Against Municipal Courts In Colorado

The Denver Post has an article highlighting the problems of having municipal courts not of record incarcerate people who aren't represented by lawyers with no record of the proceedings, and notes that a bill this session seeks to change that. The bill is HB26-1134:

Fairness & Transparency in Municipal Court: Concerning measures to ensure that municipal court defendants are subject to conditions similar to state court defendants.

The bill clarifies that municipal court defendants have a right to counsel and that municipal defense counsel have the same notice, case information, and opportunity to meet with their clients as do state-level defense counsel. Current law prohibits paying indigent municipal defense counsel on a fixed or flat-fee payment structure if the municipality prosecutes domestic violence cases. The bill applies the prohibition to all municipalities.

All municipal court proceedings are required to be open to public observation. Virtual observation is required for all in-custody proceedings, and prompt resolution of municipal cases is required.

Last year, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that municipalities with ordinances that parallel state crimes can't have higher penalties than the state crimes, in the wake of the state legislature reducing penalties for misdemeanors, and in the wake of Governor Polis vetoing a bill that would have mandated the same result.

A different bill last legislative session addressed the problem with municipal court judges abusing failure to appear warrants in a way that led to disproportionately harsh punishments.

None of these bills address yet another problem with the municipal court system, which is that municipal court judges are not nearly as independent of the municipal legislative bodies as state court judges are because they are appointed by the Governor in a merit based system that makes state court's independent of local governments (except for Denver County Court which is quasi-municipal).

Municipal courts also leave people arrested languishing in jail for longer than the U.S. Constitution allows because they hold court less frequently than state courts.

The simple and best solution would be to abolish municipal courts entirely and to give county court's jurisdiction over ordinance violations (which could still be prosecuted by City attorneys). 

Perhaps parking violations could be made administrative proceedings of municipalities limited to fines, boot, and tow orders instead of municipal violations.

Brainstorming Possible Public Law Reforms

There are important gaps in our public law system:

* If we are to reject taxpayer standing, voter standing, and citizen standing, we need to empower someone to enforce violations of the law that harm the general public, but not any specific person differently from any other, like many forms of public corruption.

* Judges should have the power to remove government officials who defy court orders and commit serious breaches of the public trust from office, certainly, officials who are not elected officials.

* There needs to be a parallel to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for federal officials and agents (i.e. people who act under color of federal law) that is more robust than the federal common law Bivens remedy, which doesn't cover all federal officials or all federal rights.

* The unitary executive theory adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court is just a pure political trick, with no historical basis. INS v. Chadha (1983), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that legislative vetos in duly enacted laws were unconstitutional was also a bad decision.

* The gutting of the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment by SCOTUS was a horrible legal decision not supported by any fair reading of the document.

* The grant of immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts of the President was a very bad idea. Granting both civil immunity and criminal immunity should be a matter of common law or statutory law that can be changed by Congress, not a matter of constitutional law.

* Granting unfettered pardon power to the President now looks like it was a bad idea on the part of the Founders. Notably, a great many U.S. states do not afford the same power to their Governors.

* Requiring a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Congress to override a Presidential veto greatly upsets the proper balance of power between Congress and the President. Let the President veto legislation that unwittingly contains a bad provision which the President noticed but Congress did not. But let them reaffirm and override it by a simple majority of both houses. Part of the big picture problem in the United States is that it is far too hard to legislate, so the courts and regulations adopted by the executive have to fill the gap.

* Making the respective houses of Congress the judges of their own elections was a bad idea.

* The impeachment power is too weak and too political. And, it should be easier and less political to remove a President (or any other public official) for disability.

* A proposal is pending in Colorado to remove absolute immunity for prosecutors from civil liability, which as drafted I don't support, even though I can somewhat sympathize with the motivations for it. Judges also have absolute immunity. I think that the solution is to make a finding of professional or judicial misconduct or criminal conduct have the collateral consequence of forfeiting absolute immunity, with the statute of limitations for a private civil action to impose liability in those cases running from the time that there is a final criminal conviction or of professional or judicial misconduct. If a judge convicts you of a crime and sentences you to a private prison due to a bribe from a private prison investor, and the judge is convicted of that, the judge should have civil liability to you.

* An alternative to the fault based approach of § 1983 and Bivens for civil rights violations, would be to instead adopt the takings jurisprudence that applies when the government takes property without fair compensation. Rather than being perpetrator focused, if someone is deprived of their civil rights, they would be entitled to just, compensatory only, compensation, by the government under whose color the deprivation occurred, without regard to the intent of the person violating the right, and without individual liability on the part of the agents who participated in the deprivation of civil rights. Indemnification and defense mandates of public employees basically gets you to a similar place in most cases, but denies any relief when someone is deprived of life or liberty wrongfully, if no one individual intentional or almost intentionally violates their rights (e.g. if the injuries or destroyed property or other harm arose from mere negligence or mistakes, or due to broken systems rather than malicious individuals). Thus, if you were incarcerated and later found to be innocent, or incurred attorneys' fees defending a criminal case only to be acquitted, you would be entitled to compensation from the government that brought the charges and incarcerated you, without regard to how you were wrongfully convicted or were charged with a crime for which you were not convicted. Qualified immunity and intent requirements would be much less problematic if § 1983 lawsuits and Bivens actions were secondary remedies to punish individual bad apples (and included, for example disqualification from serving in law enforcement for serious willful wrongdoing), while municipal liability for compensatory relief only was available much more easily.

* Many countries vest prosecutorial power in the judiciary rather than in the executive branch, and many states have an attorney general or DA who is independently elected to create a built in special prosecutor. There is wisdom in depriving an elected executive branch politician like a President or Governor or Mayor from having absolute control over enforcement of the criminal laws.

