Monday, February 14, 2005
Prisons empty as crime continues to fall in New York.
Tough and effective law enforcement -- including tough jail sentences -- deter crime, which leads to lower crime rates, fewer criminals and the emptying of prisons. New York shows the way...
That journalistic peculiarity, and some odd things that did make that Times story while the drop in the New York prison population did not, was together with some more data about the crime/prison situation here the subject of an earlier post, on the off chance you are interested.
Tough and effective law enforcement -- including tough jail sentences -- deter crime, which leads to lower crime rates, fewer criminals and the emptying of prisons. New York shows the way...
Reinforcing New York City's improved policing strategies in the 1990s were tougher sentencing laws and a significant expansion of the city and state correctional systems. Would-be criminals in the Big Apple came to realize that they were not only more likely to get caught, but more likely to end up serving hard time.Yes, now that last sentence was the subject of a recent story in the NY Times, Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates, in which the Times, despite its being a New York paper, somehow managed not to mention that the opposite is true in its very own home town and state, where the serious fight against crime started first and crime as has dropped by far the most (barely mentioning in a brief aside only that there has been a reduction in "new" inmates).
The results have been nothing less than spectacular: by one key measure, serious crime in the city has dropped 70 percent over the past 15 years.
But that success is also yielding another, less widely noticed, dividend: with felony arrests dropping as a result of the falling crime rate, New York's once-swollen city jails and state prisons are becoming less crowded...
...The decreasing jail population has enabled the city to close its detention facilities in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, to close some wings in other facilities and to cut the headcount of jail employees, saving at least $185 million a year in staff costs alone...
At the state level, the number of corrections officers has dropped some 1,500 since 2000, generating a wage-and-benefit savings of roughly $120 million a year...
Nationally, the number of criminals behind bars continues to grow... [City Journal]
That journalistic peculiarity, and some odd things that did make that Times story while the drop in the New York prison population did not, was together with some more data about the crime/prison situation here the subject of an earlier post, on the off chance you are interested.
