The massive rise in the prison population isn't one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.<br /><br />Question: Why has crime, generally, declined over the past 20 <br />years? Robert Perkinson: We have seen a historic <br />decline in crime all through the 1990's. It has not yet in a very <br />significant way picked up with this recession. We've seen, and this is <br />very important for people to realize, crime rates in some cases drop <br />more steeply in states that have not incarcerated such huge portions of <br />their populations. One of the steepest declines has been in New York <br />City, which has sent a whole lot of people to jail on Rockefeller drug <br />laws, but nothing like the South. And yet crime in New York has fallen <br />much more steeply then in Houston or Dallas. So the crime drop is a <br />great riddle for social scientists to figure out, but critically, at <br />least I think it's important for people to know that the massive growth <br />of incarceration is, we think, not one of the largest determining <br />factors in decreasing that crime. Incarceration has been going up <br />straight since the 1970's. In some of the periods incarceration <br /> has been going up crime has been going up, other times down. But there <br /> is not a clear correlation between incarceration and protecting the <br />public. In fact, one of the statistics you would think you would have <br />gotten if you believe in a kind of weak version of deterrence, you would <br /> think that all of these harsher penalties would at least deter some of <br />the people who know the criminal justice system best—criminals and <br />former prisoners—from committing crimes. Because they do become, even <br />if their levels of education attainment are somewhat limited, through <br />being cranked through the criminal justice system, they learn a lot of <br />the criminal law and they know the penalties are very harsh. So if <br />deterrence were to work and if imprisonment was an effective way to deal <br /> with crime, you would think that recidivism rates in the United States <br />would be lower now than they were when the prison boom began, when <br />penalties were comparably more mild. Instead, the opposite has <br />occurred, recidivism rates have gone up. One more piece of evidence <br />that shows this experiment in mass incarceration has been one the one <br />hand a total failure in terms of protecting the public. On the other <br />hand a catastrophe for the weakest members of our... the most vulnerable <br /> members of our society, including those who are more victimized by <br />crime. That's also in the poor neighborhoods. It hasn't helped them in <br /> any way. Their people are getting shipped off to rural prisons and <br />then those rural prisons are getting the census money and so on, and <br />they are still suffering high rates of crime. So, it's a mess, I'm <br />afraid. Question: Is the monetary cost of <br />incarceration less than the cost of crime?Robert <br />Perkinson: People have tried. It's harder to do than people have <br />claimed. Some economists have said, well even if you are spending <br />$50,000 a year to lock someone up, as is the price in California where <br />the corrections officers are well paid, because that person you are <br />putting behind bars would have committed 'X' number of crimes, then <br />you're actually saving money. But those studies kind of fall apart for a <br /> whole series of reasons. They're based on surveys of certain classes <br />of criminals that don't correlate very well to who is actually in <br />prison. They don't take into account the ways that crime can't just be <br />thought of as a subtraction from the economy. I mean as strange as it <br />sounds... If I steal $100 from you, that doesn't decrease the GDP of the <br /> United States, that just means that I have $100 to spend and generate <br />economic activity and you don't. So, it's not a subtraction, it's not a <br /> cost to society, it's a cost to you. It's not a cost to society. So <br /> those studies don't hold up very well. I mean, it's true that I think, <br /> you know, that incarceration is not something that we're going to be <br />able to get rid of entirely. There are people who are extremely <br />dangerous. A very small portion, it's important to realize. We think <br />that prison beds are filled with dangerous sexual predators and armed <br />robbers and serial killers because that's how it seems watching the <br />nightly news. That's not the case. Most people going into prison are <br />non-violent offenders in a given year, and most of them are drug <br />offenders, or are hooked on alcohol and so on. Recorded April 14, 2010