* Colorado has the Colorado Open Records Act and the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act to allow pre-litigation discovery of incidents that might give rise to civil liability on the part of public officials, which makes Warne v. Hall, which prevents people from suing first and getting discovery to determine if they really have a claim, by adopting the federal standards of Twombly and Iqbal for pleading civil actions more tolerable than in other contexts. It isn't clear to me that FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) at the federal level, provides an equally effective tool to bring claims against federal public officials.

* While allowing all U.S. District Court judges to impose national injunctions can be problematic, mostly because it allows for forum shopping, it is also deeply problematic to allow the federal government to re-litigate issues that it has lost in other jurisdictions over and over again, which is just reverse forum shopping. Maybe national injunction power needs to be reserved for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

* Felons should be able to vote. But maybe they shouldn't be able to run for public office without some process establishing that they were reformed or just the passage of time of a certain number of years after they fully served their sentence.

* A statutory obligation for all law enforcement officers to be unmasked and clearly display their badges subject to narrow exceptions that would have to be authorized much like a search warrant on a case by case basis, wouldn't be a bad law.

* We need a better structure to limit the use of military force and covert operations by intelligence agencies to legally authorized act, that doesn't simply give the President absolute power.

* No President should have the power to unilaterally impose any taxes, including tariffs.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

Prosecuting Federal Officials For State Law Crimes

Prosecuting federal officials for crimes arising under state law committed in the course of their federal duties is not only not forbidden by the supremacy clause, it is actually expressly contemplated and provided for by a federal statute. 

In those cases, the case is started in state court, but may be removed to federal court, where the case continues to be prosecuted by state prosecutors in federal court with a federal judge presiding.

28 U.S. Code § 1442 - Federal officers or agencies sued or prosecuted

A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:

(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.

(2) A property holder whose title is derived from any such officer, where such action or prosecution affects the validity of any law of the United States.

(3) Any officer of the courts of the United States, for or relating to any act under color of office or in the performance of his duties;

(4) Any officer of either House of Congress, for or relating to any act in the discharge of his official duty under an order of such House.

(b) A personal action commenced in any State court by an alien against any citizen of a State who is, or at the time the alleged action accrued was, a civil officer of the United States and is a nonresident of such State, wherein jurisdiction is obtained by the State court by personal service of process, may be removed by the defendant to the district court of the United States for the district and division in which the defendant was served with process.

(c) Solely for purposes of determining the propriety of removal under subsection (a), a law enforcement officer, who is the defendant in a criminal prosecution, shall be deemed to have been acting under the color of his office if the officer—

(1) protected an individual in the presence of the officer from a crime of violence;

(2) provided immediate assistance to an individual who suffered, or who was threatened with, bodily harm; or

(3) prevented the escape of any individual who the officer reasonably believed to have committed, or was about to commit, in the presence of the officer, a crime of violence that resulted in, or was likely to result in, death or serious bodily injury.

(d) In this section, the following definitions apply:

(1) The terms “civil action” and “criminal prosecution” include any proceeding (whether or not ancillary to another proceeding) to the extent that in such proceeding a judicial order, including a subpoena for testimony or documents, is sought or issued. If removal is sought for a proceeding described in the previous sentence, and there is no other basis for removal, only that proceeding may be removed to the district court.

(2) The term “crime of violence” has the meaning given that term in section 16 of title 18.

(3) The term “law enforcement officer” means any employee described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) of section 8401(17) of title 5 and any special agent in the Diplomatic Security Service of the Department of State.

(4) The term “serious bodily injury” has the meaning given that term in section 1365 of title 18.

(5) The term “State” includes the District of Columbia, United States territories and insular possessions, and Indian country (as defined in section 1151 of title 18).

(6) The term “State court” includes the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, a court of a United States territory or insular possession, and a tribal court.

28 U.S. Code § 1455 - Procedure for removal of criminal prosecutions

(a) Notice of Removal.—

A defendant or defendants desiring to remove any criminal prosecution from a State court shall file in the district court of the United States for the district and division within which such prosecution is pending a notice of removal signed pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and containing a short and plain statement of the grounds for removal, together with a copy of all process, pleadings, and orders served upon such defendant or defendants in such action.

(b) Requirements.—

(1) A notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall be filed not later than 30 days after the arraignment in the State court, or at any time before trial, whichever is earlier, except that for good cause shown the United States district court may enter an order granting the defendant or defendants leave to file the notice at a later time.

(2) A notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall include all grounds for such removal. A failure to state grounds that exist at the time of the filing of the notice shall constitute a waiver of such grounds, and a second notice may be filed only on grounds not existing at the time of the original notice. For good cause shown, the United States district court may grant relief from the limitations of this paragraph.

(3) The filing of a notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall not prevent the State court in which such prosecution is pending from proceeding further, except that a judgment of conviction shall not be entered unless the prosecution is first remanded.

(4) The United States district court in which such notice is filed shall examine the notice promptly. If it clearly appears on the face of the notice and any exhibits annexed thereto that removal should not be permitted, the court shall make an order for summary remand.

(5) If the United States district court does not order the summary remand of such prosecution, it shall order an evidentiary hearing to be held promptly and, after such hearing, shall make such disposition of the prosecution as justice shall require. If the United States district court determines that removal shall be permitted, it shall so notify the State court in which prosecution is pending, which shall proceed no further.

(c) Writ of Habeas Corpus.—

If the defendant or defendants are in actual custody on process issued by the State court, the district court shall issue its writ of habeas corpus, and the marshal shall thereupon take such defendant or defendants into the marshal’s custody and deliver a copy of the writ to the clerk of such State court.

Bivens Narrowed Again

The U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority isn't troubled at all by denying remedies to violations of the U.S. Constitution.

Bivens is a U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed suits for money damages against federal officials who violated selected constitutional rights, something Congress has failed to do by statute.

The order list [from today] include a unanimous per curiam opinion in Goldey v. Fields, No. 24–809 (S. Ct. June 30, 2024) (also available here), which involves an effort by a federal prisoner to sue federal prison officials for an Eighth Amendment violation alleging use of excessive force. The Court rules a Bivens suit is not available in a three-page opinion that concludes this way:

This case arises in a new context, and “special factors” counsel against recognizing an implied Bivens cause of action for Eighth Amendment excessive-force violations. To begin with, Congress has actively legislated in the area of prisoner litigation but has not enacted a statutory cause of action for money damages. See Ziglar, 582 U. S., at 148– 149. In addition, extending Bivens to allow an Eighth Amendment claim for excessive force could have negative systemic consequences for prison officials and the “inordinately difficult undertaking” of running a prison. Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 84–85 (1987). Moreover, “an alternative remedial structure” already exists for aggrieved federal prisoners. Ziglar, 582 U.S., at 137; see Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U. S. 61, 74 (2001). The existence of such alternative remedial procedures counsels against allowing Bivens suits even if such “procedures are ‘not as effective as an individual damages remedy.’” Egbert, 596 U.S., at 498.

For the past 45 years, this Court has consistently declined to extend Bivens to new contexts. See Egbert, 596 U.S., at 490–491. We do the same here.

Congress should extend 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to provide the same relief to violations of rights under the U.S. Constitution or federal law to violations committed under color of federal law. 

The claim that this would make it inordinately difficult to run federal prisons is at odds with the fact that an identical legal rule applies to all state and local prisons and jails, which house the lion's share of federal inmates (and a much larger share of violent criminals).

Ghibli v. Disney Villains

In a nutshell, this video makes the case that Disney villains are inherently evil and must be defeated and punished, while Ghibli villains are redeemable and have understandable motives but have suffered and are misunderstood. To a lesser extent DC Comics follows the Disney model and Marvel Comics follows the Ghibli model. The video argues that Ghibli villains are more realistic and creatively interesting, but acknowledges that Disney villains are cathartic, efficient, and satisfying. The video attributes the difference to a Judeo-Christian American culture compared to Japanese values rooted in Shinto religious roots (although much of that is really Confucian).

Honestly, I disagree that Ghibli villains are "more realistic".  Ghibli style villains may be more common, but Disney style villains are out there too. We call them "psychopaths" and some key distinctions in criminal law, like the distinction between 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder, are attempts to distinguish irredeemable psychopaths from misguided or impulsive or environmentally pressured individuals who are capable of being reformed.

The Case For Bills Of Attainder

Every issue has two sides. I find that argument in favor of allowing Bills of Attainder particularly weak. But here it is:

For half a millennium, bills of attainder were an accepted sovereign power, used by British and American governments to defend their people in times of emergency. Throughout the war for independence and its aftermath, the new American states repeatedly attainted loyalists and confiscated their lands, remaking much of the socioeconomic structure of the country. Then, in little over a year and with barely any reasoning, the ratifiers of the 1788 constitution stripped the state and federal governments alike of their power to attaint. Today, attainder bans are remembered as a just and inevitable part of Enlightenment reform. 

But in truth, these bans were anti-republican. Worse, they were a mistake. 

Eighteenth-century bills of attainders were not the arbitrary acts of tyranny that scholars today imagine. They were a narrow emergency power, passed only after debate and examination of evidence, with procedures guaranteeing due process and appeal written into the text of the laws. 

Moreover, although legislators occasionally passed abusive attainders, early Americans proposed reforms that would have prevented abuses without prohibiting attainder outright. In the right circumstances, bills of attainder are a valuable tool of republican government. The history and ideals of the Founding Era provide compelling reasons to embrace bills of attainder in exceptional times.

Nathan Ristuccia (Institute for Free Speech), In Praise of Attainder, SSRN (2025).

Fighting Organized Crime

Hedgehog thinking is not the right approach to law enforcement led drug enforcement. 

Also, some solutions, like reducing easy access to guns (and making it harder to smuggle guns abroad), or legalizing drugs to reduce illicit organized crime supplied demand, are politically unpopular with conservatives and centrists, who may have median voter political power. 

International drug trafficking dominates the conversation on organized crime, but equally common and serious are urban systems of organized crime—criminal groups focused not on exports or transshipment, but on dominating local markets, neighborhoods, and politics. 

When policymakers do pay attention to this problem, they consistently make the same mistake—believing there are best practices. But systems of organized crime are not all alike. There is no one blueprint or general solution, and so following the latest fad is unlikely to deliver the desired result. Instead of trying to copy the quasi-mythological success of a Giuliani or Bukele, policymakers need to understand what kind of organized crime problem they have, what capabilities their city possesses, and what tools are appropriate to the circumstances. 

This paper looks in-depth at how organized crime is organized in three cities: Chicago, Medellín, and San Salvador. It also considers New York, Bogotá, and Port-au-Prince. 

I argue that the primary driver of their organization and incentives is their source of criminal revenues. A second major driver of behavior is the degree of criminal political organization, which broadly-speaking takes three forms: atomized individuals, fragmented groups, and competing confederations. These forms are not just the product of their revenues, but are also the result of decades of competition with the state and one another. 

What policy tools will work hinges on this diagnosis. I look at the evidence for a range of standard policies—from crackdowns to street outreach—and explain why we can expect them to have wildly different impacts depending on the context.

