FAIR SCAAP Crime Report Has Many Serious Problems

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) recently released areport on illegal immigrant incarceration rates that is poorly contrived and terribly executed.   FAIR uses the number of illegal immigrants counted under theState Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), which compensates local and state governments for incarcerating some illegal immigrants, to calculate the illegal immigrant incarceration rate.   FAIR finds that illegal immigrants, as measured by the number of SCAAP aliens, are incarcerated at much higher rates than natives and legal immigrants according to their faulty methods. There are many problems with FAIR ’s report. The first problem is that it doesn ’t state what year or period of years that it is analyzing.  I can’t even work backward because their citations only indicate when they accessed the relevant data, not which annual data they accessed.  This means that it would take many dozens of hours of guesswork to recreate their work.The second problem with using SCAAP data is that they are the oddest crime data.   The SCAAP aliens are a measure of the stock and flow of illegal immigrants into state and local correctional facilities over a year.  SCAAP is used to compensate local communities and states for the costs of incarcerating some illegal immigrants, it is not designed to be used to estimate illegal immigrant incarceration rates.  As a result, the normal operation of dividing the number of prisoners who are in SCAAP by th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs