(Washington Post) - It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its 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 now live behind bars, about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world....
Approximately 60 percent of U.S. convicts serve time for charges related to drug peddling and addiction.
No one's sure exactly what factors caused the crime drop in NYC, says a former city official, but it wasn't caused by tossing more people in jail. And New York is just the best, not the only, evidence for arguing locking more people up is not necessarily the best (or only) way to drive down crime.
Meanwhile it sure seems to me we'd be better off with better schools than bigger prisons.
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