Christopher Blattman, "Bad medicine: Why different systems of organized crime demand different solutions" 2024 IMF & IDB Conference Crime in Latin America (November 9, 2024). The conclusions are as follows:

5 Conclusions

5.1 Terrible trade-offs

In tackling everyday crime, the tradeoffs are obviously difficult. Having more and better-trained security forces usually lowers crime. But this comes at a steep fiscal cost, collides with systems and cultures that are resistant to change, and buffets some continuities with heavy-handed tactics.

In cities with established gangs and organized crime, however, mayors and police chiefs wish their tradeoffs were so easy. At least in the short run, there are almost never options that reduce violence, drug use, criminal power, and political corruption at the same time.

Achieving some of these objectives often comes at the expense of others.

Take crackdowns and mano dura approaches. These policies can “work” in the sense that they disrupt illicit business, fragment powerful criminal factions, and loosen criminal control of neighborhoods and politicians. They use existing police capabilities, without asking forces to do something new or different. And the effects are immediate and easy to splash on the pages of newspapers. The public often supports these efforts, at least at first. All this help explain why these policies are often popular among police and politicians.

As we’ve seen, however, heavy-handed and unconditional tactics bring new challenges. In the worst case, they lead to a more fragmented landscape. Decapitating criminal organizations can destabilize a city’s fragile criminal systems, launching inter-factional wars of succession and dominance. And when state control over prisons is weak (as in El Salvador before 2019), competition and mass imprisonment has often prompted criminal confederations a chance to consolidate and strengthen.

Strengthening state capabilities is no panacea. Cities like Chicago managed to completely dismantle their meso-level structures. Perhaps El Salvador has accomplished the same. But Chalfin and McCrary (2017) in the U.S., at least, the effect on violence has been mixed and at times unstable. Lower control by confederations stopped large-scale inter-factional warfare. It also eliminated these rich and powerful structures from the social and political scene. But the remnants of these former empires—the fragmented, anarchic landscape of hundreds of small street gangs—has proven almost impossible to eradicate, and has been vulnerable to violence spirals that are hard to control.

A more savvy and focused approach—cracking down on the most violent gangs, and incentivizing the meso actors to maintain a city-wide peace—carries trade-offs too. Medellín has managed more than a decade of incredible peace, with homicides dropping to a historic low of 12 per 100,000 in recent years. But its criminal factions have leveraged this influence to enrich themselves and city’s gangs—fixing retail drug markets and earning monopolistic profits, growing the ranks of drug consumers and addicts, expanding into legal markets like consumer products and security-provision, and channeling some of these winnings into political influence and police corruption.

In previous work my collaborators and I have called this the “terrible tradeoff” between violence and criminal control. Ben Lessing has also called it a trilemma. Policymakers want low violence, weak criminal groups (with low control over the state), and low drug flows, but they can seldom achieve all three at the same time. The more a city tackles drug flows and weakens criminal group control, the fewer incentives criminal groups have to maintain peace, and the more potential for violent spirals.

While these trade-offs are real, there is some reason for hope. 

First, Chicago (like many American cities) experienced an improvement in all three during the great homicide decline of the late 1990s to roughly 2014. They are trying to recreate that success now by combining more and better policing with focused deterrence and funding a “civilian architecture” for community violence reduction—one of the largest and most targeted outreach and service efforts in history.

New York gradually whittled down its organized crime problem through years of creative prosecutorial and policing strategies. 

Medellín’s new mayor is also trying to attain all three goals by maintaining incentives for peace (through conditional repression) while simultaneously weakening the economic power of the gangs in a variety of ways.

5.2 Becoming problem-oriented, adaptive, and iterative

Some problems are relatively straightforward to solve. They have clear causes and measures for progress, the technology exists to solve it, it doesn’t require enormous local adaptation, they don’t require the coordination of many actors, or if they do, that logistical effort isn’t complicated by conflicting interests and information. If we stick with the medical analogy that started this article, a good example would be the delivery of flu or smallpox vaccines.

Other problems are “wicked” in nature. This is a technical term, coined in the 1960s by a management scholar to describe the really hard-to-solve social challenges. The causes are unclear, the metrics are hard to observe, the right tools don’t exist, and if they do they require customization and adaptation. Implementing them requires coordinating many actors, most of them with conflicting interests, where it’s hard to observe their effort or intentions. Wicked problems are not insoluble, however, and a longstanding literature on tackling wicked policy problems contains a few lessons that we can apply to organized crime.

Problem-driven and diagnostic

Instead of leaping to policy solutions—crackdowns, hotspots policing, focused deterrence, or cognitive behavioral programs—we have to understand the ailment before prescribing a treatment.

Typically, most cities have enough local experts and police intelligence to quickly assess the basic organizational structures and criminal situation. Going beyond the basics takes more investment, but organized crime is also a problem that will take decades to tackle, and so any investment in diagnostic and monitoring has a great deal of time to deliver returns.

Common diagnostic investments include:

• Organizations tend to manage what is measured, and a first step is to establish metrics and measurement systems, especially to capture systematically unmeasured outcomes  (such as gang activities, extortion payments, and criminal and state legitimacy.

• Foster a research community to do the descriptive research–qualitative and quantitative research—to establish the facts and regularities on the ground, and to build this intelligence gathering and processing capacity within and also outside of government.

• As circumstances often vary by neighborhood, build out the local capacity to understand and communicate with local criminal actors—not just within the state apparatus, but also through the “civilian architecture” of neighborhood-level outreach organizations that understand, build relationships with, and address the issues of the most violent groups and actors.

