Marginal Revolution: Prison fact of the day

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Prison fact of the day

Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68

Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75

Percentage today who are in prisons: 97

That is from Harper's Index, April 2007 issue.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 20, 2007 at 02:04 PM in Data Source | Permalink

Comments

Wow. Seems like there's a certain percentage of folks that just go haywire. Wonder if the response will eventually change the statistic (I suspect not), or if it just plain doesn't matter what "treatment" option we use. What a horror all the way around. Any statistics on what proportion of this approximately .7 percent are long term or have been re-institutionalized into prisons or mental hospitals?

Posted by: anne at Mar 20, 2007 2:18:47 PM

Frontline had a great episode on this last year.

I volunteer pretty actively with a program that sends books to prisoners (email me if you want to help out) and we get a lot of letters from some very sick people.

Posted by: LB at Mar 20, 2007 2:38:11 PM

Is there any distinction made between the number of people in mental institutions in the 50s who were there voluntarily and those who were compelled to be there?

Posted by: John Payne at Mar 20, 2007 2:57:53 PM

Reason for the increase in prison population: The War on Drugs.

Posted by: Christopher Monnier at Mar 20, 2007 3:05:27 PM

Wow is right. Although following Christopher Monnier's comment, I'd venture to guess that the "incarceration" rate means something quite different today.

does the "institutionalization" rate of yore include only "mental hospital" commitments/incarcerations or does it include the variety of "institutionalized" people of yore that now are often "mainstreamed"?

Here's a link to a slightly dated Christian Science Monitor article on comparative incarceration rates. One in 37 adults in prison as of 2003, highest rate in the world. Here's another link, to an Olin Working Paper on "From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution" that looks interesting.

from the abstract of the latter:
"When the data on mental hospitalization are combined with the data on imprisonment for the period 1928 through 2000, the incarceration revolution of the late twentieth century barely reaches the level of institutionalization that the United States experienced at mid-century. The highest rate of aggregated institutionalization during the entire century occurred in 1955 when almost 640 persons per 100,000 adults over the age 15 were institutionalized in asylums, mental hospitals, and state and federal prisons. In addition, the trend line for aggregated institutionalization reflects a mirror image of the national homicide rate during the same period. Using a Prais-Winsten regression model that corrects for autocorrelation in time-series data, and holding constant three leading structural covariates of homicide, this paper finds a large, statistically significant, and robust relationship between aggregated institutionalization and homicide. "

Posted by: brianS at Mar 20, 2007 3:30:51 PM

Here's a link to the PDF of the Harcourt paper I referenced above.

Posted by: brianS at Mar 20, 2007 3:40:01 PM

I, for one, am proud of the strides society in improving the mental health of its population and increasing the efficiency of its criminal justice system!

Posted by: mobile at Mar 20, 2007 4:22:58 PM

As to the war on drugs, how many inmates were in prison for drug crimes in 1953? It certainly wasn't zero. The "War on Drugs" didn't start in the Sixties. More like the Thirties, right after Prohibition ended. Coincidentally. And similarly, how many inmates today who are incarcerated for drug crimes also have a long history of violence?

Certainly drug crimes in themselves do not justify incarceration. But many nut-cases do not need to be locked up in nut houses, either, as they indubitably were in 1953. Perhaps each era has its own form of unnecessary incarceration.

Posted by: Robert Speirs at Mar 20, 2007 4:27:05 PM

Drugs I: War on Drugs puts people in prison.

Drugs II: Drugs sold by pharmacists keep people out of asylums.

Posted by: Brant at Mar 20, 2007 4:35:03 PM

What a misleading statistic.

As Christopher Monnier states, "Reason for the increase in prison population: The War on Drugs."

And, in the 50's, we institutionalized people for homosexuality and autism, never mind conditions that are almost always treated by outpatient psychiatry these days.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg at Mar 20, 2007 4:36:21 PM

Not only that, but some of the people who would have been institutionalized in 1953 are on the streets now. What would the statistics look like if the homeless were included as a category? The 0.67-0.68 match is just a coincidence.

Posted by: KCinDC at Mar 20, 2007 5:50:51 PM

God bless Peter Breggin.

Posted by: dave meleney at Mar 20, 2007 8:06:40 PM

Could many of the people in mental hospitals in the 1950's actually have been elderly people with dementia? Today most people like that are in nursing homes, but IINM nursing homes weren't too common before the 1960's.

Posted by: Peter at Mar 20, 2007 9:50:05 PM

the Panopticon will not be denied.

Posted by: michel f. at Mar 20, 2007 11:30:10 PM

Could it be that the advances in medicine that decreased the number of people in mental institutions made resources avalible to lock up the next most irritating segment of the population? If a drug were developed that cures drug addiction would the prison population decrease or would more behaviors be defined as serious crimes meriting long prison terms?

