In New York City (2008-2013) most of the people arrested had 3.2 prior felony arrests and 5 prior misdemeanor arrests

From Misdemeanor Bail by  Alex Tabarrok.  

I am sensitive to how the judicial system can be disproportionately impactful on the poor and those of lesser cognitive capability and therefore we need some flexibility and capacity to not accidentally destroy people's lives.  On the other hand, the crime statistics are such that we clearly are not pursuing any sort of optimal charging or indicting process.  

In my comments at Brookings on bail I pointed out that:

In New York City (2008-2013) most of the people arrested had prior interactions with the criminal justice system. On average, each arrested person had 3.2 prior felony arrests and 5 prior misdemeanor arrests—convictions were considerably fewer than arrests, which suggests to me that the system isn’t convicting enough people. Interpretations may differ, but, in any case, the typical arrested person has been arrested multiple times previously.

…I think most Americans would be surprised and upset to learn that by far the majority of the arrestees are released prior to trial, 74% in total in NYC.

Moreover, the people who do not make bail are obviously not a random sample of arrestees—the people who do not make bail are on average more dangerous—they have twice as many arrests and twice as many convictions on average as those who are released. For example, the average defendant who doesn’t make bail has 6 previous felony arrests and 4 previous failures to appear.

These numbers are by no means unique to New York City. Across 34 states for which data could be collected, for example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the average person sent to state prison in 2014 had 10.3 previous arrests (median 8) and 4.3 previous convictions (median 3)!

(These are not including the arrest and conviction that sent them to jail so add one to get to the figures in Table 6.)

At Brookings I continued with the obvious, yet controversial:

What is going on here seems pretty obvious to me. There is a group of people whose job is a crime. Thus, being arrested is simply part of their job and so after being arrested and released these people go back to work—it’s almost laudatory—they keep working until finally an arrest results in a conviction and they spend some time behind bars.

As Tyler noted yesterday, The NYTimes has a piece on some of the extreme versions of this basic fact.

Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.

These, by the way, are just criminals who are repeatedly caught. The problem is much bigger:

…By the end of 2022, the theft of items valued at less than $1,000 had increased 53 percent since 2019 at major commercial locations, according to a new analysis of police data by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice…..Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.

The way bail reformers like to frame the issue of eliminating cash bail is to point to a misdemeanor case and say ‘look this ordinary person was denied bail because of a misdemeanor!’ In fact, what is going on is that judges are dealing with serial offenders–they are setting high bail rates for those who have already failed to appear on multiple previous misdemeanor charges. Eliminating cash bail for misdemeanors is one of those policies which sounds reasonable on its face but in practice it leads to shoplifters who have already been arrested 20 times being arrested and released again. The issue of “unaffordable bail” is also misleading. Judges set high bail amounts for a reason!

There is a bit more to the post and a lot more good discussion in the comments.