• Establish incentives for the invention, proposal, and piloting of new policy solutions— within the bureaucracy, but also in the public sphere, by making information and data public. One example, building on the experience of U.S. cities, is Thomas Abt’s Community Violence Problem Analysis (CVPA).

In U.S. cities, violence tends to cluster around small networks of people and places. Shootings among these fragmented groups or atomistic individuals often occur in cascades of retaliatory violence. “Problem analyses” are designed to identify these high-risk networks through the systematic analysis of incidents, studying groups and social networks, and identifying the highest-risk places. The goal is to interrogate and challenge assumptions, while also focusing policy attention on the small number of highest-risk people, groups, places, and behaviors. Many of the same tools could be applied in situations of more hierarchical organized crime, especially the idea of intelligence gathering on groups, with the proviso that the most powerful groups may be committing the least violence.

Another example example is an ongoing collaboration in Medellín, Colombia between local and international universities, a research organization, the local government and police, as well as local media and experts. Independent, full-time ethnographers and journalists conduct continuous interviews with community members and criminal group members to understand criminal business lines, organization, hierarchies, peace arrangements, and causes of violence. We collaborate with the city government to conduct annual city-wide surveys of gang and state governance, fee payment, and legitimacy (published in the main newspaper). We also support the city government in building their information systems and analyzing data. We work with the national and local governments to integrate administrative data on neighborhoods, blocks, and individuals to track crime and other issues, and to build predictive models of crime and extortion for targeting. And we help the school system build mechanisms for monitoring dropout and recruitment risk and to target interventions to reduce risk.

This “urban lab” draws in many ways on the success of the University of Chicago Urban Labs—a nearly two-decade collaboration between the government, foundations, police, and non-profits designed to develop and share data, challenge assumptions, and inspire new approaches. The main question is why so few cities in the hemisphere have developed similar partnerships and capabilities.

Becoming iterative and experimental

The trouble with any first diagnosis is that it is probably mistaken. The first round of policies and solutions are probably wrong as well. And if they do work, criminal groups are smart and strategic and will adapt. 

Therefore, cities do not simply need the capacity to diagnose at intervals, they need to be able to engage in a process of trial and error, trying our multiple approaches and solutions at once, carefully trying to discern which are working or not, and using the patterns of observed success and failure to re-diagnose the problem.

The information systems discussed above–metrics, surveys, qualitative, and administrative data—are important here. Consider Medellín again. The annual surveys identified surprisingly high levels of gang governance and legitimacy in the city. Further investigation revealed that historical increases in police presence did not have the expected effects on criminal rule—often, the threat of police presence was the main factor driving gangs to provide order on the street, to protect drug profits. Increasing police presence pushed gangs to behave better, but did not counter gang rule. Retrospective analysis and a experimental pilot suggested that gang rule was a response to a strong and capable state, especially in sectors where drug rents are high.

This pointed the administration to focus on strategies that reduce rents while also maintaining gang incentives to avoid abusing and extorting residents.

Another example comes from studying gang entry among adolescents. While the city of Medellín had many promising youth programs, investigation revealed that the highest-risk youth were difficult to reach and engage, and often not deliberately targeted, meaning programs were not reaching the right recipients. Schools were also good at judging who had already joined a gang, but had few capabilities to identify the risk in advance. Large-scale surveys in schools identified the factors most predictive of gang entry, and these are now being integrated into routine administrative data collection. In partnership with non-profit organizations, Medellin’s schools are now testing and refining a series of counter-recruitment programs.

Another model for identifying and incentivizing experimentation is through competitive calls. The two major cognitive-behavioral programs in Liberia and Chicago that inspired so many community violence interventions around the world each emerged from competitive bids for new and innovative violence reduction programs—one from the UN Peacebuilding Fund and Liberian government, the other from the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Fostering self-correcting mechanisms

One challenge with these recommendation is that few city administrations or police have incentives to diagnose and iterate. Policymakers who want to engage on careful trial and error constantly compete against political opponents who promise big, bold steps against organized crime. Worse still, crackdowns, kingpin strategies, and mano dura approaches are simple and clear, and often prove popular at the polls, at least temporarily.

As for schools, mayor’s offices, or police departments, trial and error asks these bureaucracies not to do what they are already equipped to do, but rather develop new capabilities that may or may not prove effective. It is one thing to ask authorities to be nimble and to adopt the best programs for their city’s circumstances, and another to ask them to innovate and iterate on their own. This points to the need for public–private partnerships between the state and universities, community organizations, and the media. Schools and police departments seldom have the analytical capabilities, the bandwidth, or the skills to engage in diagnostics or trial and error alone.

Ultimately, however, there needs to be accountability for results. This is a further advantage of the data produced through the diagnostics and monitoring described above. Bureaucracies have a tendency to mange what is measured. Most police commanders can tell you how crimes per sector have changed since last year, but not whether gangs have sold more drugs. Mayors and newspapers can quote week to week changes in homicide rates but not gang legitimacy. Better information systems, available to the public and newspapers, and transparent evaluation is one step towards accountability for improvement on these unmeasured margins.

Tackling organized crime is the ultimate wicked problem. Success will not come from simply importing solutions from abroad. Nor will it come from simply funneling more fiscal resources into policing or intelligence systems. It was be more difficult than that, requiring a change in mindset and approach.

A Major New Misdemeanor Database

While there is fairly good publicly available data on the felony offenses for which people are in prison, the parallel data on people who are in jail pursuant to misdemeanor convictions has been hard to find. 

A new data set addresses that shortcoming.

