Do Americans really want to end mass incarceration? Or do they simply want to cut prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders?
These are two different questions: Although much of the focus on prison reform over the past few years has gone to nonviolent drug offenders, the rapid growth of the US prison population since the 1960s — which put America above even Russia and China in incarceration — was actually driven by longer sentences for violent crime.
A new poll by Morning Consult and Vox gives some insight: Americans agree there are too many people in prison — but they’re only willing to cut sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, not violent criminals.
The survey of more than 2,000 registered voters posed several questions regarding mass incarceration. Some tested understanding: “To the best of your knowledge are each of the following statements true or false? Since 1990, 60 percent of the growth in state prison populations has come from violent offenders.” (This is true.) Other questions gauged general views: “Do you support or oppose reducing prison time for … people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime?”
The answers revealed not just Americans’ attitudes toward incarceration but also what they don’t understand about the prison system. For example, voters overestimate how many people are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses while underestimating — or at least not knowing — that most of the growth in state prisons was driven by sentences for violent crime. And that has seemingly influenced their attitudes to focus on cutting incarceration only when it comes to drugs and other nonviolent offenses.
The findings suggest that Americans are willing to cut back on some incarceration — just not the level that reformers have put forward with #Cut50, the bipartisan goal to reduce the overall prison population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. This has huge implications for policy: If US politicians move to dethrone the US as the world’s leader in incarceration (with only the small African nation of Seychelles boasting a higher imprisonment rate), they could face very stiff opposition from the public.
Voters oppose long prison sentences for drug offenses but (wrongly) blame them for mass incarceration
America leads the world in incarceration. It holds the largest prison population in the world at more than 2.2 million, above China and Russia’s reported numbers. It also has the highest imprisonment rate among major countries: 693 prisoners for every 100,000 people. In comparison, Russia is at 451, China is at 118, the United Kingdom is below 150, Canada is at 114, France is at 103, and Germany is at 76.
These statistics are why the #Cut50 goal exists: To get anywhere close to other major countries’ levels, the US would really need to cut its prison population by 50 percent.
The Vox/Morning Consult poll found Americans are vaguely aware of their country’s high incarceration rates. About 47 percent said it’s true that “22 percent of the world’s prisoners are in the United States,” and 51 percent said there are too many people in prison in the US. About 52 percent also said that the following statement comes closer to their view: “One out of every 100 American adults is in prison. That’s too many, and it costs too much. There are more effective, less expensive alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders and expanding those alternatives is the best way to reduce the crime rate.”
Things get a little murkier, however, when American voters are asked about specifics. For starters, 61 percent of respondents said that nearly half of all prisoners in the US are incarcerated for drug offenses. Self-identified liberals, who are more likely to back prison sentencing reform, were more likely than self-identified conservatives to hold this view by a 6-point margin.
That 61 percent is wrong: Drug offenses are indeed a significant contributor, making up about 21 percent of the jail and prison population. But the most common offenses are violent crimes (like murder, assault, and robbery), which nearly 40 percent of the prison population is in for. The remaining are property crimes, public order offenses, and other low-level violations.
Seemingly putting all of these beliefs together, the great majority of voters said they support reducing prison time for nonviolent criminal offenders: 78 percent said that “people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime” should be let out of prison earlier. Only 32 percent said the same of nonviolent criminals who had “a high risk of committing another crime.”
Again, liberals were more likely to support letting nonviolent criminals out of prison early: 86 percent of liberals said that they support letting nonviolent criminals with a low risk of reoffending out of prison earlier, compared with 75 percent of conservatives. And 43 percent of liberals supported letting nonviolent criminals with a high risk of reoffending out of prison early, compared with 26 percent of conservatives.
These are fairly high levels of support, especially among liberals, for reducing prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenses — perhaps as a result of the belief that those in prison for these crimes are driving too much incarceration. But the story looks very different when violent crimes — again, the major cause of mass incarceration — are up for question.
Americans don’t want to reduce prison sentences for violent crimes
Most Americans don’t know that the growing number of people locked up for violent offenses drove 60 percent of the growth since 1990 in state prisons, where 86 percent of US prison inmates reside. Asked about this, 29 percent of voters wrongly said it was false, and 37 percent said they didn’t know or offered no opinion.
