Kids these days are awesome

Mr. Gillette pointed me to a post by Judge Richard Kopf called “Justifying harsh sentencing through the power of a single image.” That image was this one:


This shows that violent crime, which has been dropping for decades now, continued its sharp descent over the last few years, at least until 2011. Judge Kopf’s considered opinion is that “harsh sentencing” has a lot to do with this. The idea, as fleshed out by Judge Kopf in the comments to his post, is that longer sentences keep more criminals off the streets, where they can’t commit crimes (except against each other). Judge Kopf also cites with approval the idea that “the graying of America” has lowered the crime rate because old people don’t commit as much crime as young people. Thus, a shift to an older population will reduce the crime rate.

I think it is pretty easy to show that these two arguments (mass incarceration and the greying of Amercia) are not responsible for much of the epic drop in the crime rate. To do so, let’s assume that these arguments explained 100% of the drop in the crime rate. We would expect to see at least two things in the data.

1) We’d expect that the youth crime rate would be relatively stable. This is because the "graying of America" argument assumes a stable crime rate within age groups, and the "mass incarceration" argument assumes that we are imprisoning people longer (but not sooner). Thus, neither of these arguments can explain any appreciable drop in the youth crime rate.

2) To whatever extent other factors might affect the crime rate, we’d still expect that the crime rates of people in middle age would drop more than the crime rates of youth. This is because the mass incarceration argument assumes that we are sweeping up new criminals and keeping them in jail, where they can’t commit any crimes (except against each other). Before the “draconian” sentencing policies, we let those people out of jail, at least sooner, so they presumably used to drive up the crime rate of the middle aged when they got out of jail and went back to their evil ways.

But here are the facts: the youth crime rate has plummeted, and the middle-aged crime rate hasn’t. This FBI report tells the tale. It breaks down the crime rate by age for every year between 1993 and 2001. (I can’t find the data for other years, but this is a good date range because it encompasses the first half of the great crime rate drop, which started in earnest in 1995.)

Focusing on the violent crime rate, we can see that it has plummeted among the very young, merely lessened among the not-so-young, and not dropped at all among the middle-aged:

Age	Change 93-01
15	-43%
16	-44%
17	-41%
18	-34%
19	-25%
25-29	-29%
30-34	-24%
35-39	-7%
40-44	+8%
45-49	+4%

Now, you might be wondering what has happened since 2001. So I did a little work to figure this out. I found the statistics from the 2010 census, which break down the population by age. Then I calculated a violent crime rate for each of the above age groups using the FBI crime data from 2010. Here’s the result:

Age	Change 93-10
15	-66%
16	-63%
17	-62%
18	-57%
19	-51%
25-29	-46%
30-34	-39%
35-39	-39%
40-44	-22%
45-49	-11%

Given these numbers, it’s hard to believe that the graying of the US population has had more than a trivial effect on the crime rate. On the contrary, the drop in the crime rate is overwhelmingly a youth phenomenon. Kids these days—they’re just way better behaved than they used to be. And they keep getting better! They are less than half as likely to commit a violent crime than their forebears from my generation. That is astounding, and demographics cannot explain it.

These numbers also undercut the argument that mass incarceration is a big factor in the crime rate drop. The mass incarceration argument is that the crime rate is dropping because we’re locking up all the bad guys. But these numbers show definitely that there are just fewer bad guys to lock up.

Of course mass incarceration could have had a nice healthy side effect: deterrence. It could be that tough-on-crime policies have scared the bejeezus out of kids. Kids who once were willing to steal a car when it meant just five years in jail are saying “no way!” when it means ten years in jail.

Anyone who’s spent much time around young men knows that this is argument is unlikely to be true. Young men don’t weigh consequences very well, which is why they are vastly more likely to commit crimes in the first place. So changing the incentives at the margin probably doesn’t matter much.

So what does explain this? My favorite theory remains: lead.

Trophies, college football, and clothes

Virtually the entire sports media world would have you believe that today's game between the University of Alabama and Texas A&M University is the most important college football game being played.  This may be true if one is only concerned about which school might be named college football's national champion in January.  True fans of the game know that the most important football game today is game between the University of Iowa and Iowa State University.  The winner of the game is awarded the Cy-Hawk Trophy.  Our previous coverage of the Cy-Hawk Trophy is here.

According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa is slightly favored to win.  However, Iowa State is wearing throwback jerseys to honor Jack Trice. Mr. Trice, if you did not know, was the first African-American football player at Iowa State.  He played for the team in 1923 and died as a result of injuries sustained during Iowa State's game against the University of Minnesota.  The jerseys are not the first time that Iowa State has honored Mr. Trice's memory.  In fact, Iowa State s football stadium is named after him.

