In today's installment in the Toronto Star's continuing "nobody should ever, like, go to jail, like, ever" series, we are happily treated to more of the same: lies, misdirection and obfuscation. For whatever reason, Michigan has come under particular scrutiny - yet, despite the best efforts of the Star's reporters, the facts resolutely refuse to conform to the narrative they wish to impose.
Let's start with this story (from the weekend), written by Sandro Cotenta and Jim Rankin. In the middle of it is buried this passage:
Canada is starting down a road well-travelled by the United States, where it is becoming clear that mandatory sentences have been mostly ineffective and financially disastrous.
Michigan, for example, has 50,000 inmates and a state prison bill of $2 billion – an amount equal to Canada's entire prison spending. Ironically, two minimum sentencing measures aimed at guns and drugs, introduced in the '70s, led to more mandatory sentences for other crimes and an astronomical increases in incarceration rates in that state. The number of state prisons exploded from a handful to close to 50.
However, the crime rate there did not decrease.
Let's start with the first portion quoted above: "[in] the United States, where it is becoming clear that mandatory sentences have been mostly ineffective". You could read the Toronto Star's entire excrutiatingly long magnum opus on imprisonment and be left entirely uninformed of the fact that violent crime rates in the United States have plummeted over the past fifteen years (at a much steeper rate than Canada's crime rates have fallen) to levels not seen since the 1960s - at precisely the time when mandatory minimum sentences have been most widely deployed. Now, is that causation or correlation? Maybe a little of both. But it is certainly not "becoming clear" that mandatory sentences have "been mostly ineffective". Criminologists (who, as a profession, seem to have a bias against actually punishing criminals) have been desperate to disprove any link between putting people in jail and falling crime rates - and they've mostly failed in those efforts (see here for an example).
But that's almost quibbling, given what the reporters next indulge in - which is sleight of hand. "However, the crime rate there did not decrease". That's what they say. Bereft of context, bereft of reference, bereft of, well, anything. "Did not decrease" - from when to when? Compared to what? Who knows? Michigan is never again raised in the article. But remember the conclusion which you, as a reader, are meant to walk away with: in Michigan, they imprisoned more people, but the crime rate did not decrease.
Fine. Today, Betsy Powell really drills down on Michigan. Bad Michigan! Here's what Betsy had to say:
Responding to law enforcement lobbying in the `70s and `80s and the perception that drug-fuelled crime was out of control, politicians across the United States enacted tough sentencing laws believing they would snare major drug dealers and deter drug use while showing the public they were being tough on crime.
Michigan's mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences, including the so-called "650-Lifer" law that locked up Larson, were viewed as the harshest in the nation.
Today, Michigan is lock-up central. It has 50,000 inmates – Canada, with more than three times the population, has 32,000 – and 50 correctional facilities, 35 built since 1985.
But the state's "mass incarceration experiment" has achieved none of its stated objectives, says Laura Sager of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).
"The dividends were broken families and broken communities not less crime."
... If the goal of locking up more people is to increase safety than Michigan "should be Shangri-la," said Sager in an interview in a tiny FAMM office in Lansing, the state capital 150 kilometres west of Detroit.
Yet Michigan's violent crime rate in 2006 was 562 per 100,000 people, according to the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending. Detroit alone had 400 homicides last year.
Well, at least this time they stoop to actually providing us with a statistic. Left completely unaddressed, however, is whether that violent crime rate is higher, lower or about the same as before the mandatory minimums were introduced. Presumably, we're meant to look at "562 per 100,000" and faint away in horror (that the Canadian violent crime rate is 930 per 100,000 likewise is best left buried (and, yes, thanks, I'm aware that you can't do one to one comparisons of the violent crime rate because of differences in definitions and reporting)). We have no idea what Powell is using as a reference point when she implies that the crime rate has not fallen. Other than that 35 incarceration facilities have been built since 1985, and a sidebar which indicates that the prison population has increased by about 350% since 1984, we're not sure what either Powell or, previously, Contenta and Rankin, are talking about.
So guess what?
Michigan's violent crime rate has plummeted.
That "562 per 100,000" number which Powell was kind enough to provide is, let's see, about a 25% drop from either 1984 or 1985, take your pick (when violent crime rates were 760 and 734, respectively) and a 30% drop from the peak of the violent crime rate in 1986. And 562 is the highest the violent crime rate has been this decade. The last time the violent crime rate in Michigan was consistently this low was in the 1960s. But I guess things are so much more complicated when you actually look at the underlying facts.
