"Reconsidering The 'Violent Offender'"

In this post from last fall, I noted the new Square One Project working to "reimagine justice" and conducting executive sessions and roundtables on the future of justice policy.  In that post, I noted some early draft of interesting papers from the project (which linked here in final form), and I just recently saw a new paper with the title that serves as the title of this post.  This new paper is authored by James Austin, Vincent Schiraldi, Bruce Western and Anamika Dwivedi, and here is part of its starting text:

People convicted of violent crimes have always been treated harshly by the criminal justice system, but in the four decades of rising incarceration rates from the early 1970s, punishment of the violent offender intensified disproportionately. Under President Bill Clinton, bipartisan consensus cemented the 1994 federal crime bill, enacting stricter sentencing laws for violent offenses at the federal level and incentivizing the same in the states.

Two decades later, even as President Barack Obama called for a reexamination of U.S. sentencing laws in 2015, he noted, “there are people who need to be in prison, and I don’t have tolerance for violent criminals” (C-SPAN 2015).  That same year, a Washington Times opinion piece by Newt Gingrich described criminal justice reform as a “rare area of bipartisan agreement in an otherwise sharply divided Congress,” but added, “we all agree that violent, dangerous criminals should be in prison, and the cost of incarcerating them is money well spent” (Gingrich and Nolan 2015).  Following suit, in 2017, Senator Kamala Harris, a self-identified “progressive” prosecutor stated that “we must maintain a relentless focus on reducing violence and aggressively prosecuting violent criminals” (Marcetic 2017).

Demonizing people as violent has perpetuated policies rooted in fear rather than fact. In this paper, we break from the tradition of punitiveness toward people convicted of violent offenses and argue that the violent offender label breaches the principle of parsimony, distorts proportionality, and fails as a predictive tool for future violent behavior. The label disproportionately affects people of color — black and Hispanic people comprise larger shares of people incarcerated for violent offenses in state prisons than white people (Bronson and Carson 2019).  In short, the violent offender label offers little to criminal justice policy.  Instead, justice policy should focus on those who actually commit violence, mitigate responses based on the experience of violent victimization, and discount the violent offender label as predictive of future violence.

Convincing policymakers and the public to change the approach to people charged with or convicted of violent offenses will require active education around the truths of violent offending alongside a significant cultural change. Affirming well-established criminal justice principles of parsimony and proportionality should take priority over a politics of fear.

We begin by detailing the social context and life histories that surround violent offending, and argue the case for parsimonious use of punishment.  While more serious and violent offenses may merit a proportionally greater response, the principle of parsimony reminds us that the punishment for violent offending should be the least coercive response necessary to achieve justice (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014).  When we account for the life histories of victimization among incarcerated people, and the situational character of the violence in their lives, the principle of parsimony must admit mercy and forbearance.