Notes:

1. Calculated from Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, annual; and Texas Department of Public Safety, Crime in Texas: 1994. [See Tables A-1 and A-2 in the appendix to this report.] Note that no drug offenses are included in these crime figures.

2. Murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

3. Murders increased by 11 percent in Dallas during the first six months, but it appears that the total for the entire year will be down from 1994. Jason Sickles, “Dallas Slayings Increase: Six-month Figures Buck U.S. Trend,” Dallas Morning News, December 18, 1995, p. 17A.

4. Burglary and theft.

5. Dallas Police Department, Support Services Division, June 1995; and T. J. Milling and S. K. Bardwell, “A Sharp Fall in Murders,” Houston Chronicle, August 24, 1995, p. 29A

6. Nonreporting of crime is due to a number of factors, among them: the victim does not “want to get involved,” distrusts or has low confidence in the police, is afraid of retaliation by the offender if the crime is reported or believes the loss was too small to bother with. Different people have different propensities to report crime — even the same crime. See Morgan O. Reynolds, Crime by Choice: An Economic Analysis (Dallas, TX: Fisher Institute, 1985), p. 25.

7. See Note 1. Also calculated from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, annual.

8. Ibid.

9. “Louisiana Deemed Most Dangerous State,” Associated Press dispatch, Fort Worth Star Telegram, March 10, 1995.

10. “8.3% Violent Crime Drop,” Houston Chronicle, January 26, 1995, p. 23A

11. Milling and Bardwell, “A Sharp Fall in Murders.”

12. Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division.

13. Louisiana stood second at 573 and Oklahoma was third at 536; lowest was North Dakota at 90.

14. Steve Olafson, “County Jails Boomed, Now Face a Bust,” Houston Chronicle, November 12, 1995, p. 37A.

15. 621,000 vs. 496,000 in California at the end of 1994. See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Press Release, “The Nation’s Correctional Population Tops 5 Million,” August 27, 1995.

16. This assumes a prison population of 118,000 and a state population of 18.3 million.

17. As might be expected, the average (mean) time served for all serious crimes and the percentage of each prison sentence actually served have also increased in recent years. The mean time served for all serious crimes, 1.9 years in 1990, climbed to 3 years by 1994. Whereas prisoners released in 1990 served 20 percent of their sentences on the average, those released in 1994 served 28 percent on the average.

18. Criminal Justice Policy Council, Testing the Case for More Incarceration in Texas: The Record So Far, October 5, 1995, State of Texas, first page (no numbers provided).

19. Criminal Justice Policy Council, Testing the Case for More Incarceration in Texas, second unnumbered page.

20. Criminal Justice Policy Council, The Big Picture Issues in Criminal Justice, Biennial Report to the Governor and the 74th Texas Legislature, January 1995, p. 1.

21. See, for example, Robert James Bidinotto, ed., Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1994); Morgan O. Reynolds, “Crime-Stoppers’ Textbooks,” Reason, August/September 1995, pp. 58-62; James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Hernstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 377-78; Douglas Lipton, Robert Martinson and Judith Wilks, The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment (New York: Praeger, 1975); and Steven P. Lab and John T. Whitehead, “From Nothing Works to the Appropriate Works: The Latest Stop on the Search for the Secular Grail,” Criminology 28, August 1990, p. 405.

22. This is true for “crimes of passion” as well as economic crimes. The less costly crime becomes, the more often people fail to control their passions. Incentives matter in all human behavior.

23. James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime, revised edition (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 117

24. W. Kip Viscusi, “The Risks and Rewards of Criminal Activity: A Comprehensive Test of Criminal Deterrence,” Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1986, pp. 317-40; Julie Horney and Ineke H. Marshall, “Risk Perceptions Among Serious Offenders: The Role of Crime and Punishment,” Criminology, Vol. 30, No. 4, November 1992, pp. 575-91; and Houston Chronicle, Dec. 2, 1990, pp. 1A, 25A and 1D.

25. Ibid. Also see earlier surveys of the literature in Gordon Tullock, “Does Punishment Deter Crime?” The Public Interest, 36, Summer 1974, pp. 103-11; Reynolds, Crime by Choice, ch. 12; and Stephen G. Craig, “The Deterrent Impact of Police: An Examination of a Locally Provided Public Service,” Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 21, 1987, pp. 298-311.

26. In other words, one-half of all crimes resulted in an arrest, one-half of all arrests led to prosecution, one-half of all prosecutions produced a conviction, and one-half of all convictions meant a prison sentence.

