MORE TIME, LESS CRIME
THOMAS, ANDREW PEYTON
MORE TIME, LESS CRIME by Andrew Peyton Thomas FOX BUTTERFIELD of the New York Times regularly reports on what he sees as one of the great anomalies of the age: Incarceration rates are rising while...
...Americans may cherish many of the wrong values today, but at least we love our lives and property enough to be willing to lock up large numbers of criminals in expensive, out-of-the-way places...
...In other words, all other things being equal, the removal of known criminals from society ipso facto will reduce the crime rate...
...Nationwide, the recidivism rate for burglary is just under 50 percent...
...Robbers, like burglars, have high recidivism rates—the highest recidivism rates of any violent offenders...
...Prison can reduce the crime rate in two ways: (a) by teaching criminals that they will suffer punishment for breaking the law (which deters people from committing crimes), and (b) by removing criminals from society (which incapacitates them...
...Except for the mid-1980s, when the number of drug-related crimes rose, the decline in burglary rates has been steady...
...The data suggest a strong connection between burglary rates and incarceration rates...
...Still, those of us who, until recently, thought that crime rates would continue to rise because of social dissolution should admit that we underestimated the effectiveness of simple punishment...
...As a result, we would expect to see the strongest relationship between crime rates and incarceration rates for those offenses for which both deterrence and incapaci-tation are operative...
...Americans clearly are locking up the right people...
...This is higher than even the recidivism rate for drug offenders...
...Butterfield began, "The nation's prison population grew by 5.2 percent in 1997, according to the Justice Department, even though crime has been declining for six straight years, suggesting that the imprisonment boom has developed a built-in growth dynamic independent of the crime rate, experts say...
...Of course, improved police work, greater community involvement, teenage curfews, and other reforms have reinforced these trends...
...The serious-crime rate during the same period fell 22 percent...
...When the prison-building boom began in 1980, the burglary rate started to descend...
...As long as we drive this lesson home—and as long as America as a whole is spared the pathologies most acutely associated with the inner city—permanent reductions in our crime rates will be a realistic goal...
...The burglary rate dropped 44 percent from 1980 to 1996...
...In the 1990s, the burglary rate fell 25 percent in just six years...
...After all, the simplest explanation for today's declining crime rates is the simultaneous rise in incarceration rates...
...Burglaries and robberies have declined at a faster rate in the 1990s than any other serious crimes...
...To him and his likeminded profs, the continued rise in incarceration rates during a time of declining crime rates is a mystery tinged with injustice...
...We have seen in this decade that when career criminals are sent to prison, crime rates drop...
...First, we look for data on crime rates and incarceration rates...
...He noted that 52 percent of the total increase in male prisoners in 1997 came from criminals convicted of violent offenses...
...How do we test this...
...As Butterfield stated in a January article, the rise in incarceration rates is prompting "troublesome questions" about "whether the United States is relying too heavily on prison sentences to combat drugs and whether the prison boom has become self-perpetuating...
...Andrew Peyton Thomas, an attorney in Phoenix, is the author of Crime and the Sacking of America: The Roots of Chaos...
...The initiative would have required the release of all inmates sentenced for first-time drug offenses—about 1,000 inmates in all...
...As for drug offenses, the vast majority of inmates are career criminals, as demonstrated in Arizona, where in 1996 voters approved a drug-liberalization ballot initiative...
...Next we should consider the effect of incarceration on specific crimes...
...Criminals, as a result, are learning that society means business...
...Except for robberies, violent crimes are not well suited to this type of analysis...
...This new space has not gone empty: From 1980 to 1996, the incarceration rate lurched upward 209 percent...
...Over the same 16 years, there has been a relatively steady decrease in the serious-crime rate—a decrease of 31 percent...
...This was, again, during the same period in which the overall incarceration rate rose 38 percent...
...By "experts say," Butterfield meant that many liberal criminologists agree with him...
...From 1991 to 1996, robbery rates fell 26 percent (almost identical to the 25 percent decline in the burglary rate...
...Burglars have the highest recidivism rate of all serious offenders...
...From 1991 to 1996, incarceration rates rose 38 percent...
...Most murders, rapes, and other violent crimes are not committed in a serial fashion...
...And the success enjoyed to date scarcely guarantees future success...
...As a result, the number of inmates entitled to freedom shrank to 53...
...Even if the violent-crime rate continued to decline at its current rate, it would take 25 years for America to return to the violent-crime rate it enjoyed in 1960...
...MORE TIME, LESS CRIME by Andrew Peyton Thomas FOX BUTTERFIELD of the New York Times regularly reports on what he sees as one of the great anomalies of the age: Incarceration rates are rising while crime rates are falling...
...Yet Butterfield's own article in August had an answer to these questions...
...Like burglary, robbery—the taking of property from another by force or threat thereof—is a crime typically committed in serial fashion...
...Only anarchists would pronounce this a tragedy...
...Common sense and empirical knowledge conspire against the thesis that crime rates and incarceration rates are unrelated...
...In the 1990s, as word spread on the street that serious crimes would provoke serious punishment, crime rates fell dramatically...
...Tough incarceration rates may deter these criminals, but because violent criminals, by and large, do not commit many crimes of the same type, locking them up offers little marginal return in the way of incapacitation...
...This is highly unlikely for many reasons, including the cyclical nature of crime rates, the demographic bulge of young men coming of age over the next decade, and the fact that incarceration rates today are still quite low, relative to where they were in the late 1950s...
...As more violent offenders—murderers, rapists, and the like—were taken out of circulation, the violent-crime rate similarly declined 16 percent...
...An August article titled "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" was typical...
...But in 1997, the state legislature amended the law to disqualify from this amnesty all first-time drug inmates previously convicted of a felony...
...Daryl R. Fischer, research manager of the Arizona Department of Corrections, assisted in the preparation of this article...
...If not for incarceration, a very high percentage of burglars would simply keep on burglarizing...
...The most appropriate crime for testing both the deterrence effects and the incapacitation effects of incarceration is burglary...
...In 1980, America began an unprecedented boom in prison construction...
...The same analysis holds true for robbery rates...
...Also, most violent criminals have relatively low recidivism rates...
...Deterrence and incapacita-tion combined to produce an impressive decline in burglary rates...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
