Inductivist

Folks should know some basic facts about criminals before applauding the Senate's vote for sweeping federal criminal justice reform.

One basic finding in criminology is that criminals are not specialists. They are opportunists who like to cut corners by stealing stuff, selling drugs, and using violence to get their way.  Serving a sentence for drug dealing in no way implies that the offender is simply a businessman who never steals or attacks people. He happens to be serving a sentence for a drug conviction, but next time it is almost as likely to be for a property crime or violence.

Also--criminals who are serving time in federal prison for a drug offense are not decent people who simply have a drug addiction problem. They are traffickers.  More than 90% of all felonies are plea bargained, so it is not uncommon for someone charged with trafficking to get it reduced to a lesser offense like possession in exchange for a guilty plea. The only druggies who are locked up in federal prison are people who commit other types of federal crimes--i.e., serious stuff.

Almost all ex-convicts recidivate.  A recent study that tracked former inmates for 10 years found that more than 80% were reconvicted and returned to prison, many within two or three years. And those were only the criminals who were caught.  Research shows that many offenders will commit dozens of crimes without ever being apprehended, and some criminals are more skilled at evading arrest and conviction than others.

All the evidence points to criminality being a life-long trait that is highly influenced by genes. Noticeably bad behavior emerges early in life, it becomes more obnoxious and dangerous when the boy (it's typically a boy) reaches adolescence; serious criminality peaks around age 20; and the criminal impulse weakens as a man ages into his 30s and beyond.  It follows testosterone levels over the life-course. (There is another pattern of rebellious adolescence which starts later, ends much earlier, and remains more superficial than what we see with the hard cases.)

And one of the only ways to stop the biologically-driven career criminal is to incapacitate him behind bars. 

And perhaps even dumber than setting hard cases free is to allow them conjugal visits, so we increase the rate of hard cases into the next generation.

I finally found some data on the question of the family size of people who have served time in prison. (Reader Mark Wethman e-mailed me about this a few weeks ago). I suspect that the hope is that ex-cons have fewer kids, so that America's current practice of mass incarceration has an unintended eugenic effect. 

The MIDUS Study asked people how many children they have, and if they have ever served time in prison. The problem is that researchers wanted to know how the number of biological, adopted, and step-children all added up. These days quite a few people have non-biological children, and I would expect ex-cons to have more because of greater relationship instability. Here are the means:

Mean number of children (sample size = 1,937, ages 45+)

Men
Served time 2.71
Did not 2.62

Women
Served time 2.79
Did not 2.70

Men and women who have been in prison have slightly higher means, but notice how the means are high for all groups. The numbers are inflated by non-biological children. I suspect that the means for ex-cons would drop more if we could pull out the stepkids, but there is little evidence here that prison reduces one's number of offspring.    

Studies show that blacks don't have markedly higher levels of testosterone than whites, but recent research suggests that they might be more sensitive to it.

A difference has been found in androgen receptors which vary in the their number of glutamines (an amino acid). The length of the glutamine chain is important in determining a person's sensitivity to testosterone. The shorter the chain, the more sensitive. 

Black men have shorter glutamine chains than white men, and this difference might help explain the higher rate of prostate cancer among blacks.

Having short chains is also linked to ADHD, conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder--disorders which are more prevalent among blacks (in symptoms, but not diagnosis).

These disorders strongly predict a lifecourse-persistent pattern of criminality, a pattern also seen more frequently in blacks compared to whites.        

Does getting arrested help or hurt your chances of getting laid? Is it really true that that girls are attracted to bad boys? The General Social Survey asked 168 men ages 18 to 30 if they were arrested in the past year, and they were also asked how many sex partners they had during the same time period. Here are the mean number of partners:


Mean number of sexual partners in the past year

Arrestees 3.04
Non-arrestees 1.67

No competition. The brutes flout the law and deflower the girls, and evidently the girls like it.