From 1960 to the early 1990s, violent crimes (murders, rapes, robberies,
and aggravated assaults) as reported to state and local police and tallied
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soared by 450 percent, including
a 23 percent rise between 1980 and 1990. But from 1990 to 1998 the violent
crime rate fell by 22.3 percent. Despite an increase in murders in New
York and several other big cities, violent crime was down again in 1999.
Through annual victimization surveys, the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS) counts virtually all property and violent crimes. Since 1993 the
two indices have moved largely in tandem and clearly in the right direction.
In recent polls most citizens have said that they feel safer in their
own neighborhoods.
Over a quarter-century's worth of public investments and private efforts
were bound to slow or reverse the climb in crime. They did, but certain
laws must still be obeyed -- the laws, that is, of diminishing returns
and perverse and unintended consequences. Merely repealing old public
laws or passing new ones will not do. Over the next decade the nation's
record juvenile population (more than 70 million and counting) will enter
its most crime-prone years.
To keep crime going down, deal with this demographic bulge, and mitigate
the adverse social consequences of present anti-crime policies, a new
set of public-private initiatives will be needed.
First comes the challenge of explaining why crime dropped. Theories abound.
Some cite changes in policing. Others stress the demise of crack-cocaine.
Still others cite drops in the number of young males, or improved economic
conditions, or carrot-and-stick anti-violence efforts undertaken through
law enforcement partnerships with community and church leaders, or packed
prisons, or federal policies like the Brady handgun-control bill and "100,000
cops."
Each of these theories has lots of explaining left to do. For example,
policing reform was a big part of the crime-drop story in New York, but
not in Los Angeles and several other big cities that have also enjoyed
dramatic reductions in crime. Neither crack-cocaine nor drug-selling,
gun-toting street gangs have disappeared. Such data as we now have give
only tentative answers to the question of what fraction of the crime drop
has been due to increased imprisonment.
Diminishing Returns
Nobody predicted or truly understands the decline in crime, but that
will not keep responsible leaders and concerned citizens from searching
for effective ways to keep crime on the run, nor should it. Begin by acknowledging
that we have yet to return to the levels of public safety enjoyed by our
parents and grandparents, or to the days when it was not wishful thinking
to call youth criminals "juvenile delinquents."
In 1960 the violent crime rate was 160.9 per 100,000 citizens. By 1970,
the rate had risen to 363.5, on the way to 596.6 in 1980 and 731.8 in
1990. The violent crime arrest rate per 100,000 persons aged 10 to 17
rose from 131.4 in 1975 to 239.5 in 1990, a 182 percent increase. Youths
perpetrated 137,000 more violent crimes in 1994 than they did in 1985.
As murders by adults fell, murders by juveniles and young adults rose.
For example, between 1983 and 1995, the murder commission rate for white
males aged 14 to 17 doubled to 20.8 per 100,000, and the rate at which
black males of the same age cohort committed murder more than tripled
to 165.8 per 100,000. Over the same period, the murder commission rate
per 100,000 white males aged 18 to 24 jumped from 23.5 to 31.6, while
for black males it doubled from 137.7 to 288.3 (1 in 357).
In 1968 Washington began what became a steady stream of multi-billion-dollar
federal investments in all manner of crime prevention, intervention, and
enforcement programs. During the 1980s, Congress passed at least one new
crime or drug control bill every two years. On the heels of the 1993 Brady
handgun-control law, the 1994 omnibus federal crime bill mandated life
imprisonment for federal criminals convicted of three violent offenses;
banned certain assault weapons; and authorized about $9 billion to hire
local police,$8 billion to build state prisons, and $7 billion for crime
prevention programs.
Still, Washington rightly remained the junior partner in crime control.
State and local governments poured more money and personnel than ever
into the three c's of criminal justice administration: courts, cops, and
corrections. Meanwhile, urban public schools installed metal detectors
and increased security budgets. Millions of private citizens and business
owners made crime-avoidance lifestyle changes (no walking alone at night,
no driving without locking the car doors); purchased guns and home security
systems; joined neighborhood watch groups; created gated communities;
hired rent-a-cops; and took other measures to make the places where they
lived, worked, shopped, attended school, and recreated relatively impervious
to crime. For safety's sake, crime-weary city dwellers, black and white,
moved in droves to the suburbs.