Combined with most Americans agreeing that nearly half of the US prison population is nonviolent drug offenders, the poll suggests that most Americans don’t know that the major cause of mass incarceration is harsher sentencing for violent offenses.
Possibly because of this, Americans are very unwilling to let violent offenders out of prison early. Only 29 percent said they support reducing prison time for “people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime.” And 27 percent said they support reducing prison time for violent offenders who “have a high risk of committing another crime.” Majorities rejected the idea of reducing sentences for both types of violent offenders.
To put these numbers in context, there’s more support (32 percent) for reducing the prison sentence of nonviolent criminals with a high risk of reoffending than there is for cutting the sentence of violent criminals with a low risk of reoffending.
Even the majority of liberals oppose reducing prison sentences for violent criminals with a low risk of reoffending: 55 percent oppose it, versus 42 percent who support. Conservatives are overwhelmingly against the idea: 68 percent oppose it, versus 23 percent who support.
In fact, no majority of any group — whether divided by race, religion, ideology, political party, employment, or any other category evaluated by Morning Consult — supported reducing prison sentences for violent criminals with a low risk of committing another crime.
Similarly, while 55 percent said they support reducing sentences for drug offenses, only 24 percent said the same for crimes in general.
One potential reason: About 55 percent of voters said that one acceptable reason to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders is “to keep room for violent offenders in prisons.” In other words, cutting back on the incarceration of drug offenders is seen as good partly because it lets the government lock up more violent offenders.
Part of this may be driven by voters’ unawareness that violent crime has dramatically dropped over the past couple of decades. Asked if the national rate of violent crime has decreased by 49 percent since 1991, 25 percent said it’s true, while 41 percent said it’s false, and 33 percent didn’t know or offered no opinion. (Gallup reports similar findings every year.)
Whatever the reason, the general point is clear: Americans are simply not interested in cutting prison sentences for violent offenders.
To fight mass incarceration, Americans’ views will need to change
To anyone who wants to truly end mass incarceration, all of these numbers should be concerning.
As this great interactive from the Marshall Project shows, it’s not possible to halve the state prison population — the bulk of the US prison system — without releasing some violent criminals, even if you choose to release everyone for lower-level crimes like drug dealing and theft (an unrealistic goal, to say the least):
This reflects the reality of how mass incarceration happened. From the 1960s through ’90s, crime in America was unusually high: The murder rate peaked at 10.2 in 1980, compared with 4.5 in 2013 and 2014. Unsurprisingly, Americans back then were much more likely, based on Gallup’s surveys, to say crime was “the most important problem.” Lawmakers reacted with mass incarceration, vastly increasing the prison sentences for nearly every type of crime.
This policy prescription wasn’t very effective. There is no historical correlation between higher incarceration rates and dropping crime rates — incarceration rose steeply for two decades before crime began to fall, as scholar William Stuntz documented in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. And a 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration explained 0 to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s, while other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the ’90s. (There are many other theories for why violent crime fell by roughly half in this time period.)
At the same time, incarceration costs the US about $80 billion each year, according to the Hamilton Project.
Mass incarceration has ravaged certain communities. Black people are nearly six times as likely to be locked up as their white peers (with about 61 to 80 percent of that explained by higher crime rates in black communities). As a result, for every 100 black women out of prison, there are just 83 black men — what a New York Times analysis described as “1.5 million missing black men,” who could be fathers or workers for their communities but instead are behind bars.
So America locks up more people up than any other country in the world — even though there’s no evidence it’s an effective policy to fight crime and there’s evidence that it’s destroying some communities. Yet based on the views of respondents to Vox and Morning Consult’s poll, it looks likely to remain that way — because Americans are okay with it.
Morning Consult polled 2,001 registered voters on September 1 and 2, 2016. The interviews were conducted using large, established online survey vendors and were weighted to approximate a target sample of registered voters based on age, race/ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, region, annual household income, home ownership status, and marital status. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points. Topline results are available here, and cross-tabulation results are available here.