EDITOR’S NOTE: Light posting today as we are working on larger stories, two of which are scheduled for next week.
SO WHAT HAS CAUSED THE NATONWIDE DROP IN CRIME?
In his recent letter to the LA Times, Sheriff Lee Baca claimed as one of his accomplishments, the drop in crime in LA County in the last 10 years under his watch.
Certainly crime has dropped in LA County since 2003. It has also dropped to historically low levels in LA City—under the watch of the LAPD.
And in New York City under the NYPD. And so on.
The truth is, of course, that there has been a great drop in crime nationwide in the last decade, a trend that, with a few hiccups, has been fairly steady in most American cities since the mid-1990s.
It is a drop that no one has been able to definitively explain.
Certainly the idea of “policing smarter, not just harder,” as Bill Bratton used to put it, would seem to be at least one of the big causes of the slide in crime stats.
But just how big a cause seems unclear.
So why has crime dropped? Theories range from the widespread availability of abortions to the cleanup of lead in the air. (Mother Jones did a great story on the lead research. That’s their graphic above.)
Now, with funding from the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice, the National Academy of Sciences has organized a round-table project with experts from academia and law enforcement to address the question.
University of Missouri criminologist Richard Rosenfeld is heading up the effort.
Ted Gest of The Crime Report talks with Rosenfeld about some of what the project hopes to examine.
Here’s a clip:
TCR: The most popular explanations for the crime drop now seem to involve criminal justice measures. What do we know about that?
Rosenfeld: The evidence from policing research is robust that “smart policing” in high-crime areas can reduce crime in those areas. There also is evidence that increases in incarceration can reduce crime in the short run. So there is evidence that the criminal justice process makes a difference
(However), no study has shown that criminal justice efforts, not necessarily limited to the police and corrections, are responsible for all or most of the crime decline.
I use the analogy of doctors and hospitals. While we wouldn’t discount their role, they don’t control lifestyles, and are not wholly responsible for increases or decreases in illnesses. Clearly medical intervention makes a difference, just as criminal justice has. (But) when the cancer rate goes up, we don’t blame hospital directors….
There’s more here. But for fuller answers and opinions, we await the project results.
CALIFORNIA LOOKS AT RENTING BEDS IN PRIVATE PRISONS, BUT NOT EVERYONE AGREES
In order to meet the court-ordered prison population reduction of 9400 prisoners, Governor Jerry Brown is reconsidering paying private prisons to take some of California’s overflow inmates.
However, there is disagreement about the strategy. For instance, some on the right say that California would be better served to use the same money to build more prisons. (Although how that would solve the immediate population reduction problem is unclear. And some of the rest of the math is fuzzy.)
Don Thompson of the AP has that story.
Here’s a clip:
Some Republicans, including former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, are calling on Brown to build new prisons or reopen closed facilities. Maldonado is exploring a run for governor next year, when Brown is expected to seek re-election.
The $1 billion that California has spent on private out-of-state prisons since 2006 would have more than paid for two of the 5,000-bed maximum-security prisons of the sort the state last opened in 2005.
The state estimates it costs an average $56,000 to house an inmate in a California state prison, more than double the $26,000 annual average cost for a contract cell in another state.
Officials say the out-of-state costs are lower because only healthy and less dangerous inmates are sent to other states, while California bears the higher costs for inmates who have physical or mental health problems or who are housed in maximum-security prisons, isolation units or on death row.
Criminal justice advocates recommend instead using so-called “good time credits” to shave less than a year off the sentences of certain prisoners, contending that this plan would not endanger public safety.
The LA Times Chris Megerian has that story. Here’s a clip:
Don Specter, a lawyer for inmates who have sued the state over prison conditions, said the state’s plans to relocate inmates would only provide a temporary solution.
“It’s expensive. It doesn’t do anything to further rehabilitation,” he said. “It just perpetuates the same policy.”
James Austin, a prison consultant, said it makes more sense to expand credits for good behavior, allowing low-security inmates to be released early. He said that will save the state money without increasing the crime rate.
“It works,” he said. “And it doesn’t jeopardize public safety.”
STUDY LOOKS AT RACIAL BIAS AND STAND YOUR GROUND LAWS
Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor has this interesting and nuanced story.
Here’s a clip from the middle of the story:
In states with stand-your-ground laws, the shooting of a black person by a white person is found justifiable 17 percent of the time, while the shooting of a white person by a black person is deemed justifiable just over 1 percent of the time, according to the study. In states without stand-your-ground laws, white-on-black shootings are found justified just over 9 percent of the time.
Such findings “show that it’s just harder for black defendants to assert stand-your-ground defense if the victim is white, and easier for whites to raise a stand-your-ground defense if the victims are black,” says Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of color.”
The potential reasons behind this are multilayered….