Sentencing Data are Clear as Mud

Piece Authored By: Erin Bendily, Ph.D.

Around 100 bills were filed in Louisiana’s 2023 Regular Legislative Session and assigned to the various committees on criminal justice. While the subjects of those bills run the gamut, the vast majority of them relate to various aspects of sentencing.

The hodgepodge of sentencing laws in Louisiana prevents standard sentencing and equal treatment regardless of the jurisdiction in which the offense took place. This creates disparate outcomes and customization of sentencing, which hinders research into the effectiveness of longer sentences and their effect on violent crime and recidivism.

No doubt, lawmakers are responding to requests from their constituents to address rising crime. But are targeted sentencing enhancements or wholesale changes to sentencing calculations the way to do it?

Well, it’s not clear.

A review of available literature – and there’s a lot of it – suggests no real consensus among academics who have studied the issue. There is a great deal of writing on the issue, mostly by advocates. But, the academic and truly data-focused research studies are inconclusive, at best. Most conclude no relationship between longer sentences and reductions in either crime or recidivism, especially for crimes at the shorter end. (Which makes sense: geriatric rates of recidivism are incredibly low.)

The conclusions of two larger recent studies are instructive.

A 2022 report by the Council on Criminal Justice concludes:

“The relationship between long prison sentences and public safety is complex. Although long prison sentences may be warranted in individual cases based on one or more of the varied purposes of sentencing, the imposition of such sentences on a large scale offers diminishing returns for public safety. Research consistently shows that a relatively small percentage of individuals are responsible for an outsized share of crime in their communities. But attempts to use long sentences to selectively incapacitate this population have been unable to overcome competing factors like the “replacement effect,” where the incarceration of one person leads to another individual taking their place, and the “age-crime curve,” the criminological fact that offending typically decreases with age.”

And, a 2014 government report published by National Academies Press found:

“Specifically, the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best. Also, because recidivism rates decline markedly with age and prisoners necessarily age as they serve their prison sentence, lengthy prison sentences are an inefficient approach to preventing crime by incapacitation unless they are specifically targeted at very high-rate or extremely dangerous offenders. For these reasons, statutes mandating lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on the basis of their effectiveness in preventing crime.”

What should be done with this? Well, we should be skeptical of promises made by supporters of increased sentences or sentencing enhancements for reductions in crime or recidivism. There’s not much in the way of data to support those claims.

Further, these findings suggest much more should be done with public safety data. Instead, it seems, the data are getting less accessible, not more. Tools like Recidiviz are helping states make the most of the data available to them, and public policy should mandate more transparency to available data.

Amid all the debate, two things are clear:

First, voters are concerned about crime. Poll after poll show pluralities of voters list this issue above others as they weigh their decisions in the voting booth this fall. It’s up to our state’s leaders to make wise decisions based on available information and experiences in other places, not just follow the heated rhetoric of the moment. Voters deserve this, and our communities will be safer if they do.

Second, Louisiana’s sentencing laws are a mess. It’s time for a more holistic approach to reform of the state’s sentencing laws. The Pelican Institute and Smart on Crime Louisiana are launching a deep dive study into the tangle of laws that make up Louisiana’s sentencing statutes and will recommend a broad-based, consistent, proven set of policies to address this problem. Holistic reform is nearly always better than piecemeal, and especially in this case.

Lives and safety are on the line – it’s worth getting this right.