Middle Class Crime

Middle Class Prison Inmates Are Rare

There is a lot of data on the characteristics of offenders and nature of the offenses committed overall, and there is significant data on sentencing for felonies (sentencing data for misdemeanors and ordinance violations is much harder to come by).

One of the things that we know from that data is that having any college education, even attending a single semester at community college and then dropping out, profoundly reduces you odds of being a prison inmate relative to have no college education at all. Your odds of being a prison inmate are 40-fold or more lower.

Clearly, this is mostly a sorting effect. 

Your likelihood of being a prison inmate is highest if you don't graduate from high school and also don't earn a GED. 

The next highest likelihood of being a prison inmate is earning a GED (even though it takes a higher IQ to do so than it does to graduate from high school in the ordinary course), rather than graduating from high school and then not receiving any further higher education. This reflects the fact that people, especially men, drop out of high school not just because they are low in IQ and not succeeding in school for that reason. They also drop out because they have trouble behaving appropriately in a high school setting, which is highly connected to their likelihood of committing crimes and going to prison.

Graduating from high school in the ordinary course rather than earning a GED, and then not receiving any further higher education is the next highest likelihood of being a prison inmate, and is still quite high.

But, some college or more dramatically reduces your likelihood of being a prison inmate, and the number of prison inmates who are in that category is so small that the statistics often aren't broken down further into people who have only some college, people who have associate's degrees, people who have four year degrees, and people who have graduate or professional degrees beyond a four year undergraduate degree.

By comparison, in the general population:

In 2022, the highest level of education of the population age 25 and older in the United States ranged from less than high school to advanced degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree.

9% had less than a high school diploma or equivalent.

28% had high school as their highest level of school completed.

15% had completed some college but not a degree.

10% had an associate degree as their highest level of school completed.

23% had a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.

14% had completed advanced education such as a master’s degree, professional degree or doctorate. . . . 

In 2022, 30.1% of men age 25 and older had completed a high school diploma or GED as their highest level of educational attainment, compared with 27.0% of women age 25 and older.

In 2022, 39.0% of women age 25 and older, and 36.2% of men in the same age range, had completed a bachelor’s degree or more as their highest level of educational attainment. 

About 16% of adults have passed a GED exam. About half of people who pass the GED exam go on to have at least some college. So, about 8% of adults have a GED as their highest educational credential (roughly the same as the percentage of high school dropouts who haven't passed a GED exam). 

Both high school dropouts and people who have a GED exam as their highest educational credential are disproportionately men. In the case of the GED, this is, in part, because a large share of GED exams are taken high school dropouts who are in prison, and prison inmates are disproportionately men.

So, about 36% of men have at least a four year degree, 24% of men have some college but no degree or an associate's degree, about 20% of men graduated from high school in the ordinary course, 10% have a GED rather than a high school diploma and no college, and about 10% of men are high school dropouts who have not earned a GED.

The roughly 60% of men with at least some college have a dramatically reduced likelihood of going to prison. The 20% of men who are high school dropouts or only have a GED have a highly elevated likelihood of going to prison, and the 20% of men who graduate from high school but have no further high education have an intermediate likelihood of going to prison. On average, these men are in the bottom quarter of high school graduates academically (although a variety of other factors influence a decision not to pursue any higher education after graduating from high school).

One expects that among the 20% of men who graduate from high school but have no further education, men who are at the top of that group academically and behaviorally but didn't go to college because they had decent job prospects or went into the military or couldn't afford to go to college, probably have a likelihood of going to prison similar to that of people who drop out of college soon after starting college. But men who are the the bottom of that group academically and behaviorally probably have a likelihood of going to prison similar to but somewhat lower men who drop out of high school and then earn a GED but don't pursue further education. They are able to behave marginally well enough to meet the minimum requirements to graduate, and are not totally stupid.

So, the likelihood of going to prison is probably most elevated among men in the bottom 30% to 1/3rd of success in the formal education system, and are profoundly reduced among men who are more successful in the formal education system.

Operationally, however, since there is almost no data sorting high achieving and well-behaved high school graduates with no college, from low achieving and poorly behaved high school graduates with no college, we can define "middle class" inmates as inmates who have some college or more.

Questions That Are Hard To Answer

1. Some of the reason that middle class inmates are so rare is that middle class criminal defendants tend to have only minimal prior criminal records and are seen as having good prospects of rehabilitation. They also tend to have been legal representation in the court system, make good choices about when to accept plea bargains, take actions that judges view as mitigating circumstances, and behave in the way that sentencing judges want them to in the court process, relative to non-middle class criminal defendants. 