An Act To Prevent Tyranny

I would suggest that Congress pass a "Prevent Tyranny Act". This would:

1. Repeal the Insurrection Act of 1807 (now codified at 10 U.S.C. §§ 251-255).

2. Repeal the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (now codified at 50 U.S.C. § 21).

3. Repeal 8 U.S.C. § 1251(a)(4)(C)(i) (i.e. Section 241(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") which provides that the U.S. may cancel the visa of and deport:

An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.

4. Repeal 8 U.S.C. § 1451 (authorizing the revocation of a grant of citizenship by naturalization in certain exceptional circumstances).

5. Pass legislation invoking Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, by authorizing a civil action to disqualify any person from holding public office on account of their involvement in an insurrection against the government of the United States in any federal district court, and also in any state court or tribunal granted jurisdiction to make such determinations by state law, if the disqualifying conduct is shown by a preponderance of the evidence.

6. Pass a statute authorizing a habeas corpus action related to any person detained by the United States government, and any other civil action related to such a detention, to be filed in the U.S. District Court with territorial jurisdiction over the place where that person was detained, or if outside the territorial jurisdiction of any U.S. District Court, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in addition to continuing to authorizing the filing of such a civil action in any other U.S. District Court that has jurisdiction under existing U.S. law. Further, provide that a plaintiff in such an action shall have an absolute right, to compel the United States government to, at the expense of the United States government, as soon as logistically possible, return any person detained by the United States government to a place in the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court with with territorial jurisdiction over the place where that person was detained, or if outside the territorial jurisdiction of any U.S. District Court, to the District of Columbia.

7. Pass a statute prohibiting the United States government (or any other person acting under the color of state or federal law), from involuntarily removing a civilian United States citizen from the United States for any reason (other than a request to extradite that person, to another country with whom the United States has diplomatic relations, for prosecution for a suspected felony committed in that country, pursuant to existing extradition laws).

8. Amend 42 U.S.C. § 1983 which creates a private civil action against persons who deprive someone of fedreal rights under color of state law, to codify Bivens actions (named after the case of  Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), by making it also apply to anyone who deprives someone of a federal right under color of federal law.

9. Repeal the doctrine of qualified immunity to liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

10. Authorize the additional discretionary remedy under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, of imposing a disqualification from holding public office similar to that of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, under the authority of Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, to persons held liable under that statute, for good cause shown.

11. Prohibit the invocation of the State Secrets Privilege in any habeas corpus case, any proceeding related to immigration, and any criminal prosecution.

12. Prohibit deportation of a non-citizen from the United States, without their free and voluntary consent in open court while represented by counsel, to any country where that person is not a national or citizen.

DNA Evidence Probably Identifies Jack The Ripper

More than a dozen suspects who could have been Jack the Ripper, one of the earliest well known serial killers, have been seriously considered. 

A police investigation into a series of eleven brutal murders committed in Whitechapel and Spitalfields between 1888 and 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888. Five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—are known as the "canonical five" and their murders between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked. The murders were never solved.

Several other murders, less definitively connected to this spree than the "canonical five" also occurred in the vicinity before the man who is now clearly the prime suspect was committed to an insane asylum.

But, DNA evidence has tipped the balance and arguably cracked this cold case case and linked the killings to one of the top suspects.

A Polish barber by the name of Aaron Kosminski was a suspect at the time of the five murders in Whitechapel, east London, in 1888. . . . A bloodstained shawl said to have been found on the body of one of the victims – which was purchased at auction in 2007 by author and Ripper researcher Russell Edwards – was recently found to have the DNA of both the victim and Kosminski. In October, the Daily Mail revealed that Mr Edwards had uncovered new evidence of Kosminski’s links to the highly secretive Freemasons which may have motivated his sadistic killings and shielded him from law enforcement, ensuring he was locked away in an asylum, where he eventually died. . . . Aaron Kosminski was a Polish immigrant who worked as a barber upon moving to London. He was only a young man when he embarked on his killing spree – 23 years old to be exact. To uncover the killer’s identity, Kosminski’s oldest brother’s great-great-granddaughter actually helped Edwards. She provided a DNA sample that was able to be matched with that of the shawl. . . . When the original inquest was held on October 4, 1888, a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ was returned. But police were still hunting for the serial killer at the time.

From here.

While the DNA match isn't ironclad, it apparently relied on mtDNA which isn't as useful at definitively fingering a suspect as autosomal DNA, it also corroborates other evidence against him which was stronger than the evidence against of any of the other leading suspects, even without DNA evidence. He was formally diagnosed at the asylum with paranoid schizophrenia. 

On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later. On 4 February 1891, he was returned to the workhouse, possibly by the police, and on 7 February, he was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife. It is unclear whether this meant Kosminski's sister or Cohen's. Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe. 

The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month, aged 53.

While the evidence that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper might not meet modern standards of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, in a case that is 130 years old occurring at the dawn of modern policing, there is enough evidence that is is very likely that he was the Ripper, and he is far more likely to have been the killer than any of the other leading suspects.

The Shooting In Washington Park

The Shooting

The description of the events in this section is compiled mostly from multiple news reports at the Denver Post (including this one), the Denver Gazette, and three TV news channel websites (7 News including this one, 9 News, and Fox 31 News).

My previous post on middle class crime, was motivated by, and a prelude to, this post about the February 2, 2025 shooting in Washington Park, in Denver, Colorado, about three blocks from my home, that took place around 2:30-2:40 p.m. on a sunny warm day in broad daylight, just minutes after my wife decided to take another route home from the Washington Park Recreation Center than she had been planning to take. 

The shooting took place roughly Downing and Kentucky streets near a major west entrance to the park (it may have taken place a block further south at Downing and Tennessee, there are conflicting reports and there is a park bench there that could have been the one central to this story).

