Prison conversion - criminologist and author John J. DiIulio Jr

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Jacob Sullum

From late 1996 through September 1997, DiIulio, Piehl, and University of New Mexico sociologist Bert Useem surveyed about 1,500 incoming prisoners in New York, Arizona, and New Mexico. They used anonymous questionnaires to ask the prisoners detailed questions about their backgrounds and criminal histories. They were not able to obtain access to the prisoners' records for confirmation, but research by the RAND Corporation in the 1970s had shown a good correspondence between inmates' self-reports and their rap sheets, once the data were adjusted to exclude apparent fakers (those claiming to have committed thousands of crimes in a year, for example).

DiIulio and his collaborators found that drug-only offenders accounted for 28 percent of incoming male prisoners in New York, 18 percent in Arizona, and 15 percent in New Mexico. Among female prisoners, the figures were 49 percent, 20 percent, and 14 percent, respectively. In New York, drug offenders represented 47 percent of new prisoners in 1997, so DiIulio et al.'s findings indicate that most of them were not predatory criminals. "There is a large chunk of genuinely drug-only offenders," Useem says. "That was a surprise to me, and I think to John." He says the percentage of prisoners in this category "was strikingly high to me - and worrisome."

These results had a dramatic impact on DiIulio's public posture vis-a-vis drug offenders.

"If it turns out that we have reached the point of diminishing returns with respect to somewhere between a third and half of the people who are now being sentenced to prison under mandatory minimum and kindred laws as drug offenders," he says, "even though [sentencing reform] isn't going to free up a gazillion beds, it's going to free up a certain amount of space, it's going to relieve a certain amount of drain on the public purse, and it's going to make the system more effective at delivering public safety for the marginal tax dollar."

DiIulio laid out this argument in a March 12, 1999, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. "Current laws put too many nonviolent drug offenders in prison," he declared, citing highlights from the three-state study, which was published in early summer by the Manhattan Institute. Among other things, he recommended abolition of mandatory minimums, reform of the federal sentencing guidelines, release of nonviolent drug offenders, and an end to the federalization of crime policy. "Such changes would undoubtedly reduce the number of drug-only offenders in federal prisons by tens of thousands," he wrote.

DiIulio followed that up with a May 17 National Review article making "a conservative crime-control case" for repealing mandatory minimums. "To continue to imprison drug-only offenders mandatorily," he wrote, "is to hamstring further a justice system that controls crime in a daily war of inches, not miles, and that has among its main beneficiaries low-income urban dwellers." He explains: "I view the criminal justice system as a sorting machine. ... For me, it's about one thing, essentially: How do you improve at the margin the system's capacity to sort in ways that increase public safety?"