conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'Thinking About Crime'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.. Start with the sentence 'Thinking About Crime
  About the time the Shinnars published this argument, other scholars were appearing in print with estimates of the individual offense rate that were much lower than ten'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Thinking About Crime
  About the time the Shinnars published this argument, other scholars were appearing in print with estimates of the individual offense rate that were much lower than ten. David Greenberg, using various methods, estimated that the average offender commits something on the order of two serious* offenses per year. Based on this estimate, Greenberg concluded that if society were to increase the length of the average prison sentence by one year (it is now two years), we would cut the rate of serious crime by only about 4 percent. Stevens Clarke undertook to calculate the incapacitative effect of prison on juvenile offenders (Greenberg had been concerned with adults) and decided that, at least in Philadelphia, the proportion of all serious crimes averted by the present sentences given to young offenders was no more than 4 percent. Stephan Van Dine and his colleagues at the Academy for Contemporary Problems made an estimate of the crime-reduction effects of imposing a five-year prison term on all persons convicted of a felony in one county in Ohio, and concluded that this stringent policy would reduce violent crime by only 4 percent. Since so many different critics were arriving at similar low estimates of what incapacitation might produce, many persons began questioning the large crime-reduction effects claimed by the Shinnars.
  At this point, the matter was taken up by a panel of experts appointed by the National Research Council (a part of the National Academy of Sciences), the same panel that analyzed the academic controversy over deterrence described in chapter 7. Jacqueline Cohen of Carnegie-Mellon University prepared, at the invitation of the panel, a careful analysis of the competing claims of various scholars. She concluded that Greenberg and Clarke both "underestimate the individual crime rate." Reexamining Clarke's data under more reasonable assumptions, Cohen decided that the proportion of serious crimes averted by present imprisonment rates for juveniles was two to three times larger than that estimated by Clarke and, by implication, the number of crimes that could be prevented by increasing the use of prison would also be much higher. Similarly, Greenberg made some questionable assumptions, as well as an error in his calculations, that rendered his estimates of dubious value, but there was no easy way to revise his calculations to provide a better estimate.
  Though the panel did not deal with the Van Dine estimates, other scholars did. Three separate articles were published pointing to a fundamental error in the Van Dine calculations. In their rejoinder, the Van Dine group, in effect, conceded the correctness of the criticism and in subsequent published work revised their estimate of the incapacitation effect upward. What they had originally done was to assume that the persons arrested in Ohio had committed only the crimes for which they were charged and that the only additional crimes that would be averted by sending them away to prison for long terms would have been those other crimes for which they had previously been arrested. They assumed, in short, that these offenders never committed any crimes that did not lead to an arrest. Since this was obviously untrue, their original, very low estimate of the crime-reduction effect of incapacitation had to be in error.
  Cohen and the panel concluded in 1978 that the most important research task confronting persons interested in incapacitation was to obtain better estimates of individual offense rates. A major step in that direction was taken the following year with the publication of a new estimate, the most sophisticated to date, of those rates. Working with individual adult criminal records of all those persons arrested in Washington, D.C., during 1973 for any one of six major crimes (over five thousand persons in all), Alfred Blumstein and Jacqueline Cohen suggested that the individual offense rate varied significantly for different kinds of offenders. For example, it was highest for larceny and lowest for aggravated assault. But they also found, as had other scholars before them, that there was not a great deal of specialization among criminals—a person arrested today for robbery might be arrested next time for burglary. The major contribution of their study was the ingenious method they developed for converting the number of times persons were arrested into an estimate of the number of crimes they actually committed, a method that took into account the fact that many crimes are not reported to the police, that most crimes known to the police do not result in an arrest, and that some crimes are likely to be committed by groups of persons rather than by single offenders. Combining all the individual crime rates, the offenders in this study (a group of adults who had been arrested at least twice in Washington, D.C.) committed between nine and seventeen serious offenses per year free.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The assumption that law enforcement has no influence on the size of the addict population but does have an effect on the price of heroin (and thus on crime committed to meet that higher price) rests chiefly on the evidence that the majority of known addicts have been arrested at least once; that during his life expectancy, any addict is virtually certain to be arrested; and that, despite this, the addict returns to his habit and to the criminal life needed to sustain it. These facts are essentially correct. The difficulty lies in equating "law enforcement" with "arrest."
