Those numbers are significantly worse than I expected them to be: one percent recommit murder, 22 percent recommit violent crime, and 51 percent get arrested for criming again. The numbers are even worse for people incarcerated for violent crime. Needless to say even the one percent that do another murder are killing at a rate exponentially higher than the rest of the population (something like .001 percent of American adults commit a murder). All in all, this website confirms my firm belief that murderers are in general anti-social, have poor impulse control, and that there is little benefit to allowing them to roam free.
I’m not sure what number I would find acceptable but if 51 percent of murderers we let out get arrested again within five years I am very comfortable saying that we let too many murderers out of prison.
There is also where we distribute the risk and benefits. If we let a murderer (or really any violent criminal) out of jail, that person stands to gain a lot, perhaps a few people close to him benefit. The rest of us gain at best nothing but stand to lose quite a bit. On the flip side, the rest of us don’t suffer much harm at all aside from taxes if we keep a violent criminal locked away and in fact stand to gain quite a bit. I am not particularly interested in something where the benefits primarily accrue to convicted criminals and the risks and negatives all fall on non-criminals. I feel the same way about white-collar crime and fraudsters, I think people who do that are inherently untrustworthy and predatory and should not get a second chance to fraud people again.
For what its worth, I do think jails in America are completely inhumane and that drives a lot of the discussion. I strongly support safe, clean, even enriching places to stash criminals away from everyone else where we don’t have to think about them.