Reply #44: Either way

[Atypical Liberal]

The "4 felonies" statistic comes from a Don Kates article. That's felony arrests, not convictions. Also, the notion of an "average criminal" here hides some "Bill Gates" effect: putting Bill Gates in stadium with 40,000 homeless people and then claiming that the average person there is a millionaire. Despite the fact that this is the average (in the one particular dataset Kates was looking at...), most murderers do not in fact have four prior felony arrests.

The article does only mention arrests, but that does not mean that they were not also convicted of the things they were arrested for.

Given the extensive criminal history of most of these criminals, dating back to adolescence, it seems likely that the premise is still quite true: Your average homicide committer is not a law-abiding citizen who just snapped one day.