Friday, March 10, 2006

Math Dept.

In 2004, 301 people were murdered. Or what it 278? let's say 278.
Of these murders, 97 of the victims' cases ended in the punishment of somebody for something (anything from a handgun violation to Murder One), 34.8 percent.
38 cases are still pending 13.6 percent.
149 homicide cases, or 53.5 percent, remain open.
23 cases were found "justified."

Leonard Hamm earns more than the mayor, or the city's top lawyer.

According to the GBC, in 1995, Baltimore's 50,000 drug addicts were stealing at least $2.5 million worth of goods from citizens and tourists a day. They estimated that treatment was about seven times cheaper than incarceration.

20 comments:

Emptyman said...

The Baltimore City State's Attorney's office is horrifically mismanaged. The task is made more difficult by the fact that nobody wants to make a career out of being a city prosecutor, so there are lots of inexperienced people in over their heads. Baltimore City's is NOT the worst prosecutor's office in the state, but (a) they get the most attention and (b) some of the worse ones are in jurisdictions where the judges and juries will convict anybody automatically, so they can afford to be sloppy. Baltimore City can't, because it's a jurisdiction where it is relatively difficult to get a conviction.

I don't know if inept management is driving people out of that office, or if the exodus of people from that office is causing the inept management, but either way...

Anonymous said...

'They (GBC)estimated that treatment was about seven times cheaper than incarceration.'

Yes, and turning them into Soylent Green is even cheaper. And organic.

Anonymous said...

35% + 14% + 54% = 103%

Maurice Bradbury said...

some cases have multiple victims.

Maurice Bradbury said...

..and some have multiple defendants.

Anonymous said...

Horrifically mismanaged? How do you know? How can you back up such a blanket statement? Do you have first-hand knowledge? Do you work there? Do tell.

Anonymous said...

Treatment: legal solution
Soylent Green: not so legal solution

Not sure reducing human beings to a liquid by which to feed the masses is such a good idea. At least it didn't look like a world I'd like to live in.

The $1/$7 comparison came from a California study, according to the article. Has there ever been a study in Baltimore that showed similar results? What constituted as intensive treatment?

Anonymous said...

www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/treatment/index.html

www.ndsn.org/march93/prison.html

www.courts.state.me.us/faq/drugcourt.html

www.drugpolicy.org/reducingharm/treatmentvsi/

www.justicepolicy.org/article.php?id=408

Si Fitz said...

"Treatment: legal solution
Soylent Green: not so legal solution"

Or a moral one. I bet Galt even calls himself a Christian. I have a respectful request for all Christians that support War and other means of legalized murder. Please read some more about the teachings of the man your religion is named after.

Jesus would probably not call himself a Christian and he would probably publicly shame most of the leaders of the "Christian Right" and the so-called "moral majority."

Anonymous said...

My point is that cost minimization is a nice thing, ceteris paribus. But as between justice and methadone, who said ceteris was paribus ? Suppose we saved money incarcerating vehicular manslaughterers by sending them to driving school ? Justice is not done. The way to do it is to ratchet up the penalties for committing a crime under the influence and then offer the compelling alternative of treatment. You will tend to see reduced relapse, particularly if failed treatments increase the percentage of cost borne by the patient.

Anonymous said...

We have a legal principle excusing behavior caused by rational incapacity solely of medical origin. I challenge the proposition that drug addiction is an incapacity beyong the control of the patient. The fact that it is now beyond his control does not equate with an absence of control on the part of the HIM acting at the time HE began his addiction. I made a choice many years ago not to go down that road because of where it would take me. Others chose to go with current satisfaction and the hell with the ME some years in the future.

People like me worship at the altar of Personal Responsibility more readily than that of an all-forgiving new testament Messiah. I'm rather more fire and brimstone, pillars of salt, Old Testament.

Anonymous said...

If a hoodlum is going to bust my $100 window to grab a couple of CDs which he can hock for $5, should I leave a $10 bill on the hood because it's cost-effective ?

Prosecuting and incarcerating him will cost far more. Maybe even more than the value of all his subsequent smash-and-grabs. But it's right. It's just.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Maurice Bradbury said...

