Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Do more prisons equal less crime?

Recently George Will, the national syndicated columnist, wrote a column in which he argued that the prison expansion of the last few decades led to a significant decline in the U.S. crime rate.


Although Will cited several kinds of evidence for his argument, The Sentencing Project soon issued a report, “Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will” (http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cwill_overall%20response.pdf) that refuted his evidence. Among other things, this report pointed out that states with lower increases in incarceration during the 1990s had greater crime declines than states with higher increases in incarceration. Other evidence cited by the report shows that increasing incarceration during the 1990s accounted for only about 25% of the crime decline during that decade; factors such as a change in drug trafficking markets and an improved economy probably played a much more important role. This increasing incarceration cost the nation billions of dollars that would have reduced crime more effectively had it been instead spent on crime prevention programs, such as early childhood intervention efforts directed at families whose children are most at risk for delinquency and crime as they grow up.


It is tempting and almost natural for Americans to believe that harsher sentencing practices and higher incarceration rates must be very effective in reducing crime. However, much research finds that this is not the case. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that the nation has wasted (in terms of reducing crime) most of the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on prisons and prisoners during the past few decades. This huge expenditure has certainly not made the nation much safer, and there is good reason to believe that it aggravates the very crime problem it is intended to relieve. I’ll return to this theme in a later posting.

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