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How Many Americans Have a Police Record? Probably More Than You Think
Drill-down into oft-cited crime statistic points to an undercount
Pop quiz: How many American adults have a criminal history?
a) 5%
b) 15%
c) 30%
It’s often reported that nearly 1 in 3 American adults, or about 30%, has a police record.
To some, that figure sounds surprisingly high. In fact, it may be low—but there are some caveats.
First, there is no way to pinpoint the exact number because a complete data set of arrests and prosecutions doesn’t exist. And second, the statistic depends on how you define “criminal history.”
“The juvenile who got arrested when he was 15 and now is 32 and applying for a job as truck driver—does he have a criminal history?” asked Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has tried to answer the question. “I think reasonable people might disagree about that.”
Researchers who study the issue typically include anyone who has been arrested or taken into custody by police, regardless of whether the charges were ultimately dropped. By that definition, many people who have never been convicted of a crime have a criminal history.
The issue is of concern to workers’ rights groups, which circulate the statistic to rally support for “ban the box” initiatives aimed at removing questions about criminal history from job applications.
“I often ask people if they think having a record is a rare event and if it clearly identifies you as a criminal,” said Shawn D. Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York who has collaborated with Dr. Brame. “Most people think it is a rare event. That’s simply not true. Lots of people have records.”
Researchers first tried to pin down how many Americans had a criminal record in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to study the criminal-justice system. The group’s final report concluded that 40% of all boys living in the U.S. would be arrested for a non-traffic offense during their lifetime.
That figure was the work of Ronald Christensen, who was employed by the commission’s science and technology task force to crunch numbers. Initially, the commissioners doubted his estimate.
“I was sure he had missed a decimal point and it was more like 5%,” said Alfred Blumstein,a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University who directed the task force. “We checked everything he did, and it was right.”
Using police and court records, Dr. Christensen devised a “virgin-arrest age curve” that identified the fraction of the population by age that had been arrested for the first time.
He then applied the curve to arrest records in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report to extrapolate the lifetime chance of arrest. The figure for girls was about 10%, for an overall lifetime chance of arrest, when combined with the boys, of about 1 in 4.
A weakness of the study was that it projected what would happen in the future based on the assumption that conditions in 1965 would remain constant. In fact, much has changed.
“They didn’t arrest for drugs then,” Dr. Blumstein said. “DUI was a traffic offense. They didn’t arrest for domestic violence.”
Drs. Brame and Bushway recently revisited the question using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a representative sample of children who were age 12 to 16 on Dec. 31, 1996, and who have been interviewed each year since to document their life experiences.
While Dr. Christensen’s work projected the chance of arrest over a lifetime, Dr. Brame and his colleagues documented what had already happened. They found that by age 23, approximately 30% of the survey participants had been arrested or taken into police custody for a non-traffic offense. The results were published in the journal Pediatrics.
But their study also had weaknesses: Some of the survey sample dropped out or never participated and, as with Dr. Christensen’s work, conditions that were present when the group was selected may no longer apply.
“It’s not at all clear that today’s 12- to 16-year-olds are having that experience,” Dr. Brame said. “Crime rates were much, much higher in the mid-1990s than they are today. And arrest rates for juveniles are much lower today than they were in mid-1990s.”
The National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit organization that supports removing the conviction history question from job applications and delaying background checks to reduce stigma, has used the Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems conducted by the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics to address the question.
The most recent report recorded more than 100 million arrest records, according to Becki R. Goggins, director of law and policy for the consortium, who notes the data include records for offenders who are deceased as well as multiple records for individuals who have been arrested in more than one state.
To account for these discrepancies, which could result in an overcount of the number of people with an arrest record, NELP subtracts about a third of the cases.
“We say 70 million,” said Maurice Emsellem,director of the Access and Opportunity Program at the NELP, an estimate that also works out to around 1 in 3 adults.
Although all of the numbers are squishy, the researchers agree that, if not precisely accurate, 30% is a reasonable ballpark estimate of the number of American adults with an arrest.
“If you find it surprising, you shouldn’t,” Dr. Bushway said. “There are a lot more people involved with the criminal-justice system than you know. It’s a pretty common American experience.”
Write to Jo Craven McGinty at Jo.McGinty@wsj.com
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