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“Defensive gun use” in practice

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Since when seconds count the police are minutes away, a brave and self-reliant West Virginia homeowner engaged in the sort of defensive gun use that proves the value of an armed citizenry. Seeing two strangers breaking into his shed, he acted like a real American and blew the perps away with a scoped rifle. (Remember, the best form of gun control is a steady aim.) He then called the police to report his heroic deed.

Alas for Rodney Bruce Black (and the two DOAs) he was - like Rick when he went to Casablanca to take the waters - misinformed. The shed was not, in fact, on Black’s property, but on the property the two dead men had just purchased. So now we have two corpses and one man in jail for murder.

Three queries for lawyers:

1) To what extent does the right to use deadly force to defend one’s home extend to out-buildings?

2) Am I correct in thinking that, for a householder dealing with an intruder, there is no legal obligation to make a verbal challenge before shooting?

3) Mistake of law is, of course, no defense. But mistake of fact is. Assuming what appears to be true - that Black had a good-faith, though mistaken, belief that he was defending his property - can he offer that as a defense and try to get what looks as if it will be a second-degree murder charge (though the news story reports that the arrest charge was first-degree, which doesn’t seem right in the absence of premeditation) broken down to manslaughter?

David Kennedy on reducing violence

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If you care about homicide, click through. Key points: We know how to reduce bloodshed, and violence suppression doesn’t depend on indiscriminate, intrusive use of police power. Again: We know how to do it.

Note to Radley Balko: Congratulations on your new gig at the Washington Post. Your criticisms of police excess - often spot-on - would have more cred if, just once, you celebrated police success, or noticed that liberty can be threatened by crime as well as by official misconduct.

U.S. Prison Admissions are at a Two-Decade Low

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Like most people who write about trends in incarceration, I generally focus on how the size and nature of the entire U.S. prison population changes from year to year (e.g., here and here). This sort of analysis can reveal important things, for example that after rising every year for more than three decades, the size of the prison population has been dropping for three years in a row. But at the same time, such analyses tell us little about what state and federal policymakers are doing regarding prisons right now.

All policymakers are at some level trapped by decision accretion, and prisons are a perfect example of the phenomenon. The high level of incarceration in the U.S. is the product of decisions made over many years prior to when the current group of policymakers was on the scene. For example, while I have complained about the abolition of federal prison parole as a cause of overcrowding, I also recognize that many of the elected officials who voted for it have died of old age, and hardly any are still in office. Even if the current Congress re-established parole tomorrow, it would take years to unring that bell. Likewise, people who have committed heinous crimes for which they are serving multi-decade sentences do not simply evaporate with each election. And that’s critically important in evaluating how quickly current policymakers can reduce incarceration levels given that the majority of the state prison population is composed of violent offenders who are serving long sentences.

To try to get around this analytic problem of decision accretion swamping recent trends, I used the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics data to compute the annual rate of admissions to state/federal prison. As the chart below reveals, the large amount of recent change in this variable was obscured in my prior analyses, which looked only at total prison population size. I was startled and encouraged to see that under current policies, we are at a two decade-year low in the prison admission rate. To provide historical perspective, peg the change to Presidential terms: When President Obama was elected, the rate of prison admission was just 3% below its 2006 level, which was very probably the highest it has ever been in U.S. history. But by the end of Obama’s first term, it had dropped to a level not seen since President Clinton’s first year in office.

Prison graph

Rick Altice on the challenges of correctional care (and related matters)

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When I was a doctoral student, I wrote a desk-jockey dissertation. I analyzed a gigantic dataset to examine informal economic transfers within low-income families. Then I took a Yale postdoc. One of the first people I met there was Dr. Frederick Altice, who was a key investigator and clinician providing care to HIV-infected prisoners and drug users at the community health care van, a needle-exchange-based health services targeting street drug users. This was the mid-1990s and New Haven was an epicenter for HIV among drug users. It was a pretty awful time for the city. At least New Haven had intrepid people like Rick who worked to limit the public health harms and the human suffering.

One of my first times out, a woman stepped on the van to get some care. She was a sex worker and a person who injected drugs. Within the close quarters of that van, many of the other people waiting gave her a little extra room. She was very grimy, probably homeless.  Rick called her over. He pulled out an apple, and split it with his penknife. He handed her one piece, and said, “Why don’t you share this with me?”  As they ate together, he conducted a beautiful clinical interview that explored her incredible range of serious health problems.

