Ducking reality on crime

This Chicago Tribune column by Steve Chapman which I saw on Real Clear Politics yesterday purports to describe "How New York Won the War on Crime" without in fact doing anything of the sort. But one piece of his argument caught my attention because it is so common: denial that prison had anything to do with it.

This line is so common as to have become the conventional academic wisdom as apparently in a book mentioned by Chapman called "The City That Became Safe" by Franklin Zimring.

"While authorities elsewhere were building new prisons and filling them up," Chapman writes, "New York was not. After 1990, notes Zimring, the national incarceration rate rose by 65 percent. In Gotham, it shrank by more than a quarter. If locking up criminals is essential to combating crime, the city should be awash in violence. Instead, the tide went out -- and kept receding."

The obvious point being missed is that New York state's incarceration rate went up mightily in the 1980s, which very likely largely caused the precipitous decline in the New York City crime rate from 1990 -- as pointed out here in 2009. Because New York started building prisons sooner it got the benefit in crime reduction earlier than other states, although upstate has benefited less because some NYC criminals moved operations there. It is the reduction in crime that permitted stabilization and then reduction of the number of inmates.

Comments

[EFBertsch]

Bob your argument makes no sense to me. It seems to suggest that a large number of NYS (or NYC)criminals were locked up in the '80ies thereby reducing crime in NYC in the 90ies??? Come again????? All the criminally inclined (or actually convicted)were already in prison? There wasn't a new cohort of criminals to populate the prisons in the 90ies????? Is that your proposition?

[Bob Conner]

Hi Elmer: With the crime rate exploding from 1960 to 1990 (when there were six times more homicides in NYC than there had been 30 years earlier), prisons quickly filled up. Sentencing laws became unenforceable because there was insufficient prison capacity. Mario Cuomo's prison building was the foundation which enabled other policies to work -- those policies/attitudes including: Dinkins hiring more cops, improved policing techniques under Giuliani, tougher sentences passed at the Capitol, Schenectady's Operation Crackdown in 1993 (which had a big effect for a few years), welfare reform in the 1990s, police aid and tougher sentences passed in D.C., decreased public and elite tolerance for crime.

[Bob Conner]

And just as the broken windows theory says that ignoring crime brings more of it, so building prisons enabled New York to enforce laws and reverse the 30-year trend, creating a virtuous, un-vicious cycle.