Then comes the matter of unintended consequences, some quite negative.
Take sentencing policy. As crime began to climb, the nation's prison population
fell, from about 213,000 in 1960 to 196,000 in 1970. The average time
served by prisoners fell, too. Back then, many leading liberal Democrats
doubled as anti-incarceration ideologues. It took over two decades and
the rise of the New Democrats for the party to recover fully from this
folly, but recover it did. In the mid-1980s, Democrats in Congress and
in many states called for sentencing felons convicted of murder, rape,
robbery, and aggravated assault to prison for more than a few years.
They succeeded. State prisons held 1.1 million felons in 1997, up from
690,000 in 1990. Violent offenders accounted for 50 percent of the total
increase in state prison populations during this seven-year period, drug
offenders for 19 percent, and property offenders for 16 percent. The average
time served in state prison by violent offenders was about 43 months in
1993 (representing 47 percent of sentence). Violent felons admitted to
state prison today will serve an average of close to 88 months (representing
roughly 80 percent of sentence), or double the average time served by
violent offenders released in 1993.
Putting more convicted violent felons behind bars for longer terms has
helped to cut violent crime. BJS data document that 62 percent of state
prisoners in 1991 had been convicted of one or more violent crimes, and
that felons who were back in prison for a parole violation or a new crime
in 1991 had committed at least 6,800 murders, 5,500 rapes, 8,800 assaults,
and 22,500 robberies while out on parole. BJS statistician Patrick A.
Langan has estimated that had the post-1975 prison population not risen
as it did, in 1989 alone there would have been 390,000 more murders, rapes,
robberies, and aggravated assaults. University of Chicago economist Steven
D. Levitt has estimated that each additional incarceration averted about
15 crimes a year, including two or three violent crimes. Criminologist
Richard Rosenfeld has estimated that increased imprisonment has accounted
for more than a quarter of the decline in homicides.
But in mid-1999, as the prison population approached 1.3 million, the
ratio of violent to non-violent felons entering prisons fell. For example,
studies by myself and others have estimated that in 1997 about a quarter
of persons admitted to state prisons, and over half of those admitted
to federal ones, were drug-only offenders, meaning felons whose only crimes,
detected or undetected, were
nonviolent drug-dealing offenses. The public-safety value of imprisoning
drug-only offenders is nil.
The justice system is becoming progressively less capable of distributing
sanctions and supervision rationally. For example, Harvard economist Anne
Morrison Piehl has estimated that about half of all persons imprisoned
on drug charges in Massachusetts have no known record of violence, while
half of the state's community-based probation population consists of known
violent felons.
Especially given the sorry state of probation, this is insane. In 1999
the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation (CCI) published
a report drafted by five present and past presidents of the nation's leading
associations of probation workers. The report stated that, with more than
3.4 million persons on probation, over half of them convicted felons,
"widespread political and public dissatisfaction with community corrections
has often been totally justified." At least half of probationers
commit new crimes while "under supervision." Probation has simply
lost track of about 350,000 probationers, including thousands of violent
felons. Most "intensive" supervision probation programs remain
shams. In many cities, "fortress probation" by officers who
literally never see their "cases" except on paper is the administrative
norm.
The CCI report offered a blueprint for "reinventing probation"
in ways that would promote public safety while helping probationers to
get off drugs, find jobs, and otherwise function as responsible citizens.
It generated lots of media attention, and it has since sparked a dozen
or so local probation reform initiatives. Still, public spending on probation
remains paltry (about $200 per year per probationer), and statewide probation
reform efforts have hardly even begun.