I interviewed Rick today at Wonkblog. We talked about a range of pertinent issues in correctional care. If anything, Rick understates the challenge. Connecticut is quite unusual in providing generous Medicaid to many low-income adults who would be uninsured in other states. 

More here.

Understanding and Reducing Federal Prison Overcrowding

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The Department of Justice’s Inspector General has released a report highlighting challenges within the federal prison system. The IG correctly identifies overcrowding as a root cause of numerous other problems, including inhumane conditions for prisoners, risk to correctional officers and budgetary burden.

Unfortunately, some of the media coverage and blog commentary about the report made the mistake of equating the federal prison population with the “US prison population”. This conflation leads to a misunderstanding both of the unique nature of the problem in federal prisons and the range of the solutions, because the federal prison system is a small, atypical part of the U.S. prison system.

If you don’t know that the federal prison system is different than the (almost entirely state-run) U.S. prison system, you would misunderstand the IG report to mean that the US prison population is relentlessly rising and is increasingly composed of drug offenders. In fact, the number of people in US prisons has been dropping since 2010 and the proportion of inmates serving time for drug offenses hasn’t been so low since the 1980s.

This realization redirects attention in a productive way by raising a question: What is different about federal prisons that makes them out of step with the broader national de-incarceration trend? They differ in many ways of course, but the most critical for overcrowding is that Congress abolished parole in the federal system in 1984. Nearly three decades without the option of paroling rehabilitated inmates virtually assures that a prison system will become overcrowded.

If Congress would move to reverse that policy, and the Bureau of Prisons would do a better job of implementing Attorney General Holder’s recently proposed expansion of compassionate release (which the IG report argues is not being well used) the federal prison system would quickly fall in line with the rest of the US prison system as a contracting rather than expanding enterprise.

The Woman Taken in Adultery and the question of capital punishment

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I recently had the experience of lecturing at Pepperdine University on the (possible) roots of Jewish liberalism in the Book of Deuteronomy and the connection it makes between the redemption from slavery in Egypt and the obligation to help the disadvantaged. The subsequent discussion reminded me of something that has puzzled me for a long time: the apparent irrelevance of those passages (especially, in the current context, the ones about not mistreating “the stranger”: i.e., immigrants) to the political commitments of many who consider themselves Bible Christians.

That, in turn, reminded me of a related puzzle, this one based on a passage from the Gospels rather than the Hebrew Bible.

Consider, if you will, John 8:1-11, the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery.

Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

It’s a familiar story, having supplied two phrases (“casting the first stone” and “Go, and sin no more more”) that any reasonably literate English-speaker will recognize, even if unaware of their source.

And yet I have never heard it quoted in the debate on capital punishment. It seems, on the surface, to be quite decisive. The message seems to be that even if an offender has earned the death penalty under the law, no sinful human being is fit to carry it out. Is the Governor of Texas “without sin”?

So consider this an invitation to readers who know more about the Christian tradition than I do: What is the theory that reconciles this passage with support for actual imposition of the death penalty? (There seems to be more than a trace of doubt as to whether the passage was a part of the original Gospel of John, but that’s not someplace evangelical Protestants want to go.)

Footnote Some ground rules: This is not an invitation to argue about capital punishment, or about the truth or value of Christianity, or about the authority of the Bible. My question is how Christians who take the Bible as authoritative have actually dealt with the issue.

As to why death-penalty opponents don’t use this text, I think I have a good guess: it’s because, being liberals, they have swallowed the Rawlsian principle of “public reason” and thus consider the use of sacred text inadmissible in political argument. Since the words attributed to Jesus aren’t binding on non-Christians, they shouldn’t be used - says Rawls - in public discourse. Here I would add “The fool!” save for my fear of Hellfire.

Life without parole

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Unlike some of my friends, I can imagine situations where the death penalty would be justified. (That doesn’t mean I think there’s a way to make it work under U.S. legal and social conditions.)

But life-without-parole - accepted by some as a superior alternative - strikes me as almost always unjustified. Even if you agree with me that sometimes it’s possible to say “This person deserves to die,” how could you possibly say convincingly “The person this person will become in fifty years deserves to be in prison until he dies?”

That’s especially true, of course, when the Lw/oP sentence comes from a stupidly sadistic mandatory-sentencing law, of the kind we still have on the books federally and in some states, and as the result of gross failures of prosecutorial discretion.