You can see the jerseys here.  As far as throwback jerseys go, these look pretty good. Some folks say that being a fan of a team is really rooting for laundry (this article says that Jerry Seinfeld made this observation).  If that is true, at least this week's Iowa State laundry stands for something more than just bragging rights for a year.

The game may be ending.

Continuing our coverage of Michigan state court judge Wade McCree (see here, here, here, and here), the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission has reached a decision and recommendation for the Michigan Supreme Court about how to handle the charges that Judge McCree engaged in improper conduct while on the bench.  Most of the allegations relate to the fact that Judge McCree became romantically involved with a woman who had a case pending before him. You can read the decision and recommendation here.  In essence, the commission recommends that Judge McCree be suspended from being a judge for a period of six years beginning on January 1, 2015. Judge McCree is up for re-election in 2014.  So, if the voters in Wayne County, Michigan decide someone other than Judge McCree should be their judge, then Judge McCree's suspension will not take effect (assuming that the Michigan Supreme Court adopts the recommendation).  Or perhaps Judge McCree will simply have been suspended by a different authority than the Michigan Supreme court.  I suppose that is a matter of perspective.  

"[W]e find that a hot dog is a sandwich..."

That's a line in this recent decision from the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board. Technically it's dicta, but I think we can consider that important question settled. Next time I go to a ballgame I'm going to go up to the concession stand and say, "One hotdog sandwich, please," just to see what happens.

More importantly, the Board found that "footlong" is a generic term with respect to sandwiches, so Subway can't register a trademark on it.

Previous coverage of this issue here.

In case you're wondering, the last time I checked the litigation over whether Subway's "footlong" sandwiches are deceptively titled had been centralized into a Multi-District Litigation case in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. If I have time, I will see if there have been any post-worthy developments there.

--Bart Torvik

Some things never die.

Although the current heat wave in Minnesota is evidence to the contrary, summer is turning to fall. Among other things, this means a return to politics as usual in Washington. One of the first things we can expect is another batch of stories about the need to raise the debt ceiling. Matthew Ygelsias at Slate has a preview here.

Crime down, prosecutions ... down?

On Friday, I published a chart showing that, despite dropping crime rates, the rate of people being sentenced in federal court has gone up.

As I mentioned then, one plausible explanation for this mismatch is that there is just something particular about federal crimes (which are a small slice of overall crimes). So I went looking for some state-only data. I was able to find some data on the number of number of felonies filed in Illinois courts each year since 1997. If you add that data, you get this chart:

(All three lines are normalized to an index rate of 100 in 1997, so this shows their relative change over time.)

The blue line is the new Illinois data. Unlike the federal sentencing rate (which has gone up despite the drop in crime) the Illinois felony-filing was steady between 1997 and 2006, after which it began to mirror the drop in the overall crime rate. So that's kind of encouraging. And it's evidence that undercuts my implicit hypothesis that the prosecution rate isn't at all sensitive to the crime rate.

Paul Soglin, Mifflin Street, and Fair Use

Eugene Volokh has a nice post about a recent federal court decision discussing the use of Paul Soglin's image on some T-shirts sold at the 2012 Mifflin Street Block Party:

The photographer who took the image used for the shirts sued for copyright infringement, but the Court dismissed the case on fair use grounds.

The opinion also nicely lays out the ironic backstory. As you may know, the Mifflin Street Block Party started during the student protest era, with a young firebrand named Paul Soglin at the forefront. Well, times change. Paul Soglin has now been Madison's mayor a bunch of different times, and he's pretty much a party-pooper nowadays. So it goes.

As for my own experience with the Mifflin Street Block Party, I can personally attest to the high quality of the brownies.

Crimes down, Convictions ... up!

Crime rates in the United States have been plummeting for over 20 years. The cause of this turnaround is a topic of much debate and controversy. The Freakonomics guys say we can thank Roe v. Wade. Kevin Drum says we can thank unleaded gas. The authoritarians say we can thank boots on the ground and pigs in the pen. And there are many other plausible theories. Perhaps the most plausible theory is that a lot of things came together at once. But no one denies that we've seen a remarkable and remarkably unexpected drop in crime—all kinds of crime: rape, murder, theft, etc.

This got me to thinking. Even though you hear more and more about this dropping crime rate, you don't hear much about prosecutors sitting around on their hands with nothing to do. So I wondered whether there was any data on the relationship between the number of crimes committed and the number of people who are actually being convicted of crimes.