  Thousands of addicts are arrested every year; a very large proportion are simply returned to the street—by the police, who wish to use them as informants, or by judges who wish to place them on probation or under suspended sentences because they believe (rightly) that a prison term will not cause their cure or rehabilitation. Only a few addicts are singled out for very severe punishment. We do not know for how many addicts arrest is simply a revolving door. In Boston, however, David Wheat did a careful study of the relationship between the level of law enforcement, defined as the "expected costs" of an arrest to the user, and the number of addicts in the city. By "expected costs," Wheat meant the probability of being arrested multiplied by the probability of being sentenced to prison and the length of the average prison sentence. Though his numerical estimates were complex and open to criticism, the general relationship between the number of heroin users and the expected "costs" to the addict of law enforcement was quite striking—the "costs" declined sharply between 1961 and 1970, while the estimated number of addicts in Boston increased about tenfold. Furthermore, the largest increases in the number of addicts tended to follow years in which the certainty and severity of law enforcement were the lowest.
  More specifically: (1) from 1961 to 1965, the estimated proportion of users arrested by the police declined (it started to increase again in 1966); (2) the chances that an arrested user would be sentenced to jail declined from better than one in two in 1960 to only one in ten in 1970; and (3) the length of the average sentence imposed fell from about twenty-three months in 1961 to fewer than fifteen months in 1969, though there were some intervening ups and downs. By 1970, the chance of a heroin addict being sent to jail during any given year was rather remote. We do not know whether similar changes occurred in other cities, though given the cause of the changes—the growing (and erroneous) view among legislators and judges that addicts should be referred to psychiatrists for (nonexistent) "help"—we suspect that many cities, influenced by the same sentiments, may have experienced the same changes. In Chicago, for example, Hughes and his colleagues have shown that the number of arrests of addicts, and the average sentence given to those convicted, rose dramatically during or just after the heroin epidemic of 1947–1950, but by 1955 the length of sentence had begun to fall again, and by 1960 it was almost down to the prewar level.
  If there is a relationship between law enforcement and heroin use, it may result from one or both of two processes. An increase in legal penalties may deter the novice user from further use, or it may deter the confirmed addict-dealer (or if he is jailed, prevent him entirely) from selling to a potential user. Lessening the "costs" of the penalty may either embolden the novice users and potential users, or improve their access to a supplier, or both.
  There is some clinical evidence that both processes are in fact at work. Robert Schasre's study of forty Mexican-American heroin users who had stopped shooting heroin revealed that over half (twenty-two) did so involuntarily after they had lost their source of supply (their dealer had been arrested or had lost his source, or the user himself had moved to another community where he could find no dealer). Of the remaining eighteen who stopped "voluntarily," most did so in response to some social or institutional pressure; in a third of these cases, that pressure was having been arrested or having a friend who was arrested on a narcotics charge.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Of the remaining eighteen who stopped "voluntarily," most did so in response to some social or institutional pressure; in a third of these cases, that pressure was having been arrested or having a friend who was arrested on a narcotics charge.. Robert Schasre's study of forty Mexican-American heroin users who had stopped shooting heroin revealed that over half (twenty-two) did so involuntarily after they had lost their source of supply (their dealer had been arrested or had lost his source, or the user himself had moved to another community where he could find no dealer).
  There is some clinical evidence that both processes are in fact at work. Lessening the "costs" of the penalty may either embolden the novice users and potential users, or improve their access to a supplier, or both. An increase in legal penalties may deter the novice user from further use, or it may deter the confirmed addict-dealer (or if he is jailed, prevent him entirely) from selling to a potential user.
