Crime
Last week, the Cook County (Chicago) Illinois, Court Clerk, Iris Martinez, issued a letter calling for review of the state’s pre-trial release program. The Pre-Trial Fairness Act went into effect one year ago in Chicago. Since then, Martinez claims, and she’s the one that processes the paperwork, that two-thirds of all criminal defendants in Cook County have failed to appear for court.
If you look at the provisions of the Act, it’s not hard to understand why two-thirds of defendants failed to appear. The confusing thing is why one-third bothered to appear. Under the Act, if a criminal defendant does not show up to court, the judge cannot issue an arrest warrant for the defendant’s failure to appear. Instead, the judge is required to send a postcard to the defendant explaining that he or she missed court and providing a new date with instructions to appear. If the defendant is not spurred to action by this postcard and fails to appear again, the judge still cannot issue a warrant. Rather, the judge must issue a summons to the defendant with still another court date. If the defendant responds to the summons, he is given yet another court date, and prosecutors cannot use these failures to appear as evidence of flight risk for future proceedings.
Supporters of the reforms dispute Martinez’s claims. Given the incentive structure of the Act, my money is on Martinez. You can read more about it here.
More crime
Recently, CWBChicago, a media company that focuses on crime reporting, released a report claiming that since the elimination of cash bail in Chicago, nearly 20% of felony arrests have been committed by people on pre-trial release for other crimes. This, according to CWB, compares to 8.5% prior to cashless bail. People dispute these numbers. You can read the analysis for yourself here.
Still more crime
One justification for putting people in jail is incapacitation. It is a fairly straightforward concept; when people are in prison, they cannot commit crime in the community. How much crime is prevented by incapacitation, though, is not so easy to discern. It requires some speculation about how many crimes the incarcerated person would have committed. Some researchers have attempted to answer the question. A 2007 study (Sweeten and Apel) found that 1 year of incapacitation for juvenile offenders prevented between 6.2 and 14.1 offenses. That same study found that 4.9 to 8.4 offenses were prevented for adult offenders. Another study (Levitt 1996) found that incarcerating one adult offender prevents 15 crimes per year. Who knows? But the number is not zero. We hear a lot about how much it costs to incarcerate people. We rarely hear about the costs of not incarcerating.
Nothing but crime this week
Online sports betting used to be illegal. In fact, most forms of gambling were restricted, save for a few casinos and horse tracks. In 2018, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. That act made it illegal for states to authorize gaming on competitive sporting events. The Supreme Court found that such a prohibition violated the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that legislative power not specifically delegated to the Congress by the Constitution is left to the states. Since then, thirty-eight states have legalized online sports betting.
While states have reaped revenue from taxes on the online betting, a recently released study points out the downside impact on citizens. In states that have legalized online sports betting, there has been a 28% increase in the likelihood of filing bankruptcy, an 8% increase in debt collection amounts, a reduction in average credit scores, a reduction in access to credit, and more unsecured loans. As economist Thomas Sowell famously said, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
I don’t gamble. I’ve never even seen an online sports betting app screen. It’s not that I have some kind of moral objection to it. It’s because the one time I went into a casino I lost fifty bucks in about fourteen seconds and that soured me for life. It’s too hard to make money to just essentially light it on fire like that.
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