary missions: rehabilitation. We have turned prisons into for-profit centers with no incentive towards rehabilitation. Pair that with the US public's interest in punishment to the exclusion of rehabilitation, you end up with frequent flyers.
Most, if not all, of this can be avoided first and foremost by not committing the crime to begin with. That starts with having quality parents instilling the right vales in their children and making sure they get a quality education at least through high school. Furthermore, it has been asserted that college isn't even a guarantee but learning the trades can be much more beneficial to gainful employment.
so, what this article is saying is that while crime has gone down, the average offender has a much more extensive criminal record today than in the past? Doesn't that argument contradict itself? Wouldn't that mean that the real reason prisons continue to grow is that judges hand out more convictions for pettier crimes than in the past?