Baltimore arrests and jails more of its citizens than nearly any other American city, but does putting so many people behind bars really make us safer?
Not according to a recent report suggesting that there's at best only a only a tenuous relationship between crime rates and how many people police and prosecutors send to the slammer. It's possible, the authors say, to significantly reduce the inmate population in city jails without increasing the risk to public safety.
The report by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based group that advocates for alternatives to incarceration, says the city's jails are full of low-risk, nonviolent offenders who could be better dealt with through treatment programs and supervised probation at far less cost to the city and state.
Jailing thousands of people every year for minor offenses such as driving on a suspended license, shoplifting, disorderly conduct and marijuana possession is actually counterproductive, the report argues, because it diverts resources away from the most violent offenders and because the negative impact it has on inmates, their families and communities outweighs any social benefit the city gets from keeping them locked up.
As The Sun's Peter Hermann reported last week, Baltimore's jail population has been declining steadily in recent years, as have the number of people arrested. Yet over the same period crime rates have also fallen.
How can that be? The combination of falling crime rates, fewer arrests and a declining inmate population may seem counterintuitive if one assumes that the more criminals police put away, the fewer criminals will be left to commit crimes.
In fact, however, most serious crime is committed by a relatively small number of violent career offenders. By focusing on them, rather than on misdemeanor nuisance crimes and minor drug offenses, police and prosecutors can bring down crimes rates for the kinds of offenses that most concern the public while actually reducing the overall number of people who are arrested and jailed.
That explains why Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III has been so successful in reducing violent crime in the city over the last few years despite the fact that his officers are arresting and jailing vastly fewer people than they did just a few years ago.
Mr. Bealefeld abandoned the "zero-tolerance" policy of his predecessors, which required officers to arrest anyone who committed the most minor offense, and switched to an emphasis on nabbing "bad guys with guns" — getting the most violent offenders off the streets and confiscating illegal weapons.
The numbers show how well the strategy worked. In 2006, for example, city police made more than 108,000 arrests, so many that judges had to free thousands of inmates because they couldn't get court hearings within the 24 hours required by law. Yet Baltimore still had 269 homicides that year.
By contrast, police made only 77,595 arrests in 2009 — more than 30,000 fewer than three years earlier. Yet the number of murders fell more than 11 percent, allowing the city to end that year with only 238 homicides.
The JPI study found that although Baltimore has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, more than a quarter of the city's approximately 4,000 jail inmates at any given time during 2008 were classified as low-risk, nonviolent offenders who could have been released under appropriate supervision without posing a threat to public safety.
The institute calculated it would cost the city about $2.50 per day to keep tabs on a released suspect, compared to $100 per day for each inmate held in the Baltimore City Detention Center and $159 a day for those at the Central Booking and Intake Facility.
The report recommends police substitute citations for arrests in most nonviolent cases and calls on prosecutors and judges to be more willing to release low-risk individuals on their own recognizance rather than requiring cash bail, which disproportionately affects indigent defendants. It also recommends providing drug treatment, counseling and housing assistance to help released inmates transition back into their communities and reduce recidivism.
To their credit, Baltimore officials are already working to implement several of these ideas. Mr. Bealefeld is continuing to focus on violent offenders and illegal guns, while the city has established diversionary drug treatment programs for youthful offenders. There are practical, effective alternatives to simply locking people up and throwing away the key, and Baltimore should take advantage of as many of them as possible.