September 28, 2000

Effect of Prison Building on Crime Is Weighed
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
The first studies to look at the link between the enormous growth of
incarceration and the significant drop in crime in the 1990's show that the
nation's prison-building boom has accounted for 5 percent to 25 percent of
the eight-year decline. In light of those findings, some of the researchers
questioned whether the benefits from the growth of incarceration were worth
the cost to taxpayers.

The studies found that the number of inmates in jails and prisons quadrupled
over the past two decades, to two million, and now cost about $40 billion a
year. To avert one killing in the 1990's, it required locking up an
additional 670 prisoners, at a cost of $13.4 million a year, according to an
estimate by Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University
of Missouri at St. Louis.

Professor Rosenfeld's findings are included in the most comprehensive of the
new studies, a book, "The Crime Drop in America," to be published next month
by Cambridge University Press. Written by a group of academic experts, the
studies found that "no single factor can be invoked as the cause of the crime
decline of the 1990's."

Instead, the authors conclude, "the explanation appears to lie with a number
of factors," which interacted with each other, making "it difficult to
isolate the relative contribution of any one of them."

Among these factors, in addition to the growth in incarceration, the authors
said, were the ebbing of the crack epidemic, innovative efforts to keep guns
out of the hands of criminals, new police tactics and an improved job market.
The authors said it was difficult if not impossible to determine how much
these factors contributed to the drop in crime.

In addition, Professor Rosenfeld said, the country may be undergoing a
cultural change in which people have become less tolerant of certain forms of
violence, particularly domestic violence, which has helped account for a
decline in killings by adults every year since 1980.

"It is possible that American adults are becoming, in a word, more
civilized," he said.

A similar cultural change beginning in the late Middle Ages in Western
Europe, with the spread of courts of law and better manners, helped reduce
crime so that homicide rates there today are only about one-tenth of what
they were in the 14th century, other scholars have found.

Another study, released today by the Sentencing Project, a research and
advocacy group in Washington, found that states that had increased the number
of prison inmates the most in the 1990's actually had smaller reductions in
crime than those states with below average increases in incarceration.

Texas led the nation with a 144 percent increase in prisoners from 1991 to
1998 and had a decrease in crime of 35 percent, the study said. But two other
populous states, California and New York, which had much smaller increases in
incarceration — California of 52 percent and New York of 24 percent — had
even sharper drops in crime. In California, the drop was 36 percent and in
New York, 43 percent.

In another recent study, of the impact of the growth in incarceration on the
drop in crime, Anne Piehl, an associate professor of public policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, drawing on
changes in crime and prison data for each state, found that the increase in
incarceration from 1989 to 1999 accounted for only about 5 percent of the
drop in overall violent and property crime.

Carlisle Moody, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary
who has long studied the link between incarceration and crime, criticized the
new estimates of the effect of imprisonment, saying they were far too low
because they did not take into account the recent history of prisons.

The rate at which criminals were incarcerated remained remarkably stable from
about 1900 to the mid- 1960's, as did the crime rate, Professor Moody said,
but then, with a sharp increase in crime in the mid- 60's, there was not an
equivalent buildup in incarceration. The rate of incarceration has only
recently begun to catch up with the crime rate.

"I'm pretty sure these other people are underestimating the effects of
incarceration on crime because they are ignoring the historical changes,"
Professor Moody said. "Prison has a much greater effect on crime than
anything else, like employment or policing."

The new book contains two studies of the impact of the growth in
incarceration on the crime drop in the 1990's. Besides the study by Professor
Rosenfeld, who estimated that incarceration reduced homicides by adults by 26
percent, a study by William Spelman, a professor of public policy at the
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas,
calculated that it reduced violent crime by 25 percent.

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