Twenty-eight year old Ryan Martin Egelston is suspected of having gotten into an argument with another man over a park bench at this location. 

As a Denver Post story explains:

Egelston got into a fight with another man in the park around 2 p.m. Sunday after the man asked if he could share a park bench with Egelston, according to an arrest affidavit released by the Denver Police Department.

Witnesses told investigators that Egelston spat on the man, pushed him in the chest and punched him in the lower back, according to the affidavit.

The man was walking away with his bike when Egelston allegedly pulled out a gun and shot at him. Egelston didn’t hit the man, but police said the bullet punctured one of the bike’s tires.

About 90 seconds later, Egelston shot at a second, unrelated victim from behind, striking him near the jaw, according to the affidavit. Witnesses told the Denver Post on Sunday that the bullet entered the man’s neck and went out his face.

“At no point did the second victim and (Egelston) appear to have any sort of disagreement or altercation prior to the shooting,” Denver police officials said in the arrest affidavit.

Chaos erupted in the crowed park in response. A medical doctor who was in the park nearby provided first aid to the man who was shot until an ambulance arrived and took him to a hospital. The man who was shot is expected to survive despite these serious injuries.

UPDATE: February 14, 2025:

A silver lining to the fateful day was the presence of Lakshmi Karra, Denver Health family medicine doctor, who was also at the park. She rushed to help Ben without hesitating. "I noticed that there was what looked like a gunshot wound on his neck," she said. "I took his picnic blanket out of his bag and I held pressure on his wound." Karra called 911 after which the Denver Health Paramedics rushed Ben to the hospital.

From 9 News.  

Egelston was muttering and cursing to himself and displayed his handgun to two women nearby telling them not to photograph him. He then tried to flee in his red Hyundai sedan.  

The 7 News story adds some details from the arrest affdavit and criminal case:

Moments after the second shooting, Egelston was seen walking southbound on S. Downing St. from E. Kentucky Ave. before he got inside a red Hyundai Sudan with Colorado license plate CIS-K97.

Denver Police officers who responded to the scene chased the vehicle with their sirens blaring before they rammed the car at E. Kentucky Ave. just west of S. Downing St. “due to the active threat to the public and in an attempt to limit a high-speed chase,” according to the affidavit.

At least two Denver police patrol cars surrounded the vehicle and took Engelson into custody. A black Glock handgun was then recovered from the passenger seat of the vehicle, according to investigators.

Egelston was taken to Denver Police Department headquarters where he was interviewed by police about two hours later following the shootings, though it’s not clear why Egelston got into an argument with the first victim and why he reportedly shot the two men, as the affidavit obtained by Denver7 Monday is heavily redacted.

The suspect is currently being held for investigation of attempted first-degree murder on a $1 million cash-only bond.

He was also carrying a concealed weapon in a Denver park, which is itself illegal.

UPDATE (February 10, 2024) from the Denver Post:

Ryan Martin Egelston has been charged with four counts of first-degree attempted murder, one count of assault and one count of vehicular eluding, all felonies, according to court records. He is also charged with six sentence-enhancing charges related to violent crimes and weapons.

Egelston told police he didn’t intend to shoot anyone, that he thought the two victims were involved in psyops and he was previously hospitalized for mental health concerns.

A GoFundMe has been established for the shooting victim Ben Varga, who is 23 years old, by his family. As I write this, it has raised $34,935 towards a $40,000 goal from 530 donors. Varga was taken to Denver Health, a level one trauma center. The GoFundMe page explains that:

On February 2nd, 2025, our friend, brother, and son, Ben Varga, was the victim of a shooting in Wash Park, Denver. Ben was shot from behind while waiting to meet up with friends. The bullet traveled through the back of his neck and straight through his jaw and chin. We are incredibly grateful that he survived. In what can only be described as a miracle, the bullet narrowly missed critical structures like his trachea and spine, preventing even more devastating consequences. The visible impact on his face is minimal, given that the bullet traveled in a way that left his facial structure largely intact on the surface. Since the incident, Ben has been in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) at Denver Health, undergoing multiple surgeries and receiving round-the-clock care. His recovery will be long, but we remain hopeful. . . . 

Ben, a lifelong Coloradan, has always had a deep love for his home state and the community around him. He graduated from CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business last May, is a dedicated Buffs fan, and recently moved to downtown Denver to start a new job. Ben is also a big fan of all Colorado sports, including the Broncos, Avalanche, and Nuggets. When he's not cheering for local teams, he loves skiing, playing pickleball, trying new restaurants, and traveling the world. As a triplet, he shares a special bond with his brother, sister, and family. His love extends deeply to his friends and his dogs, Tatum and Bernie.

Ben's picture appears on his "recovery" blog: 

About Shooting Suspect Ryan Egelston

The suspect in this case is not much of a fit to stereotypes about random shootings in big cities.

Egelston attended the University of Dayton, in Ohio, from 2015-2019 where he got decent enough grades, after graduating from Buffalo Grove High School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois (a Chicago suburb) on schedule, starting in August of 2011. He was born sometime in 1996. While he was in college, in the summer of 2018, he was an intern with Respire Ministries, helping to teach English to Haitian immigrants (probably the ones made famous in the 2024 Presidential race).

After he graduated with a bachelor's degree in accounting and finance he became a CPA for the Big Four accounting firm of Deloitte, which he rose to the position of senior auditor over a period of two years and four months. He moved to Denver in 2021 to work as a senior associate for a financial consulting firm involving "interim financial assistance primarily to Fortune 1000 companies during critical times of need" performing accounting, auditing and compliance functions for a year until November of 2022, and was admitted as a licensed CPA in Colorado by reciprocity.

