{"id":1401,"date":"2012-01-29T20:01:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T02:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/?p=1401"},"modified":"2012-01-29T20:16:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-30T02:16:32","slug":"why-haley-barbour-employed-and-pardoned-convicted-murderers-rather-than-car-thieves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2012\/01\/29\/why-haley-barbour-employed-and-pardoned-convicted-murderers-rather-than-car-thieves\/","title":{"rendered":"why haley barbour employed and pardoned convicted murderers rather than car thieves"},"content":{"rendered":"

CNN’s Anderson Cooper has\u00a0devoted several recent crime and punishment<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0reports to the pardons meted out by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.\u00a0In several segments,\u00a0Mr. Cooper\u00a0seemed incredulous that convicted murderers<\/em> were allowed to serve as “trustees” in the governor’s mansion prior to their release.\u00a0In one report, for example, he\u00a0and attorney Jeffrey Toobin dismissed Governor Barbour’s claim that murderers convicted of\u00a0a single crime of passion were somehow better suited for such positions than\u00a0inmates\u00a0serving time for\u00a0lesser offenses.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0will not\u00a0comment here on the\u00a0uses and abuses of the trustee (or “trusty”)\u00a0system, except to note\u00a0that the practice was once widespread but waned considerably after the\u00a0prisoners’ rights revolution that began in the 1960s.\u00a0Instead, I’m here to explain why Governor Barbour and his\u00a0staff preferred employing convicted\u00a0murderers rather than, say, convicted\u00a0car thieves.<\/p>\n

The chart below is taken from\u00a0an excellent\u00a0large-scale Bureau of Justice Statistics recidivism study (Langan and Levin 2002<\/a>). Overall, 67.5 percent of prisoners were rearrested\u00a0within 3 years of their release and 25.4 percent were returned to prison for committing new offenses (others were returned to prison for violating the terms of their release).\u00a0If you click on the chart, you can see that people convicted of homicide have the lowest<\/em> rate of recidivism as measured by rearrest — 40.7 percent — and the second lowest rate of return to prison for a new offense (10.8 percent). At the other end of the chart, about 79% of those convicted of motor vehicle theft were rearrested and about 31 percent were returned to prison after being convicted of\u00a0a new crime.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This doesn’t mean that a 20-year-old murderer is\u00a0less dangerous than a 20-year-old car thief, of course. It just means that by the time we see fit to release people convicted of homicide, they are unlikely to pose a significant threat to public safety. Many have spent decades <\/em>in prison and are much older than other inmates when they are finally freed. Convicted murderers make good candidates for pardons precisely because their sentences are soooo long relative to the risk that many of them\u00a0pose\u00a0at the tail-end of\u00a0those sentences.<\/p>\n

But aren’t those convicted of killing especially likely to kill<\/em> again? I mean, a 10.8 percent recidivism rate would be awful if half of those offenses turned out to be new\u00a0murders. Contrary to all we’ve learned from Quentin Tarantino movies, however,\u00a0homicide offenders tend not to specialize in killing.<\/p>\n

The chart below uses odds ratios to represent the degree of specialization among people convicted of various crimes. Here, the 1.4 for homicide is the ratio of the odds that a homicide offender will be rearrested for another homicide (that’s the numerator in the ratio)\u00a0relative to the odds that prisoners released for other <\/em>offenses will be arrested for a homicide (that’s the denominator). You can see some evidence of specialization\u00a0among those convicted of motor vehicle theft, where the odds of rearrest\u00a0 for a new auto theft are about 1.9 times greater than those for non-car thieves (2.9-1=1.9).\u00a0There is an even\u00a0greater degree of specialization for rape and other sexual offenses, with odds ratios of 4.2 and 5.9, respectively, corresponding to rates of new sex offenses that are 3-to-5 times higher than those for people convicted of non-sex crimes. For homicide, however, the odds ratio of 1.4 suggests\u00a0comparatively little specialization.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I might also add that a great proportion of homicides are “cleared” by arrest, relative to the other offenses on the list,\u00a0so it doesn’t seem likely that rampant homicide recidivism is somehow going undetected by the system.<\/p>\n

In short, there is much evidence that recidivism rates for people convicted of homicide tend to be particularly low. While it\u00a0may be\u00a0politically unpopular to pardon convicted murderers or to place them in positions of trust, they tend to do well when, at long last, they are afforded such opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CNN’s Anderson Cooper has\u00a0devoted several recent crime and punishment\u00a0\u00a0reports to the pardons meted out by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.\u00a0In several segments,\u00a0Mr. Cooper\u00a0seemed incredulous that convicted murderers were allowed to serve as “trustees” in the governor’s mansion prior to their release.\u00a0In one report, for example, he\u00a0and attorney Jeffrey Toobin dismissed Governor Barbour’s claim that murderers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1401"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1413,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions\/1413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}