As America's crime rate declined during the past decade, some have been quick to conclude that rising incarceration rates should be credited with the crime drop. But some interesting data have come out over the summer months about the disconnect between incarceration and crime rates that are bad news for prison boosters.
In August, the Justice Department reported that in 1998, the nation's prison population rose at the lowest rate since 1979. In fact, nine states actually experienced declines in prison populations that year. Only a few weeks later, the Justice Department released its annual crime survey showing that, despite slowing prison growth, the following year (1999) recorded one of the largest drops in violent crime in the history of the survey.
The scenario of slowing prison growth and less crime is being played out throughout America. The California Department of Corrections reported in July that, for the first time since the late 1970s, California's prison population actually fell in 1999. The crime-control result? In 1999, California experienced its largest single year decline in crime in over two decades.
The very divergent paths taken by two similarly sized states during the 1990s -- New York and Texas -- illustrate the futility of over-reliance on prisons as a cure-all for crime. For the nation, the 1990s were the most punitive 10 years on record, with nearly a million people added to our nation's prisons and jails, more than any other decade in our history. During this punishing decade, Texas stood out with a prison population that grew at a higher rate than any other state, twice the national average. By contrast, New York's prison growth was the third lowest in the nation. In fact, Texas added more people to prison in the 1990s (98,081) than New York's entire prison population (73,233).
If prisons are a cure for crime, Texas should have mightily outperformed New York during the 1990s, from a crime-control standpoint. But the Lone Star State's crime drops were much less impressive than what occurred in the Empire State. From 1990 to 1998, the decline in New York's crime rate exceeded the decline in Texas' crime rate by 26 percent.
During the 1990s the economic boom reached into truly impoverished communities. Combined with sensible gun control laws, this favorably impacted crime rates in states that do and do not lock 'em up and throw away the key. The ``poverty-plus-guns-equals-crime'' scenario helps explain why states in the South, which tend to have higher unemployment and gun ownership, also have higher violent crime rates despite their heavy use of incarceration.
As America entered the new millennium, we passed the dubious milestone of imprisoning 2 million of our citizens. As we plot our crime-control strategies for the new century, it is important to remember that the goal of the criminal justice system should be to have fewer victims, not just more prisoners.
Vincent Schiraldi is director of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
© 2000 Mercury Center
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