Did you read that article? Do not step to me up in here unless you have.

We must do what it takes to solve the problem for the greater good. If I still lived in Charles Village, (heaven forbid and no one ever should unless they have secured parking), leaving a $10 bill on my hood every night, assuming only vent-glass-window-smashers took the note, it would have been $100 cheaper a year than the $3,750 I spent to fix my glass. If it takes a giant babysitting-facility for adults at $30k a year it's still a good deal for me, because property crimes are a tax. If half of my taxes are keeping crackheads out my grill. Yes, thanks, I'll have one crackhead in jail with a side of tidy potholes.

Maurice Bradbury said...

Cet article... power-law. Time to take a policy stance. I want an opinion from you, galt, you should do your reading before you decide ceteris is paribus.

Anonymous said...

A couple observations:

1) yes, in fact in terms of rational crime, we have a 'law' of seven and seventy - seven percent of offenders are responsible for 70 percent of crimes, mostly small in magnitude.

2) the power law is hardly a new discovery. It's better known as Zipf's Law, which encompasses a family of qualitatively similar distributions. I played with this while working on my PhD.

3) The form of the distribution doesn't much alter the form of the optimal economic corrective instrument. You would, as the author suggests, furnish an apartment, then levying a lump-sum tax on the condition of homelessness, enforced by some draconian and dread penalty.

4) The above is from the theory of optimal taxation, which cewrtainly lets out Charles Village, one of the least optimally-applied taxes I've ever seen.

%) The need for 'justice' is readily satisfied with the budget-balancing condition on an optimal tax s.t. the offender picks up the tab. The Dread penalty which makes paying that tab a good choice is known as the Sword of Justice. Ever see the deity with the scales & sword ?

The problem in Baltimore is something in between compassion and resignation. When a hoodlum busts your window and goes to court, the P.D. advises the court that he cannot make restitution due to insolvency. In turn, we have a constitutional prohibition against debtor's prison, thank you, Mr. Jefferson. What it means in economic terms is that the balanced budget constraint or the personal budget constraint (or both) will be violated, which messes up the optimal tax scheme.

Bottom line, a free society doesn't work well with a bunch of economic nonviables running around on their own recognizance. Part of why gentrification has such good initial results. On that subject, the habit of Balto. City Police Dept. to offer preferential treatment to upper-mid income white neighborhoods as opposed to the rotten treatment in lower income black areas is remarkable as it encourages voting with the feet, hence segregation, in a city which proclaims itself so loudly committed to integration. Talk about hypocrisy. Yes, you, Martin.

Maurice Bradbury said...

What did you learn as you researched your doctoral thesis?

Anonymous said...

One of the problems with the article, DC, is that it doesn't speak to recruitment. Namely, if you 'cure' homelessness by giving apartments until all homeless have been housed, then does someone else fill the 'vacancy' in the waiting room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal ? Once you treat the junkies, does someone else have an incentive to give smashing your window a try ? If so, the treat vs. incarcerate argument loses some appeal. (There's also a literature on the recruitment effects of heightened incarceration, but the thinking is that risk-aversion goes up as more are incarcerated, so penalties become more effective and persuasive. The counterargument recognizes that many offenders have kinda limited rationality. In particular, they often don't assign full weight to sanctions until after they're caught & convicted. That limits the persuasive effect before the commission of the crime. Applying the law of small numbers, they assume that because I haven't been caught (yet), I infer I probably won't be. That doesn't change 'til after I'm booked, which is kinda late.

This is a problem when popular media latch onto 'new' economic results.

An example would be the rash of articles on the 'Tipping Point'. This 'new' social theory is simply a recognition of nonlinear relationships in the social sciences. Hardly news to economic theorists.

Anonymous said...

I learned never to pay too much attention to what someone says just because they have a PhD. Like the wizard of Oz, once you see the academician from behind the curtain, he's just another fallible, self-absorbed human being.

Maurice Bradbury said...

That's not a new report-- it's 11 years old! I don't think we ever got funded treatment spaces anyway-- did we? so the point is kind of moot anyway. I guess what my question really was: do you want to be "right," or do you want to solve the problem?

(...where have I heard that before? Oh yeah... couples' therapy.)