Results matching “levitt wilson”

Mr. Grassley [Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee], for reasons that defy basic fairness and empirical data, has remained an opponent of almost any reduction of [federal] sentences. In a speech from the Senate floor this month, he called the bills "lenient and, frankly, dangerous," and he raised the specter of high-level drug traffickers spilling onto the streets.

Mr. Grassley is as mistaken as he is powerful. Mandatory minimums have, in fact, been used to punish many lower-level offenders who were not their intended targets. Meanwhile, the persistent fantasy that locking up more people leads to less crime continues to be debunked. States from California to New York to Texas have reduced prison populations and crime rates at the same time. A report released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since 2000 putting more people behind bars has had essentially no effect on the national crime rate.

At our next meeting [of a group consisting mostly of academics], which will also be in Washington...we will focus on the 'lead hypothesis,' that the removal of lead from paint and gasoline resulted in crime declines some years later and may largely explain the crime drop.

Want a million more serious crimes each year?  Two thousand more murders?  Five thousand more rapes?  Last week, the New York Times told us how to get them.

On Thursday, the Times published this editorial decrying mandatory minimum sentences and the dramatic increase in the prison population they have helped bring about.  Perhaps the key assertion in urging repeal of these laws was the claim that they "have helped fill prisons without increasing public safety."

That claim is false.  Because of what it is enlisted to help bring about, it is also astoundingly dangerous.

Twenty years ago in 1991, near the dawn of "incarceration nation," there were 14,872,900 serious, non-drug crimes in the United States. Last year there were 10,329,135 -- a crime decrease of about 4,543,760.  The numbers, taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, depict  --  contrary to the Times  --  a huge and unprecedented improvement in public safety.

Levitt and Spelman, in a Universtiy of Chicago analysis, concurred in by James Q. Wilson of UCLA, have found that "one-quarter or more" of the decrease in the number of crimes is because more people are being imprisoned and for longer.

One-quarter of 4,543,760 is 1,135,940.  In other words, we have a staggering 1,135,940 fewer serious, non-drug crimes per year now than 20 years ago because of mandatory minimums and other statutes increasing incarceration.

If we go back to the bad old days of yesteryear when we bought phony promises of rehabilitation and were less inclined toward imprisonment, this is what the numbers tell us we can expect each year:  More than 2,400 more murder victims, 5,400 more forcible rape victims, 78,000 aggravated assault victims, and hundreds of thousands more victims of robbery, burglary and auto theft.

The toll is staggering. 

The New York Times and the chorus of others who want to reverse the gains we have made through imprisonment should tell us, and loudly, how much of this blood curdling increase in crime victimization they are willing to accept. 

We have had a very significant, generation-long decrease in the crime rate.  It is now more than 40% lower than it was at its peak 20 or 25 years ago.

Why?

The release-them-now crowd will do anything to avoid telling you the truth.  Recently, I saw, among the comments on SL&P, that crime is falling because prospective criminals spend their time browsing the Internet (and I suppose they do  --  everyone else does).

Of course, as Kent and I have pointed out, crime has fallen for several reasons.  The most important, the one that dares not speak its name (at least not in defense bar circles), isn't that hard to figure out:  We have more of the people who commit crime in prison.  They aren't out and about to do their thing, so less of their thing is getting done.

As the eminent James Q. Wilson put it recently in the Wall Street Journal:

[W]e have little reason to ascribe the recent crime decline to jobs, the labor market or consumer sentiment. The question remains: Why is the crime rate falling?

One obvious answer is that many more people are in prison than in the past. Experts differ on the size of the effect, but I think that William Spelman and Steven Levitt have it about right in believing that greater incarceration can explain about one-quarter or more of the crime decline. Yes, many thoughtful observers think that we put too many offenders in prison for too long. For some criminals, such as low-level drug dealers and former inmates returned to prison for parole violations, that may be so. But it's true nevertheless that when prisoners are kept off the street, they can attack only one another, not you or your family.

Imprisonment's crime-reduction effect helps to explain why the burglary, car-theft and robbery rates are lower in the U.S. than in England. The difference results not from the willingness to send convicted offenders to prison, which is about the same in both countries, but in how long America keeps them behind bars. For the same offense, you will spend more time in prison here than in England. Still, prison can't be the sole reason for the recent crime drop in this country: Canada has seen roughly the same decline in crime, but its imprisonment rate has been relatively flat for at least two decades.

James Q. Wilson has this op-ed in the Sunday LA Times, responding to the Pew report about 1 in 100 in prison and the accompanying hullabaloo.

In the last 10 years, the effect of prison on crime rates has been studied by many scholars. The Pew report doesn't mention any of them. Among them is Steven Levitt, coauthor of "Freakonomics." He and others have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways (poverty, urbanization and the proportion of young men in the population) that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.

But so does putting people in prison. The typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses). Locking him up spares society those crimes. Several scholars have separately estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by 25%.