The Other Big Crime Drop
USEEM, BERT & PIEHL, ANNE MORRISON
The Other Big Crime Drop What happened to America’s violent prisons? BY BERT USEEM & ANNE MORRISON PIEHL Crime rates peaked nationally in 1995 and have declined substantially over the...
...Prison crime data are notoriously problematic, but statistics on some types of crime are more reliable than others...
...One place has topped all of these impressive fi gures, yet it has received little publicity and no credit...
...Prison suicide rates also dropped sharply...
...Smaller cities show the same trend...
...And the predicted wave of prison riots never appeared...
...Kansas City’s violent crime rate fell from 1,930 to 857...
...Anne Morrison Piehl is an associate professor of economics at Rutgers University...
...Their Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration was recently published by Cambridge University Press...
...If the inmates of American prisons were assembled in a single locality, it would be the fourth largest U.S...
...In 2006 (the last year for which statistics are available), the number of people in state and federal prisons approached 1.6 million—a rate of 501 inmates per 100,000 people...
...The transformation was ultimately achieved by new administrators attacking the root causes of disorder...
...They predicted that mass prisons would have all the features of failed states: Such prisons would be tense, dangerous, and too weakly governed to prevent high rates of individual and collective violence...
...Then, in the mid-1970s, the number of prisoners began shooting upward and has continued in that direction ever since...
...the homicide rate in state prisons declined a staggering 94 percent...
...Even in 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available), more than half (52 percent) of the sentenced state prisoners had been convicted of a violent offense, down from 59 percent in 1980...
...BY BERT USEEM & ANNE MORRISON PIEHL Crime rates peaked nationally in 1995 and have declined substantially over the last decade...
...they are almost always reported and accurately counted in official statistics...
...in 2006, there were 473...
...The only question for many criminologists was when the buildup would pass the tipping point that would precipitate mass disorder: When would the line tracking violence shoot straight up...
...In fact, the opposite occurred, with prison violence trending downward for decades...
...While 7 percentage points is not a trivial decline, it cannot account for the very large drop in prison violence...
...This rate decreased to 16 suicides per 100,000 in 1990, and has remained stable...
...In 1995, there were 684 violent crimes nationally per 100,000 residents...
...Prison wardens rejected the conventional wisdom that inmates— in the majority in any prison—could disrupt prison life at will, and they determined to counter whatever inmates threw at them (whether gang dominance on the yards, riots in the blocks, or individual predation in the cells...
...Whatever the value the prison buildup would have in reducing crime on the streets, reputable criminologists feared that prisons on a mass scale would have internal troubles so severe that they would lead to an organizational collapse...
...Our safer prisons are unheralded, but they are a great achievement...
...Homicides are the best-measured crimes...
...By 2000, prison riots had become rare...
...Some criminologists have concluded that the rate of violence has declined so precipitously because nonviolent offenders are being increasingly imprisoned...
...That this did not happen refl ects the professionalism in a sector that is largely invisible unless things go badly...
...In 1990, there were 8, and in 2003, the homicide rate dropped further to 4. The chances of being murdered behind bars plunged during the buildup of the prison population...
...Modern record keeping in prisons begins in 1925, and for the 50 years thereafter the number of state and federal prisoners kept pace with the growth of the general population...
...Whatever else inmates want, they want to go home...
...Society would, like a thermostat, adjust its imprisonment decisions whenever the rate of imprisonment began to fall or rise too far...
...Los Angeles’s violent crime rate dropped from 2,405 to 787...
...There is, however, no evidence to back up the assertion...
...The much-publicized decline in New York City’s violent crime rate saw it go from 2,384 per 100,000 residents in 1995 to 638 in 2006...
...But the tipping point never came...
...Both the absolute number of riots and the ratio of riots to inmates declined...
...Inmates who committed new crimes (against both staff and inmates) were, instead of being punished with administrative sanctions, increasingly prosecuted, with new sentences tacked onto their existing ones...
...The exact manifestation of this leadership vision varied from one jurisdiction to the next, but at the center of the transformation was a hands-on management that focused on collecting “key indicators” to track all in-house trends over time...
...Filling so many new prison beds, the criminal justice system must have reached deeper into the pool of offenders, grabbing less serious ones as the more serious offenders would have already been locked up...
...Gang membership was disrupted by frequent moves to break up cliques...
...In 1973, there were 63 homicides per 100,000 state inmates...
...More defi nitively, the absolute number of prison riots has declined dramatically, not just the ratio of riots to prisoners...
...If prisons had fallen apart as predicted, it would have signaled that, even when under direct and continual super vision, those who violate the societal norms we consider most important can continue to do so even when detained by the state...
...Between 1973 and 2003, Bert Useem is a professor of sociology at Purdue University...
...Even Detroit (despite its economic woes and population losses) had a slightly lower rate of violent crime in 2006 than 1995, 2,419 down from 2,699...
...The location we have in mind is U.S...
...Training was increased for correctional offi cers, promoting their professionalism and commitment...
...They do happen from time to time—most recently, in a private prison in Indiana housing inmates transferred there to relieve overcrowding in Arizona (no deaths, a handful of injuries)—just not very often...
...In 1980, there were 34 inmate suicides per 100,000 inmates...
...city—tied with Philadelphia...
...The better explanation of the decline in violent crime in prisons is improved leadership and management...
...While prisons have indeed become increasingly populated with drug and property offenders, the largest component of state inmates remains violent offenders...
...The rate of imprisonment remained stable, at about 110 inmates per 100,000 people...
...This crime decline was quite unexpected even, indeed especially, by criminologists...
...The prison riots of the 1970s and 1980s (like the 1971 debacle at Attica, which left 43 dead, or the 1980 bloodbath in Santa Fe with 33 deaths) would multiply...
Vol. 13 • April 2008 • No. 31
