The Next Crime Wave
The New York Times has an editorial, Creating the Next Crime Wave that debunks the theory that prosecutors and tough sentencing laws are responsible for the drop in crime rate:
The United States has the largest, most expensive and fastest-growing prison system in the world, and it may be unsustainable over the long run. Faced with a national price tag for corrections that exceeds $50 billion per year, states are being forced to re-evaluate the stiff sentencing policies that drove up the prison population to more than 2 million, from 200,000 three decades ago. In recent years, 25 states have eased sentencing policies and reinstated early release and treatment programs for drug offenders, now about a quarter of the nation's prisoners....Over the last decade, national crime rates fell sharply. Prosecutors and the police rushed to take credit, arguing that crime had gone down because criminals had been locked up.
The problem with this explanation is that crime went down just as much in states that did not adopt tough new policing and sentencing strategies as in states that embraced them. The emerging consensus is that mass incarceration accounts for only a fraction of the drop in violent crime. The strong economy of the 1990's clearly played a role, as did demographic factors — and the ending of the crack epidemic, aided by teenagers who shunned the drug after seeing parents and older siblings destroyed.
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