Is Locking 'em Up the Answer?
Fischer, Karen
Is Locking 'em Up the Answer? For violent criminals probably-for the rest, it's not so clear BY KARIN FISCHER IT'S A POLITICIAN'S DREAM CME TRUE. FOR the second year in a row, the Clinton...
...California and Florida now spend more to incarcerate people than to educate their college age populations...
...There’s not a market for rape, so if you take a rapist off the street, the niche is not filled,” he explains...
...Almost certainly, the high incarceration rates have had some effect on the crime rates...
...Drug-dealing is a “demand -driven market,” he explains, which means that imprisoned dealers are simply replaced by other individuals willing to push to make a buck...
...But today’s tough-on-crime advocates would do well to take a closer look at the numbers...
...If one of the central purposes of criminal law is to help protect society from crime, the split in the impact of incarceration on different types of crime rates suggests that our current penal system is out of focus...
...approximately half had been incarcerated for violent crimes, while more than 60 percent had a past history of violence...
...Neither the NCVSs nor UCR’s celebrated survey results included data on drug crimes, which are considered victimless...
...One of the strange ironies in the growth in incarceration is that we’ve been locking people away for drug offenses,” says Blumstein...
...Daily Mail...
...Case Not Closed Not everyone is comfortable with drawing parallels between incarceration and crime rates...
...Of particular note, the UCR indicated that violent crime in 1996 fell 7 percent-the largest decrease in 35 years...
...Even more significantly, homicides committed by young people decreased by more than 65 percent while murders and assaults involving guns all but disappeared...
...Approximately 90 percent of state prisoners have a history of violence and recidivism,’’ notes Greenfeld...
...It’s hard to imagine that taking this group off the streets wouldn’t have a significant effect-it’s just hard to know how much...
...today, in 85 percent of cases, he would be slapped with a fixed sentence of, say, I2 years...
...The Clinton administration has been understandably upbeat about the recent trend, patting itself on the back for its crime-fighting achievements...
...As a result, our much-lauded War on Drugs is not only paclung prisons with drug offendersa category of criminal apparently undeterred by incarceration-it is also generating a market for even more pushers out on the streets...
...On the local level, in 1996 some 325,000 inmates in California’s county jails were released early because of overcrowding...
...Yet 25 percent of new offenders in the 1990s have been imprisoned for drug-only crimes (up from 10 percent in the early ’70s...
...between 1990 and 1995, the number of drugrelated offenders rose 27 percent...
...What’s more, says Greenfeld, one has to look at the people who are being locked away...
...Why wasn’t incarceration the answer when crime was going up...
...While the lock-’em-up strategy may be effective in dealing with certain types of crime, with others it may actually be undermining our crime-fighting efforts...
...As of June 1996, almost 1.7 million of us were incarcerated -a number roughly equivalent to the population of Utah...
...It’s tough to say that crime rates are decreasing in the last two years simply because of incarceration,” says Carnegie Mellon criminology professor Alfred Blumstein...
...While evidence indicates that incarceration may help reduce violent crime, no such evidence exists regarding drug offenses...
...But even as both the arrests for drug-abuse violations and the percentage of federal incarcerations for drug-related crimes have been climbing since the late %Os, drug use during that period has not shown a marked decline...
...What’s more, tougher sentencing laws are ensuring that criminals in most states are sraying in jail for longer periods of time...
...The drop has been very sharp . . . and very broad over the last few years,” says Lawrence A. Greenfeld, deputy director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics...
...FOR the second year in a row, the Clinton administration has had the pleasure of announcing that, after a decade-long rise in crime, America’s streets are actually becoming safer...
...Blumstein offers one possible explanation for the disparity, pointing out the supply-and-demand aspect of certain types of criminal behavior...
...Attorney General Janet Reno remarked: “Crime has been falling for several years because policy makers, law enforcement, and ordinary Americans are coming together to do the right thing.,’ Of course, most notable among the steps being taken to combat crime may be the dramatic increase in incarcerations...
...Whatever the long-term drawbacks of this nation’s lock-’em-up mentality, if you put enough people behind bars for a long enough time, there will be fewer people left roaming free to commit crimes...
...Drug crimes, however, are another story...
...As more and more drug offenders are dumped into the system, states are facing another marketing reality: Imprisonment is costly business...
...A 1993 study of prisoners in New Jersey found that each had committed a median number of 12 non-drug-related crimes in the year before he or she was caught...
...A cause for celebration on their own merits, these numbers are even more impressive considering that in ’96, both of the surveys had reported record-setting declines in both violent and property crime...
...Today, more Americans than ever before are behind bars...
...Last year, homicides in Boston dropped to a 30-year low, and robberies to a 26-year low...
...saw a 10 percent drop in violent crime from the same period in 1996...
...Over the past two decades, as crime I-ates have fluctuated, incarceration rates have risen steadily-doubling over the last 10 years, tripling over the last 20...
...In November, the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an annual poll of 50,000 US...
...In fact, “how much” seems to vary significantly depending on the type of crime involved...
...Increasingly, states will have to make tough spending decisions about whether to construct additional prisons or to invest in area schools, roads, tax cuts, etc...
...But city residents aren’t the only ones seeing the KARIN FIESCHER is the police reporter for The Charleston (W.Va...
...Although sentences handed down in most state courts are not necessarily longer, they are more determinate...
...Just one week later, the FBI announced that its Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), comprising data from 17,000 police departments nationwide, showed a 5 percent decrease in violent crime and a 4 percent drop in property crime from the previous year...
...Between 1990 and 1995, the number of violent offenders behind bars increased 47 percent...
...What’s more, crime is primarily a young person’s vocation, and the longer sentences now in vogue may keep potential repeat offenders out of commission during their prime-crime years...
...All told, the American crime rate is now equal to that of the Netherlands, Australia, or Canada...
...The most recent NCVS revealed that the biggest drop in crime rates during the first half of 1997 was in the area of sex crimes-which also happens to be the second-fastest growing segment of the prison population...
...But as Lawrence Greenfeld points out: “You can’t have more than a million people under lock and key . . . and not have some crime reduction value...
...households, showed that during the first six months of last year the U.S...
...At the very least, this suggests it’s time to take a closer look at our policies towards non-violent offenders...
...benefits...
...It affects whites and blacks, young and old, cities and rural areas...
...As of last March, California’s prison system was housing 148,000 inmates in facilities intended to hold a mere 80,000...
...Twenty years ago, a convicted felon might receive a sentence of two to 20 years...
...For violent criminals probably-for the rest, it's not so clear BY KARIN FISCHER IT'S A POLITICIAN'S DREAM CME TRUE...
...The change has been most dramatic in urban areas, Boston being among the most notable...
...Prison space is at a premium everywhere from Ohio to Texas...
...A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of 14,000 state and 6,000 federal prisoners found that eight out of 10 had at least one prior conviction...
...But the fastest-growing segment of the population, drug offenders, has not been accompanied by a similar decrease in drug offenses...
Vol. 30 • January 1998 • No. 1
