Is America’s Falling Crime Rate Real? Part 1

Cited: Time

People are now wondering if it is possible to solve big problems like health care, climate change and terrorism. It does not help the mood of Washington is a bit low. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel of one of the biggest problems this country faces. That light is focusing on violent crime. The US has been facing this problem for years and it seems to have been worse over the last 20 years. Most Americans have ranked violent crime at the top or near the top of urgent issues of government needed to handle. Americans have expected politicians from the lowliest Aldermen to the highest, the president, to come up with a way to solve violent crime issues. In fact, the murder rate in the US reached a near record 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991. Criminologist predicted a generation of super predators was going to make things even worse.

Then, a breakthrough, crime rates started falling. Apart from a few bumps and plateaus, they continued to drop through boom times and recessions, through peace and war, under Democrats and Republicans. Last year’s murder rate may be the lowest since the mid-1960s, according to preliminary statistics released by the Department of Justice. The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary. Had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That’s more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq–combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.

There’s a catch, though. No one can convincingly explain exactly how the crime problem was solved. Police chiefs around the country credit improved police work. Demographers cite changing demographics of an aging population. Some theorists point to the evolution of the drug trade at the wholesale and retail levels, while for veterans of the Clinton Administration, the preferred explanation is their initiative to hire more cops. Renegade economist Steven Levitt has speculated that legalized abortion caused the drop in crime. (Fewer unwanted babies in the 1970s and ’80s grew up to be thugs in the 1990s and beyond.)

The truth probably lies in a mix of these factors, plus one more: the steep rise in the number of Americans in prison. As local, state and federal governments face an era of diminished resources, they will need a better understanding of how and why crime rates tumbled. A sour economy need not mean a return to lawless streets, but continued success in fighting crime will require more brains, especially in those neighborhoods where violence is still rampant and public safety is a tattered dream.

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The Lockup Factor

In his book why crime rates fell, Tufts University sociologist John Conklin concluded that up to half of the improvement was due to a single factor: more people in prison. The U.S. prison population grew by more than half a million during the 1990s and continued to grow, although more slowly, in the next decade. Go back half a century: as sentencing became more lenient in the 1960s and ’70s, the crime rate started to rise. When lawmakers responded to the crime wave by building prisons and mandating tough sentences, the number of prisoners increased and the number of crimes fell.

Why Crime Went Away

Common sense, you might think. But this is not a popular conclusion among criminologists, according to Conklin. “There is a tendency, perhaps for ideological reasons, not to want to see the connection,” he says. Incarceration is to crime what amputation is to gangrene–it can work, but a humane physician would rather find a way to prevent wounds and cure infections before the saw is necessary. Prison is expensive, demoralizing and deadening. “Increased sentencing in some communities has removed entire generations of young men” from some minority communities, says San Francisco police chief George Gascón. “Has that been a factor in lowering crime? I think it probably has. I think it also probably has had a detrimental effect on those communities.”

Prisoners leave saddened parents, abandoned mates, fatherless children. Of course, in many cases, those families are better off with their violent relatives behind bars. But a court system that clobbers first-time offenders with mandatory sentences–sometimes for nonviolent crimes–will inevitably lock up thousands of not-so-bad guys alongside the hardened criminals. Not everyone agrees on the definition of a nonviolent criminal, but studies have estimated that as many as one-third of all U.S. prison inmates are in that category, most of them locked up on drug charges.

R. Dwayne Betts may be one of those not-so-bad guys, sentenced to nine years in an adult prison on a first offense at age 16. It’s hard to know if a less severe punishment would have worked. Betts hijacked a stranger’s car at gunpoint, which is a dangerous and depraved thing to do. But he also showed signs of promise, having earned his high school diploma a year ahead of schedule. Betts gradually learned to navigate the violence and boredom of prison and emerged in 2006 ready to launch a respectable life, enrolling in college, getting married and writing a book called A Question of Freedom. He looks on those prison years as a costly void, “a waste of society’s time and money in the sense that I didn’t get any rehabilitation or any educational opportunities.” Most inmates, Betts continues, can’t do what he has done; they don’t have the tools. “I was fortunate in that I knew how to read, I liked books, was pretty intelligent, and I knew I had no intention of being locked up for the rest of my life.”

With government budgets hammered red by the Great Recession, the high cost and human toll of the lock-’em-up strategy has made it hard to sustain. California lawmakers decided last month to cut the number of state prisoners by 6,500 in the coming year. Other states are already at work, on a smaller scale. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, 20 states reduced their prisoner counts by a total of nearly 10,000 inmates. As a result, according to the Justice Department, the number of state and federal prisoners grew by less than 1% nationwide–the smallest increase in nearly a decade. (The number of blacks behind bars is, in fact, falling as the rate of incarceration among

In interviews with police chiefs across the country, TIME heard the same story again and again. It is the saga of a revolution in law enforcement, a new way of battling the bad guys, and it begins, at least in some tellings, with a colorful New York City transit cop named Jack Maple. He worked the subways back when the city was averaging four, five, almost six murders a day, and even though the experts informed him that crime was inseparable from such “root causes” as poverty and despair, Maple developed a theory that the key cause was criminals. If police collected and analyzed enough data, they could figure out where the criminals liked to operate and when they tended to be there. Voilà: go there and arrest them, and crime would go down.

Continued in “Is America’s Falling Crime Rate Real? Part 2“

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My Take: Why are people asking what is behind America’s falling crime rate? If it is real, just let them keep doing what they are doing! We shouldn’t be looking the gift horse in the mouth that will get us in trouble. If this is true, maybe the number of lawyers in the world will diminish.

It means that less people are going to need a criminal attorney or a Brooklyn slip and fall lawyer. Of course, people will still need Denver civil law attorneys for other things like they might need a Brooklyn nursing home abuse lawyer because somebody abused an elderly relative or even a personal injury attorney Vail CO for an accident they had.

Of course, we always need a NY employment discrimination lawyer and slip and fall lawyer because people will always have trouble with an employer or slip and fall while shopping.

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