Before moving to Denver and until shortly after he moved to Denver, he was a treasurer and trustee on the board of the mother church, called "Destiny Church" and an "inherited church" called "Risen Church" and was a youth ministry leader at Destiny Church that served more than 100 members. At these meetings he "casted vision." He also worked in their addiction ministries.

Then, his ordinary and highly successful career path shifted. He took what he described as a "gap year" and "career break" for nineteen months, until May of 2024, during which he "authored over 4 unpublished books and numerous business consulting articles and thought leadership." Over the last nine months he has been working remotely providing accounting and finance consulting services for "One10" which I suspect, but don't know, is the entity in which he engaged in self-employment.

He describes himself as revivalist preacher and a Revelations 11 witness, maintained a blog until September of 2023, and made a dozen or two TikTok posts. The blog posts were pretty out there from the perspective of the uninitiated. For example, his September 25, 2023 blog post (the last one on his site) he said: 

Moore’s Law is the prophetic fulfillment of Daniel 12:4, which is prophecy on the end time’s that detail that knowledge shall increase stating, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

The pictures and videos on his website and TikTok posts depict a clean cut, fit, white young man, who is almost frenetic with impatient energy.

The "about me" section on his webpage says (fancy formatting in the original not fully preserved):

Passionate About Revival, Writing Books, Teaching the Word of God,

Empowerment, Leadership Development,

Business Development/Consulting Services, and Public Speaking

I am a small business owner who is 'sold out' with a deep passion to preach and teach the Word of God with all my chips on the table, and I offer speaking arrangements where I hope to be the spiritual thermostat for you, your business, or your church! When not speaking or writing books, I love to consult with companies and would love the opportunity to help take your business to the next level and be a sounding board of wisdom in your room, a voice of reason, a voice that you can trust that will come in looking out for your best intentions with the utmost excellence. Business is my passion, people are my concentration, and the Word of God is what I belt out and yearn to live out with the very actions of my life. I choose to live 'under the Word,' apply it in every area of my life, and yearn to see an on-fire and burning church ready with oil for the return of Christ.

Currently, I am writing books believing God to impact thousands of people in whatever manner possible and dream of speaking all around the world. I am deeply passionate about client service and love adding value in the consulting sphere solving complex problems and being the sounding board for decision makers like you! Moreover, I'd love to come speak at your church or organization and inspire and build up one anothers' faith, usher in a spirit of revival, and preach LIGHTS out. If you think I'd be a great fit to speak, please do not hesitate to reach out!

A Reddit thread provides some more insights about him. One comment states:

Went to college with this guy. He became super religious after moving to Colorado and started going a little nutty. We always knew he was a little off, this is taking it to the next level.

Another comment in the thread states:

I'm almost certain I saw this dude tweaking around 1st and Emerson like two weeks ago. Same red hyundai parked in the alley, same build/look. He was trying to get into the abandoned homes on that block. I remember it now because the dude looked really wound up and had something he kept pocketing/holding. i got the fuck away ASAP. It confirms my initial suspicions that it was a gun. freaky shit.

A third comment in the thread states: 

OMG this dude came through the gas station one night and was having some kind of schizophrenic episode. He did the gesture of a rifle in his arms and I asked him if he was doing alright. He like snapped out of it said he’s going great and then went back to his episode.

Analysis

Looking at all of the facts and circumstances, including his own statement to police, I have to concur with the final Reddit comment quoted above that this shooting is probably a result of Ryan Egelston developing schizophrenia symptoms (or if not that, some other form of psychosis).

His life apparently started to go off track sometime between late 2021 when he left his job at Deloitte and November of 2022 when he left the position that he took in Denver after only a year to take a "gap year." He would have been 25-26 years old at the time, which is a very typical time for men with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis (whose brains develop at a somewhat later age than women) to have their symptoms reach a point where they become unmanageable. These symptoms probably presented themselves at a more manageable level, perhaps even at such a slight level that one could doubt that they were real, several years earlier.

Inability to function in a highly structured conventional business setting like an accounting firm, paranoia and overreaction to unaggressive conduct from others, claims to see "visions", and making seemingly bizarre connections between ideas that other would see as unrelated, are all classic symptoms of schizophrenia.

He probably didn't self-diagnose his situation as a mental health issue (although his claim that he was previously hospitalized suggests otherwise), and his religious peers probably didn't either, as it seemed to be consistent with his self-image as a religious prophet or witness. 

His behavior as reported at Reddit and his lack of work history according to LinkedIn, also suggests that he may have been nearing the end of his rope financially, after being on the top of the world financially briefly after college as an accountant at a big national accounting firm, and then apparently exhausting his savings. This may have further fueled his paranoia and desperation.

From the perspective of criminal law, his behavior seems to belie the state of mind (typically associated with severe schizophrenia) that is necessary for him to present an insanity defense to his charges, although his lawyers, once hired or appointed, will probably have no choice but to present this defense in the criminal prosecution arising from this incident. The statement he made to police after the shooting might support this defense.

If he is not found to be incompetent and involuntarily committed as a threat to himself and others, he will probably plea bargain down from attempted murder to aggregated assault and received a fairly lengthy prison sentence in connection with that charge.

As a result of the quick response of the police to the incident, the numerous witnesses, and the ample physical evidence, a defense strategy claiming that he wasn't the shooter, or that he had a legal justification for the shooting, such as self-defense, would almost surely be futile. 

It is also plausible that an investigation will link him to other crimes for which he may face additional charges for which an insanity defense is not available (such as burglary, or carrying a concealed weapon in a Denver city park).

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.