That said, do I get to make an exception for Whitey Bulger? Though note that he was charged with racketeering rather than drug dealing, so though he drew two life sentences plus five years (a rather metaphysical verdict, if you read it literally) he didn’t actually get Lw/oP.

Footnote And no, though I can understand the politics of the situation, I can’t actually justify President Obama’s failure to commute a bunch of these sentences. If the pardon process is too opaque, then appoint three while male conservative Republican retired federal judges as an unofficial “clemency committee,” with a pre-commitment to commute any sentence for which they unanimously recommend commutation.

Is a firearms magazine writer/editor a journalist?

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(ht: Walt Kelly): Is a barnacle a ship?

This is messed up in so many ways.  I understand resigning in protest against something your employer did, or asks you to do. I understand getting fired because you’re not with the program.  But Bequette and Metcalf did the right thing “…generate a healthy exchange of ideas…” that the gun community would-obviously, especially in light of these events-benefit from.  We need more people acting as though a job is not the worst thing one can lose!

But instead of forcing the magazine to either fire them or back them up after the yahoo faction erupted, or resigning on grounds that the magazine was wrongly caving in to fear (of that exchange) and ignorance, they quit as though they had done something wrong.  They could have lost their jobs and kept much more important things, but now they have nothing!

Being Arrested Is An Extremely Common Experience for Young Americans

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Radley Balko wrote a shocking link-bait headline: 1 in 25 Americans was arrested in 2011! Balko’s statistic was derived by dividing the number of people in the country by the total number of arrests. As Balko’s readers quickly pointed out, this exaggerates the risk because many people get arrested multiple times a year. He half-retracted his claim, though he kept his screaming headline intact.

This was definitely a case where trying to sex up a public policy trend with the wrong data set and inaccurate analysis generated a less shocking result than identifying the right data set and reporting the facts. I obtained those facts from Professors Robert Brame and Shawn Bushway. They examined the cumulative risk of arrests from age 8 to 23 in a sample of 7335 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth participants. Participants reported on whether they had ever been arrested or taken into custody for illegal and delinquent offenses (excluding minor traffic violations). The period of the study was 1997 to 2008.

The focus of the research was on the cumulative risk of arrests, i.e., how likely were participants at different ages to have been arrested at least once at some point in their lives? Because not all participants completed every wave of interviews, the results could only be reported as ranges, but anywhere in those ranges represents a stunning result: By age 18, the cumulative arrest prevalence rate was between 15.9% and 26.8%. By age 23, it had risen to between 25.3% and 41.4%.

It’s a remarkably common experience for American young people to be arrested. Far more common, the study authors note, than it was in the mid-1960s when another study of this sort was conducted. Some of this of course reflects a rise in youth crime, but some of it almost certainly reflects changes in policing, including the widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics.

Barriers to Marijuana Tax Revenue in Washington State

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Prior to the 2012 election in which Washington voters passed a marijuana legalization initiative, state officials estimated that legalization would generate up to $560 million in new tax revenue in its first year, with the expected state income projected to increase in later years. Subsequent work by Jon Caulkins and the BOTEC analysis group that the state retained for policy advice estimated annual state marijuana consumption at 165 million grams. Will the State of Washington really reap $3.39 in tax revenue for every gram of marijuana consumed?

It’s not likely, for at least four reasons:

1. Ad valorem tax revenue is dependent on the price of marijuana, which will fall under legalization

The initiative created a marijuana industry modeled on the alcohol industry, with a tri-part structure of growers, processors and retailers. A 25% tax was assessed at each transfer point and sales tax (statewide average 8.87%) is also applied at retail. Note that you can’t just add those numbers to get the effective rate at retail because marijuana increases in value as it moves through the production chain. When that is taken into account, tax at retail works out roughly to 45% of purchase price.

That’s a set up for enormous revenue if marijuana prices stay constant, but they will not. Illegality, by design, imposes many costs on the drug business. For example, you have to compensate employees for risk of arrest and enforce contracts privately. That’s why legalization will lower marijuana prices, perhaps by as much as 80% or even more. Unless the price drop leads to a spectacular increases in consumption, ad valorem taxes will bring in substantially less revenue than expected.

Some organizations and individuals advocating marijuana legalization propose excise taxes (e..g, $50/ounce irrespective of market price). This should generate more predictable revenue and also have the public health benefit of putting a floor under effective price.

2. The medical marijuana system is very loosely regulated and tax-free for consumers Continue Reading…