MORE police = FEWER in prison

[True Earthling]

Last edited Sun Jan 29, 2012, 05:17 PM - Edit history (5)

As NYC demonstrates with staggering statistical evidence, harsh punishment and more jails are not the answer to crime prevention. The answer is more police and better policing methods. Excuse the link to the WSJ but this was written by a UC Berkeley law professor...

The dramatic drop in New York's crime rate has become a phenomenon that its citizens take for granted. Between 1990 and 2011, the homicide rate in the city dropped 80%, the robbery rate fell 83% and the burglary rate was down by 86%. Auto theft has been banished to the endangered-species list, with a current rate of about 6% of the 1990 level. Nor is this profound change just the wishful thinking of police statisticians; it has been confirmed by independent measures such as auto-insurance claims and data from other levels of government.

The rest of the country also experienced a decline in crime over the 1990s, but New York's was twice as large and has lasted twice as long. So what has the city done differently? Rather than focus on imprisonment, New York has hired more police officers and changed its policing strategy. The results of this experiment contradict four decades of crime-control orthodoxy. Since 1971, the U.S. prison population has grown from just over 200,000 to 1.5 million. When adjusted for population growth, the rate of imprisonment has increased 400%.

From 1990 to 2009, while the rest of the nation increased its rate of incarceration by 65%, New York City decreased its prison and jail rates by 28%. If the city had instead followed the national trend, it would have locked up an additional 58,000 persons at an annual cost of well over $2 billion.Another welcome finding from New York is that the new policing strategy has discouraged repeat offenders. In 1990, among all the prisoners from New York City released from state prison, a full 28% were convicted of another felony within three years. But as the general crime rate went down, so did the crime rate of released offenders. By 2006, their three-year reconviction rate had dropped to 10%.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181291838644350.html?mod=topix

Professor Zimring ...

[saras]

1. Correlation is not causation.

Show that this works similarly in hundreds of different cities, with different populations, traditions, cultures, economies, and problems.

Or contrarily, show why OWS protests, like in Oakland, aren't examples of this success. There's plenty of cops there - does it work?

[True Earthling]

2. The statistics were compiled over a 20 year period from general crime such as homicide, robbery

auto theft and burglary. The crime rate associated with social protest is not the focus of this method of policing... on the contrary the presence of more police may actually exacerbate the situation resulting in more arrests.

The population of NYC is about as diverse as it gets and 20 years of data from different economic periods and a such a huge population base and when compared to historical averages and other similar cities over the same time period makes it a very robust data set. It would be very difficult to come up with an alternative explanation to account for the dramatic differences in crime rates of NYC versus its peers.

[HuckleB]

3. Exactly. -eom-

There are many possible causes.

[Warren DeMontague]

4. Or maybe if we stopped filling our prisons up with pot smokers?

Hmmm, what an idea.