27. See Table A-6 in the appendix to this report for estimated median sentences for each category of crime.

28. Statistics on two probabilities — that of being prosecuted after an arrest and of being convicted if prosecuted — are not available in detail. Fortunately, we do not need such detail to calculate expected punishment. We require only three numbers for each type of crime: (1) the number of new convicts the courts sent to prison for those crimes, (2) the number of those crimes reported to police and (3) the median prison time served by those released from prison. Mathematically, the percentage of crimes cleared by arrest multiplied by the ratio of prosecutions to arrests multiplied by the ratio of convictions to prosecutions multiplied by the ratio of those sent to prison to total convictions equals the ratio of new prisoners to number of crimes, that is, the probability of prison.

29. Ibid., and Texas Department of Public Safety, Crime in Texas 1991, p. 10. The 1960 figures are for the FBI’s West South Central Region, which also includes Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, but Texas makes up 60 percent of the four-state area.

30. Ibid.

31. In 1985, the most recent year for which comparative figures are available, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports show 2,132 homicides in Texas, and the Interpol International Crime Statistics show 1,780 homicides in Japan. In 1994, Texas had 2,023 homicides.

32. Calculated from FBI Uniform Crime Reports, annual, and Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Statistical Reports. [Admissions to prison and probability of imprisonment are shown in Tables A-3 and A-4 in the appendix to this report.]

33. Calculated from FBI Uniform Crime Reports, annual, and Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Statistical Reports, annual.

34. Crimes compiled in the FBI Index of Crime are sometimes referred to as “Index crimes.” These crimes are defined as murder/nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft and motor vehicle theft.

35. Ibid.

36. Morgan O. Reynolds, “Crime Pays, But So Does Imprisonment,” NCPA Policy Report No. 149, March 1990.

37. FBI Uniform Crime Reports, annual.

38. California partly offsets its lower imprisonment rate by keeping more people on probation or parole. Specifically, California keeps 25 percent of its supervised offenders in prison vs. 19 percent in Texas. Indeed, among criminals under supervision, Texas has a smaller percentage in prison than the nation. One reason why Texas is at a disadvantage is a court-ordered requirement to operate prisons at a maximum of 95 percent of design capacity, while California operates its prisons at 184 percent of design capacity. See Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Prisoners in 1994, NCJ-151654, August 1995, p. 7.

39. Caleb Solomon, “If Growth Is So Strong, Why Aren’t Incomes?” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 1995, p. T1.

40. See Steven D. Levitt, “Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Working Paper No. 4991, January 1995.

41. People v. Defore, 242 NY 21 (1926)

42. 384 US 543

43. Macklin Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Reynolds, Crime by Choice, ch. 8; and Bidinotto, Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility.

44. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Bill Archer, “Cut the Federal Handcuffs Off Texas’ Prisons,” Houston Chronicle, September 26, 1995, p. 19A

45. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals operates independent of the Texas Supreme Court, while the federal court system does not separate criminal appeals from civil appeals.

46. TDCJ 1994 Annual Report, p. 6.

47. Anne Morrison Piehl and John J. DiIulio Jr., “Does Prison Pay? Revisited,” The Brookings Review, Winter 1995, pp. 21-25.

48. Ibid.

49. Prisons, however, do not pay for themselves with many drug offenders, who have grown to 30 percent of new state prisoners, up from 7 percent in 1980. There is no social benefit for incarcerating drug dealers, according to Piehl and DiIulio, because they are readily replaced in the drug market. Hence, the researchers calculate that prisons cannot pass a cost-benefit test for about one in four prisoners.

50. Stephen Klein and Michael Caggiano, Policy Implications and Recidivism (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1986); and Joan Petersilia et al., Prison Versus Probation (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1986).

51. Clay Robison, “State’s Repeat Offender Rate Rises,” Houston Chronicle, January 8, 1996, p. 10A.

52. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1988, p. 658.

53. Allen Beck, Recidivism of Young Parolees (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1987). Also see “The Case for More Incarceration,” Office of Policy Development, U.S. Department of Justice, in Bidinotto, ed., Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility.

54. Quoted in Bidinotto, Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility, p. 214. Also see George Allen, “The Courage of Our Convictions: The Abolition of Parole Will Save Lives and Money,” Policy Review, Spring 1995, pp. 4-7.

55. Bruce Fein and Edwin Meese III, “Have to Fight Crime Within Our Limited Means,” Houston Chronicle, May 3, 1989, p. 29A.

56. Prison Industry Enhancement certification program, quarterly report, American Correctional Association, Laurel, MD, March 1, 1995.

57. Telephone interview with the author, January 3, 1996.

58. Knut A. Rostad Associates, “Prison Officials Want Inmate Work Programs Increased 166 Percent; Private Sector Is Key,” Press Release, November 3, 1995, Washington, DC.