Miles, Thomas J. --- "Criminal Procedure: Empirical Analysis" [2012] ELECD 94; in Sanchirico, William Chris (ed), "Procedural Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Procedural Law and Economics

Editor(s): Sanchirico, William Chris

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847208248

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Criminal Procedure: Empirical Analysis

Author(s): Miles, Thomas J.

Number of pages: 29

Extract:

6 Criminal procedure: empirical analysis
Thomas J. Miles


1. Introduction
The criminal justice system in the United States has two prominent fea-
tures. The first is that the system is enormous. A common measure of its
size is the number of persons currently subject to criminal punishment. For
example, in 2007, US prisons and jails held nearly 2.3 million people, and
another 5 million were on probation or parole (Bureau of Justice Statistics
2007). But, this stock of punished persons underestimates the number of
people who flow through the preliminary stages of the criminal justice
system. For example, in 2003 police made more than 13.7 million arrests
(Bureau of Justice Statistics 2003), and although an exact figure is not
known, the number of people stopped and questioned by police is surely a
multiple of arrests.1 The second important fact about the American crimi-
nal justice system is its sharp racial disparities. For example, nearly 20% of
black men born between 1965 and 1969 served time in prison by their early
thirties, compared to only 3% of whites (Pettit and Western 2004).
The stunning magnitudes of these figures raise difficult questions about
what determines how much punishment the criminal justice system deliv-
ers, to whom the system metes it out, and whether these choices are the
right ones. Regarding the positive questions of the aggregate amount of
punishment and its distribution, the content of substantive criminal law
and the level of funding for enforcement are surely crucial factors. ...