So, a middle class criminal defendant who commits the same crime as a non-middle class criminal defendant is more likely to receive probation, a fine, community service, time in a half-way house, or a jail sentence, than an ordinary prison sentence, especially for less severe crimes. Likewise, even if they receive a prison sentence, it is likely to be shorter than the sentence that a typical non-middle class criminal defendant would receive for the same crime.

2. Middle class criminal defendants probably tend to commit less serious crimes, when they are convicted of crimes. They tend not to commit "blue collar" property crimes that can send you to prison like car theft, burglary, or grand larceny of tangible personal property (as opposed to fraud or theft of intangible assets). They also probably tend to commit the same sorts of crimes that are disproportionately committed by women.

3. I suspect that middle class criminal defendant who actually go to prison have mostly either committed high dollar/drug volume non-violent crimes like fraud or drug dealing, or have committed serious violent crimes for which a prison sentence is really the only plausible sentence. But, I don't know that for a fact and I haven't seen good data on that point.

4. I don't know and would be interested to know how educational attainment beyond high school influences one's likelihood of being a prison inmate. I would suspect that the risk is reduced with greater educational attainment, but the data isn't there to show how significantly protective education beyond "some college" is in terms of likelihood of being a prison inmate.

4. The trio of serious substance abuse issues, serious mental health issues, and traumatic brain injury are pervasive in a huge share of all prison inmates. Middle class prison inmates are probably no exception. Indeed, these issues probably make up a bigger share of middle class prison inmates, since economic pressures on these inmates are usually more mild.

But notably, the protective effect of even some college is huge, despite the fact that the rates of serious substance abuse and serious mental health problems is very significant even among college educated people. Most likely, people with at least some college (overall, not just prison inmates) both have mental health and substance abuse problems that are sufficiently moderate that they can function well enough to finish high school and spend some time in college, and they are better at coming up with mental health treatment, substance abuse rehabilitation, and self-help programs to manage to live an at least moderately normal life despite these challenges, while the most severely impaired people have behavioral problems early enough that they can't finish high school and some college, and/or they can't figure out a self-help regime or access the mental health care system resources that they need.

Also, some mental health and substance abuse problems have a relatively late onset. 

Susceptibility to substance abuse has a very strong genetic component. But people who grew up in strict families, or avoided substances after seeing how it affected other family members, may not have had access to substances that they can abuse, or strictly avoided substances that they can abuse, until they are in or have graduated from college.

Most mental health conditions are genetic or congenital. And, most of them, like ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, psychopathy, anxiety disorders, and OCD typically manifest before you finish high school, so people with particularly severe cases of these conditions that aren't treated adequately either don't graduate from high school for behavioral reasons or just barely scrape by at that time. Most of them, except clinical levels of autism spectrum disorder and psychopathy are quite common. Substance abuse, ADHD (as a result of high levels of impulsivity and impairments to working and being a student at regular jobs), and psychopathy seem to have the strongest association with criminal conduct that can send you to prison. Other mental health conditions, while also common, seem much less likely to be associated with criminal activity.

But psychosis (i.e. manic-depression and schizophrenia) tends to manifest in late adolescence or in one's 20s as your neural connections thin out in the brain transition from childhood to adulthood. It tends to emerge a little later in men than in women because their brains mature a little bit later than women. Psychosis is rare but devastating in its effect on your ability to function. Psychoses are also among the most heavily genetic mental health conditions.  Even if early mild symptoms of psychosis manifest in late high school or college, these way be manageable until a few years later. (As an aside, one thing that is almost a litmus test for schizophrenia is heavy nicotine use, which despite its other harmful health effects, provides some limited relief from schizophrenia symptoms. A very large percentage of schizophrenics who have access to nicotine, legally or illicitly, use it.) 

M.S. typically manifests at ages similar to psychosis but has a viral cause, and its neurodegenerative symptoms can mirror major mental health issues and gets worse over time since it is degenerative. Further, traumatic brain injury, major depression (apart from manic depression) and PTSD are predominantly not genetic or congenital and can manifest at any age. Finally, some forms of dementia, whose symptoms are often only unmistakable in late life, and stokes (including TIAs) can also give rise to symptoms similar to major mental health issues.

These mental and cognitive health conditions that manifest after one typically starts college probably disproportionately impact middle class inmates, since these impairments do not interfere with behavior until these key educational landmarks are reached.