How Federal Agencies Keep Americans in the Dark About Crime Statistics
by KATIE MCHUGH AND NEIL MUNRO
BreitBart.com
16 Apr 2017
The Department of Justice should keep the public informed about the results of former President Barack Obama’s decision to grant early releases to 1,715 convicts, says a former federal prosecutor.
“What [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions Justice Department needs to do now is track the hundreds of fellows who got these pardons and commutations,” said former federal prosecutor Bill Otis. “With overall recidivism rates for drug offenses already being 77 percent, I think we have a pretty good idea, but [the public] should get specifics: How many of these guys re-offend; what’s the nature of the new crime; were there related violent crimes in the mix as well; and how many victims (including but not limited to addicts and overdose victims) were there?”
But only the Department of Justice has the manpower and access to raw data needed to detail and analyze Obama’s last-minute, closed-door process which released a record 1,715 convicts back into Americans’ neighborhoods. At least one other group has tried to gauge the impact of President George W. Bush’s pardons—but that group had to hire three researchers to assemble only some of the data that the federal government has at its fingertips but does not share.
Since January, President Donald Trump has already taken some steps to increase federal transparency by forcing agencies to release data about crime by illegal aliens. For Otis, this change is a good example of what officials should do with information about Obama’s commutations.
“It may be helpful to have some kind of interagency standard or oversight body to ensure the public has reasonable access to the data it paid for,” consistent with privacy rules, said Jason Richwine, a public policy expert who studies government data to gauge the impact of policy alternatives. “When the government publishes [only] selected statistics from the restricted data, we get answers only to the questions that the government thinks are important—not necessarily the same questions that the public wants (or needs) to be answered,” he said.
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