Big Crime Drop in New York With Fewer Incarcerations

[madmusic]

Maybe some DUers are tired of these posts, but, damn, I have a liberal agenda:

By Jeralyn, Section Crime Policy
Posted on Fri Nov 24, 2006 at 10:00:38 PM EST

Is New York City now the safest city in the country?

BIG snip

Rehabilitation. Try it, it works.

more: http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/11/24/23038/008

[Boojatta]

1. "Rehabilitation. Try it, it works."

Are you suggesting that previously the majority of crime was committed by repeat offenders who were not deterred by the risk of being caught and who had opportunities to commit crimes because they either escaped or served short sentences?

Perhaps you are including in the realm of "rehabilitation" some kind of help for people who have not yet committed any crimes?

Did you consider demographic explanations or other possible explanations before arriving at the conclusion that successful rehabilitation explains the drop?

[madmusic]

2. All those questions are answered at the link...

I think. It is a TalkLeft blog post about the article. Very detailed. The point is, a "liberal program" is not a taboo as the Right consistently tries to frame it. Common sense is making its way back into politics.

[madmusic]

3. Liberalism resurrected from the dead...

Here is another take on it...

Blogged on to post on the WaPo story on NY, incarceration, and crime rates and saw that Kim had stolen my thunder. I agree that it's a succinct and thorough summary of what should be conventional wisdom as anyone fashions informed corrections sentencing policy. There are a couple of points that need to be added, though, even regarding Professor Blumstein's reference to the 25% reduction in crime associated with prisons in the 90s.

That 25% is a good rule of thumb, but other studies have the impact between high single digits and around 40%. The 25% was obtained by two different scholars employing two different methodologies. It's probably as good a number as we'll get. But please keep in mind a couple of provisos whenever you hear it cited. One, much of that 25% might have been obtained with other methods (as the overall theme of the article notes) that would have been more cost-effective, that is, freeing resources for other areas of criminal justice that have been starved as we funnel our funds into prisons. That means that those other methods could have been, more importantly, preventative, that is, without having to have a victim to start with.

The other thing to remember is that these estimates of "crime reduced by prison" generally refer to the crimes the offenders would have committed had they been out but weren't because the offenders were behind bars. But if prisons are "crimogenic" for some offenders, then we don't know how many more crimes they commit once they are released that they wouldn't have committed had we found another punishment and different supervision for them, especially since most offenders age out of criminal behavior to some extent as they reach the ages at which these guys have served their terms. I'm not aware of any good studies to research this question directly(which would be extraordinarily hard to design simply by their nature), but if someone else has seen anything, please let us know. In the meantime, studies of matched juveniles who get tracked for later criminality after either probation or prison (Petersilia's probation work and the Sampson/Laub life-course studies) indicate that putting people in prison generally gets you more criminals later. (The Washington State Institute for Public Policy, of course, also has some work indicating this as well.)

http://correctionssentencing.blogspot.com/2006/11/ditto.html