  If there is a relationship between law enforcement and heroin use, it may result from one or both of two processes. In Chicago, for example, Hughes and his colleagues have shown that the number of arrests of addicts, and the average sentence given to those convicted, rose dramatically during or just after the heroin epidemic of 1947–1950, but by 1955 the length of sentence had begun to fall again, and by 1960 it was almost down to the prewar level. We do not know whether similar changes occurred in other cities, though given the cause of the changes—the growing (and erroneous) view among legislators and judges that addicts should be referred to psychiatrists for (nonexistent) "help"—we suspect that many cities, influenced by the same sentiments, may have experienced the same changes. By 1970, the chance of a heroin addict being sent to jail during any given year was rather remote.
  More specifically: (1) from 1961 to 1965, the estimated proportion of users arrested by the police declined (it started to increase again in 1966); (2) the chances that an arrested user would be sentenced to jail declined from better than one in two in 1960 to only one in ten in 1970; and (3) the length of the average sentence imposed fell from about twenty-three months in 1961 to fewer than fifteen months in 1969, though there were some intervening ups and downs. Furthermore, the largest increases in the number of addicts tended to follow years in which the certainty and severity of law enforcement were the lowest. Though his numerical estimates were complex and open to criticism, the general relationship between the number of heroin users and the expected "costs" to the addict of law enforcement was quite striking—the "costs" declined sharply between 1961 and 1970, while the estimated number of addicts in Boston increased about tenfold. By "expected costs," Wheat meant the probability of being arrested multiplied by the probability of being sentenced to prison and the length of the average prison sentence. In Boston, however, David Wheat did a careful study of the relationship between the level of law enforcement, defined as the "expected costs" of an arrest to the user, and the number of addicts in the city. We do not know for how many addicts arrest is simply a revolving door. Only a few addicts are singled out for very severe punishment."
  Thousands of addicts are arrested every year; a very large proportion are simply returned to the street—by the police, who wish to use them as informants, or by judges who wish to place them on probation or under suspended sentences because they believe (rightly) that a prison term will not cause their cure or rehabilitation. The difficulty lies in equating "law enforcement" with "arrest. These facts are essentially correct.The assumption that law enforcement has no influence on the size of the addict population but does have an effect on the price of heroin (and thus on crime committed to meet that higher price) rests chiefly on the evidence that the majority of known addicts have been arrested at least once; that during his life expectancy, any addict is virtually certain to be arrested; and that, despite this, the addict returns to his habit and to the criminal life needed to sustain it
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: To reduce the black-market traffic in guns, the police should consider mounting more undercover "buy and bust" operations (much as they now do with respect to heroin and dangerous drugs) in order to make illegal gun dealers wary of dealing with strangers, to raise the price and difficulty of acquiring illegal guns (perhaps beyond the point that opportunistic, teenage robbers will find it worthwhile) and to deter some people from going into the illegal gun business at all.
  To inhibit the carrying of handguns, the police should become more aggressive in stopping suspicious people and, where they have reasonable grounds for their suspicions, frisking (that is, patting down) those stopped to obtain guns. Hand-held magnetometers, of the sort used by airport security guards, might make the street frisks easier and less intrusive. All this can probably be done without changing the law.
  The Bartley-Fox law in Massachusetts requires a mandatory one-year jail sentence for any unlicensed person who carries a firearm. It was opposed by those who said the law would not be enforced and by those who said it would not have the desired effect. As we saw in chapter 7, both criticisms appear to have been wrong—the criminal justice system did not engage in wholesale evasions of the requirements of the law, and the three studies that have been done of its effect all point to some decline in the proportion of the assaults that were committed with firearms. Assaults as a whole increased; firearm assaults decreased. The effect of Bartley-Fox might have been even greater if the police had been more aggressive in enforcing it (or less if it had not been so heavily publicized).
  Note what I am suggesting: not "gun control" in any comprehensive sense, but rather increased pressure on the particular circumstances and people whose illegal behavior is most likely to be affected by the availability of a gun. Note also that to do these things requires action chiefly by state and local, not federal, agencies. Bear in mind that motivating police and prosecutors to act in these ways is not easy. And note finally that real progress in reducing gun violence almost certainly requires methods—aggressive patrolling, undercover operations, tougher sentences—that liberals instinctively dislike. I think, however, there is no way around these tough choices, and it is time we face up to them.