Although I'm sure such data exists, I couldn't find it on the Google. So I had to create it myself:

The red line is the crime rate in years 1995 through 2011. You can see there is a precipitous decline. The source for this data is the US Department of Justice.

The green line is the number of people convicted of crimes in federal court in years 1995 through 2011. The source for this data is the United States Sentencing Commission.

What you see, obviously, is a remarkable mismatch. As the crime rate goes down, the number of people convicted of crimes goes up.

Now, one obvious objection to this graph is that it comparing apples to oranges: all crimes versus federal convictions. And that's true. So one possible explanation for this mismatch is that federal crimes have expanded despite the overall fall in the crime rate. But my working assumption is that the federal conviction data is a good proxy for the overall state and federal conviction rate. (Some support for my assumption is provided by the fact that overall incarceration rates continued to rise even while crime rates plummeted.)

Anyhow, you can draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is the obvious one: criminal justice is a one-way ratchet.  

A rude return

I returned from vacation to learn that Cosmo Allegretti, better known to millions of Captain Kangeroo fans as Dennis the Apprentice, Mr. Moose, and Bunny Rabbit, has died. The New York Times has Mr. Allegretti's obituary here.

Prosecutor considering whether to enforce unconstitutional eavesdropping law on a "case by case basis"

Reader(s)™ may recall previous coverage here of Illinois's unconstitutional "eavesdropping" law that makes it a felony for a citizen to make an audio recording a police officer in public.

Last we heard, the law was struck down on First Amendment grounds by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The state (Cook County, actually) appealed to the Supreme Court, but the writ of certiorari was denied. Thus the matter was settled: the law of the land is that this unconstitutional law is unconstitutional and unenforceable anywhere in this jurisdiction.

So imagine my surprise when I ran across this story today:

A Jacksonville [Illinois] man who had his phone seized for recording an on-duty police officer is not likely to be charged under the state’s controversial [sic: should read "unconstitutional"] eavesdropping law. 

Morgan County [Illinois] State’s Attorney Robert Bonjean said Monday that he is not anticipating prosecuting an eavesdropping charge against Randy Newingham — at least not at this time.

For the public at large, this does not mean that recording on-duty officers will never be prosecuted in Morgan County.

“We’ll review those reports and we’ll continue to monitor the decision from the 7th Circuit court,” Bonjean said. “I don’t foresee myself making any blanket decision, just taking it on a case by case basis.”

Let's break down this lawless nonsense.

First, he says he'll "continue to monitor the decision from the 7th Circuit." What a bizarre statement. Is he continuing to monitor Brown v. Board as well? The case is over. O-vah. The law is unconstitutional. That means you don't get to prosecute people for violating it anymore.

Yet Mr. Bonjean says he doesn't foresee "making any blanket decision, just taking it on a case by case basis." Let me help you out, Mr. Bonjean: the 7th Circuit made the blanket decision for you. When a federal circuit court finds a state law unconstitutional, that ruling is—well, it's kind of like a magical blanket that gets put over the entire state, and that blanket makes the law in question unconstitutional everywhere it touches. So you just get to cozy up underneath the blanket and prosecute the other laws that haven't been found unconstitutional (yet).

Mr. Bonjean apparently doesn't understand how legal authority works in a common law system:

“Quite honestly, I haven’t made a decision,” Bonjean said. “Officially I’ve [indicated] to [Police Chief Tony Grootens] that I won’t file charges. But technically it’s a felony charge, so I have three years from the date of the offense to file a charge.”

Do you understand what happens when you prosecute someone for violating a "law" that has been found unconstitutional? That's called violating a person's civil rights. The Seventh Circuit's opinion is "clearly established law" that would make prosecuting Mr. Newingham illegal. You might want to brush up on this stuff, sir.

It gets worse, actually, when you read the comments of Tony Grootens, the Chief of Police of the department which made the false arrest:

Grootens said he believed that Newingham was sincerely ignorant of the law.

“Believe me, [the State’s Attorney’s Office is] busy enough,” Grootens said. “There’s more pressing things on their plate right now than to go with that. I already took care of it. … I told him not to be doing it. He honestly thought he was OK to do it, so now if he continues to do it, I can’t tell you that he certainly won’t be arrested.”

This final comment should probably be the motto of his police department, encircling the badge: "We can't tell you that you certainly won't be arrested." Even if your conduct has been specifically found to be protected under the First Amendment by the federal court of appeals whose rulings are law in this jurisdiction, they can't guarantee that you won't be arrested for committing a phony felony.