The Headline Is Back
Imagine that. You put more people in jail and the crime rate drops. Who would have ever guessed. From The New York Times.
The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.
The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990’s that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.
George Will actually made fun of this exact same headline last year, one of the funniest segments I ever saw on This Week, and you wold have thouht someone at The New York Times would have caught on. Nope. Apparently it is inconceiveable for the people at The New York Times to believe that the reason that crime has fallen is directly related to the increase in the number of inmates, not in spite of it.
Found at The Corner.
first…
It is all George Bush’s fault…..Impeach him now!!!!!!
Second!
Boy, the NY Times is sure smart, isn’t it?
Just to throw in a few cents, The amount of people in prison for non-violent drug possession is still absolutely despicable. In no way is this the fault of any one president, they all have made harsher penalties for drug crimes, despite the fact that the Drug War is costing us way too much money for NO real results (i.e. prices lower, quality higher, use stagnant). There needs to be a change in how we pursue this issue and unfortunately, I as a young man will not see this change even when I’m old and gray.
Ryan,
I agree with you. I say lessen the posession charges and harden the violent crime charges.
The last statistics I saw (sorry no link) indicated that the rate for another arrest for convicted felons, less than 30yrs old, was 93% within 3 years,. However, the rate drops as criminals become older. So the longer they stay in jail, the lower the crime rate.
Also the last study I saw indicated a heroin addict commits an average of a crime a day, on their way to stealing/hustling the $250,000 per year they need to feed their habit. Again, keep them off the streets and you prevent 350 crimes per year
big difference between heroin addicts who commit other crimes (for which they can be convicted) and the hippie who smokes a bowl of weed once a week that he bought with his money from his office desk job.
Indeed. In fact, a great strategy would be to get all those hippies high on election day.
why, mccain?
Because even if they could spell ‘disenfranchisement’, it wouldn’t matter because they would be sleeping until the polls closed. I say give Kerrymen all the free pot they want on that one day every 4 years.