In NYC, fewer inmates and less crime
70 percent drop in killings bucks national trend

By Michael Powell, Washington Post  |  November 25, 2006

NEW YORK -- The correction commissioner walks down a long row of cells painted
blue, his footsteps echoing inside the massive Rikers Island jail block.

Every cell is empty, and he couldn't be happier.

"What we've seen in New York is the fastest drop in crime in the nation, and we
did it while locking up a lot less people," said Martin Horn, the commissioner
who oversees the city lockups, including barbed-wire-ringed Rikers Island. "The
only people using these cells now are the directors and actors from 'Law and
Order.' "

It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the
safest big city in the nation, achieved its 70 percent drop in homicides even as
it locked up fewer citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in
the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs
counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent
during that time.

Nearly 2.2 million Americans are behind bars, about eight times as many as in
1975 and the most per capita in the Western world. For three decades, Congress
and dozens of legislatures have worked to write tougher anticrime measures.

New York City officials, by contrast, are debating whether to turn some old
cells in downtown Brooklyn into luxury shops.

"If you want to drive down crime, the experience of New York shows that it's
ridiculous to spend your first dollar building more prison cells," said Michael
Jacobson, who served as New York's correction commissioner for former mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani and now is president of the Vera Institute of Justice, which
studies crime-fighting trends worldwide. "I can't tell you exactly why violent
crime in New York declined by twice the national rate. But I can tell you this:
It wasn't because we locked up more people."

Perhaps as intriguing is the experience in states where officials spent billions
of dollars to build prisons. From 1992 to 2002, Idaho's prison population grew
by 174 percent, the largest percentage increase in the nation. Yet violent crime
in that state rose by 14 percent. In Texas, the prison population jumped by 168
percent, and crime dropped by 11 percent.

The debate about the degree to which the nation's record rate of imprisonment
has driven down crime is more than a dance on the head of a statistical pin. FBI
data released in September showed that violent crime -- rape, homicide, and
robbery -- edged up by 2.2 percent last year. That is far from the violent
heights of the early 1990s, but Jacobson and others are concerned that a
resurgence in crime could cast a shadow on an intriguing cultural moment.

In the past few years, legislators in such conservative states as Louisiana and
Mississippi have overhauled sentencing guidelines.

No one, not even reformers, doubts that locking up enough people can drive down
crime. Nor does anyone question that many felonious types belong behind
bars. Alfred Blumenstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, cites a study that found that the growth in imprisonment during the
1990s accounted for about 25 percent of the national decline in crime.

David Muhlhausen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, an influential voice
within the Bush administration, goes further. He says prison is a fine
crime-fighting method.

"Putting citizens behind bars works because they can't commit crimes," he
said. "It's one of the best tools we have against crime."

But there are powerful counter examples, criminologists say. The nation's prison
population rose between 1985 and 1993 -- even as crime spiked sharply. New York
was not the only city in which crime and imprisonment fell in tandem during the
1990s. From 1993 to 2001, homicides in San Diego declined by 62 percent while
prison sentences dropped by 25 percent.

Casting an eye north of the border, Canada experienced a sharp drop in crime as
its prison population fell. "There are several examples of crime crashing
without imprisonment rising, but we treat these as outliers," said Franklin
Zimring, author of "The Great American Crime Decline" and a law professor at the
University of California at Berkeley. "For most of the nation, the 1990s were
the era of 'throw away the key.' "