Likewise, virtually nothing is being done to mitigate the indirect social
costs of anti-crime policies. These costs include 1.9 million children
who on any given day have one or both parents behind bars, and tens of
millions of ex-prisoners with dim life prospects. By every measure, the
low-income children of incarcerated adults are the single most severely
at-risk youth population in America -- at risk of failing in school, suffering
abuse and neglect, suffering from untreated illness, becoming crime victims,
ending up incarcerated themselves, and more. When their parents leave
prison -- as over 1 million persons did in just the last three years --
they typically return home with uncorrected drug habits, unmarketable
job skills, or both.
Also, as more and more veteran police officers and drug-enforcement agents
now concede, our decades-old crackdown on
drug-dealing felons has morphed into socially polarizing law enforcement
practices such as racial profiling on state highways, hassling or harassing
urban minority kids who are merely hanging out on street corners, and
so on. As I have argued elsewhere, the time has come to repeal the mandatory-minimum
drug sentencing policies that encourage such negative policing practices,
take parents away from their children, deny or delay effective drug treatment,
and yield little or nothing in the way of improved public safety.
Safer Directions
To deal with these unwelcome byproducts of our current policies, the
focus for New Democrats and compassionate conservatives alike should be
on three key populations -- drug-only felons, felony probationers, and
the low-income urban children of imprisoned adults. Federal policies can
help.
Start with the children. The only organization with any major presence
in the lives of both prisoners and their children is Prison Fellowship
(PF), an international Christian para-church organization started a quarter-century
ago by ex-Watergate felon Charles Colson. PF ministers to prisoners in
every state, and last year it mobilized some of its 60,000 church-based
volunteers in America to deliver Christmas gifts to nearly 500,000 children
of incarcerated adults. PF is in the process of expanding this program,
known as Angel Tree, to 1 million children. Meanwhile, the nation's largest
and best-known secular mentoring organization, Big Brothers Big Sisters
of America (BBBSA), is in the process of expanding its present list of
about 160,000 "active matches" to a million. Chaired by former
Republican Sen. Dan Coats, BBBSA is already partnering with faith-based
organizations and developing a promising set of school-based mentoring
programs.
Together, PF and BBBSA could put responsible, caring nonparental adult
mentors and ministers into the lives of nearly all low-income urban children
who have lost a father or mother to prison or jail. The two organizations
have entered into preliminary discussions about jointly developing a prototype
program in Philadelphia. Researchers at Public/Private Ventures and the
University of Pennsylvania are poised to monitor the program's implementation
and measure its results.
The so-called charitable choice provision (section 104) of the 1996 federal
welfare reform law made it possible for Washington to fund faith-based
social welfare programs via contracts and vouchers on the same basis that
it funds any other non-governmental providers of such services. If the
PF/BBBSA partnership becomes real, and if the Philadelphia prototype shows
objective signs of real promise, then the next president and Congress
should help it come to other cities through an expansion of charitable
choice or by other legislative means.
Next, bring the reinventing government drive to state and local probation
so that fewer first-time felons become career criminals, waste years behind
bars, never parent their children, and never work for a living. The aforementioned
CCI report, and the spring 2000 issue of Corrections Management Quarterly,
provide a plan of attack. The next president and Congress should encourage
the Department of Justice to work with top state and local probation leaders,
financially leverage (but not lead or overtake) their reinvention initiatives,
and commission independent research to document the results and determine
how, if at all, successful initiatives can be replicated.
Finally, research by Yale psychologist Sally Satel and others clearly
suggests that "coerced abstinence" substance abuse programs
of various types work. BJS researchers have reported that fully half of
all adult probationers and state prisoners committed their latest offenses
while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Still, the federal government has not widely funded such programs for
offenders in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole. The 1989 report
of the first federal drug czar, William Bennett, lamented that "millions
of individuals who need help to stop using drugs" do not receive
effective treatment. The 1999 report of drug czar Barry McCaffrey called
for "closing the public treatment system gap." There are thousands
of existing programs, religious and secular, public and private, in prisons
and on the streets, that can be harnessed now to close that gap.
In sum, nothing is guaranteed to keep crime going down, but getting a
more positive public policy grip on the children of prisoners, drug-addicted
offenders, and felony probationers is a wise, humane bet.
