Charge Attrition

Attrition by the Numbers

Most case attrition occurs at or near the entrance to the criminal justice system funnel. To begin with, about half of all serious crimes are not reported to the police, and most of those that are reported do not end in arrest. Of the 3 million or so felony offenders who are arrested annually, available data suggest that most are not convicted. Today, however, those convicted are considerably more likely to be incarcerated and for longer periods than a few decades ago, due primarily to greater public concern about crime and the War on Drugs. In 1970, imprisonments amounted to less than 1 percent of all reported index crimes. By 2000 the rate had tripled, rising to about 3 percent.

Figure 1 depicts the outcomes of 100 typical arrests for felony offenses in a cross-section of jurisdictions throughout the United States.

Figure 1. Typical Dispositions of 100 Felony Arrests in the United States, 1996

Case attrition among felony arrests begins with juvenile offenders: About 30 percent of all felony arrests involve juveniles. Statistics about the outcomes of these cases are not readily available, largely because of a widespread reluctance to maintain records involving juveniles. To the extent that the statistics are available on dispositions of the more than 1 million cases involving juveniles annually, these cases are characterized by more discretionary variation in handling than adult felony cases and fewer long-term incarcerations. (Some 700,000 juveniles were admitted to juvenile facilities in 1990 nationwide, over 80 percent to short-term confinement.)

More is known about what happens to adults arrested for felony crimes. About 30 percent of these cases are either rejected outright at the initial screening stage or dropped by the prosecutor soon afterward; some 70 percent are accepted for prosecution (about 50 percent of total felony arrests). In about one out of every ten such cases, the judge dismisses the case due to evidence insufficiency, procedural difficulty (e.g., the prosecutor is not prepared), or the triviality of the offense; in an equal number, the case is eventually dropped because the defendant fails to appear in court after having been released on money bond, personal recognizance, or third-party custody. (About 70 percent of defendants whose cases are accepted for prosecution are released prior to trial, and about one in every seven of these is rearrested before the case is resolved.) Of the remaining defendants—whose cases are accepted for trial and not dismissed or dropped—about 85 to 90 percent plead guilty, often to obtain a lighter sentence than they would receive if found guilty at trial; the others go to trial and are most often found guilty. So for every 100 felony arrests, 38 or 39 are convicted. Some are given probation, but most (24, on average) are incarcerated, the more serious receiving prison sentences and the others jail terms of less than a year (see Figure 1).

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