Posted by: joan at Mar 21, 2007 12:15:34 AM

America became more focused on personal liberty in the 1960s, so we stopped locking up most crazy people. Unfortunately, the new ethos of do-your-own-thing liberty also led to a huge growth in the crime rate (e.g., a doubling in the murder rate between 1963 and 1975), which eventually led to a gigantic increase in incarceration of criminals from about 1979 onward.

I created a Crime Misery Index graph (on the precedent of the Economic Misery Index summing inflation and unemployment) aggregating the murder and imprisonment rates since the 1920s. You can see it at:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/introducing-crime-misery-index.html

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 21, 2007 2:32:18 AM

BrianS: thanks for the interesting post.

Posted by: jult52 at Mar 21, 2007 9:27:47 AM

joan:

That model says that the society basically decides what fraction of people will be locked up, and then chooses them according to whatever rules are currently in vogue.

This seems right short-term (institutions and prisons don't change all that quickly), but we'd need more datapoints to determine about long-term rules. One argument against that is that it seems like as we learn to treat things that make you dangerous, or to ignore stuff like homosexuality that's no threat to anyone, we ought to see our society getting safer and less encumbered by criminals and nuts, since we'll be locking up more of the dangerous people with asylum space freed up by putting most of the previous inhabitants on antipsychotics or antidepressants or whatever.

Posted by: albatross at Mar 21, 2007 9:40:18 AM

Interesting thoughts, Steve Sailer. However, I think one should be careful about general claims of fundamental changes in social mores that happen to coincide with changes in the age distribution of the adult population.

The arrival of the front end of the baby boom into adulthood correlates pretty well with the "Summer of Love," the anti-war movement and the rise in the homicide rate.

The US homicide rate was relatively low during 1940-1964. Early in this period, a relatively large share of young males in the US were in military uniform, a close neighbor to being "institutionalized". Then they came home to make babies in an era of significant out-migration from rural areas into urban ones as agriculture became increasingly mechanized.

Another, somewhat tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the data Harcourt presents in his Figure 2 is an "institutional" one. Namely, during periods of unified Democratic party control of the national government (1933-46, 1949-52, 1961-68, 1977-80, 1993-94), homicide rates are lower or declining than under divided government (1931-32, 1947-48, 1969-76, 1981-92, 1995-2000) or unified Republican party control (1928-30). [I'm using a highly sophisticated, interocular pressure test here]

Posted by: brianS at Mar 21, 2007 12:11:23 PM

whoops. Should have included under "divided government" the 1955-60 period and under "unified Republican" 1953-54(? I think. I always forget on that one)

Posted by: brianS at Mar 21, 2007 12:15:14 PM

I'm not sure what Tyler intends by presenting this data, but if his implication is the obvious one, that we have moved people from mental institutions to prison, that would be pretty irresponsible. The data presented doesn't prove anything.

Posted by: mpowell at Mar 22, 2007 4:56:33 PM

There is indeed a negative partial correlation between mental hospialization rates and incarceration rates in state level panel data, but the size of the effect suggests that no more than 5 to 15 percent of the increase in incarceration can be attributable to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. (these results ar available in a working paper on my website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~raphael/raphael2000.pdf).

Moreover, there are compositional problems with the argument that the growth in incarceration is driven mostly by declines in mental hospitalization rates. For example, respondents in the 1950 and 1960 census (the peak of the mental hospital inpatient population) who are coded as residing in mental hospitals are nearly half female and minorities are only slightly over-respresented. This compares with a prison population that is overwhelmingly male (nearly 90 percent) and where minorities are heavily over-represented. A fair chunk of the decline in the mental hospital population occurs among demographic groups for whom we don't observe a large increase in incarceration rates through the end of the 20th century (white women for example).

Furthermore, the increase in incarceration rates for black men between 1980 and 2000 far exceeds their mental hospital institutionalization rate in 1980, suggesting that the increase in incarceration is driven largely by other factors.

My colleague Michael Stoll and I have tried to empirically decompose the increase in incarceration rates over the last few decades and have a section on the effect of deinstitutionalization. The working paper can be found at http://npc.umich.edu/publications/u/working_paper07-10.pdf. It should be noted that while desintitutionalization explains a relatively small portion of the increase in overall incarceration rates, it potentially explain a much larger portion of the increased numbers of mentally ill behind bars.

There is also a nice paper by Alfred Blumstein and Nathaniel Beck published in volume 26 of the journal Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, edited by Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia, that investigates the separate effects of sentencing and behavioral determinants of incarceration growth

Posted by: Steven Raphael at Mar 29, 2007 12:38:18 PM

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