ADDING TIME DOESN'T STOP CRIME

The great American crime drop is over. So why are conservative
commentators still pointing to U.S.-style incarceration as the cure
for the common criminal?

Ask conservatives about crime and how to fight it, and a familiar
story will come out.

In the 1990s, conservatives say, state and federal governments in the
United States got tough on crime. They sent criminals to prison. They
kept them there longer. And crime plummeted. So if we are serious
about fighting crime, we need longer sentences that will remove the
worst of the worst and make the rest think twice.

"Increased imprisonment really is the best single means of reducing
crime," the National Post claimed last week in an editorial that urged
the Harper government to really crack down on criminals. Thanks to
American experience, everyone knows that's true except "a handful of
turtlenecked criminologists still hopelessly bogged down in the 1960s."

It's curious that the Post's editorialist chose to accuse doubtful
criminologists of being stuck in the past because it is conservatives
who continue to drum out the more-prisoners-less-crime refrain who are
clearly not keeping up with the news.

The great American crime drop essentially ended around 2000. In the
following years, crime bobbled up or down slightly without any major
change. But in the past two years, things have taken a decided turn
for the worse: Crime, particularly violent crime, is rising
significantly across most of the U.S. In some cities, murder rates
have risen so rapidly they have all but erased the declines of the
1990s. For the first time in years, crime is once again a serious
concern among mayors, police chiefs and much of the American public.

What's behind the shift? Nobody's really sure. But one thing that is
certain is that it is not happening because American politicians went
soft on crime. From 2000 to the present, the U.S. incarceration rate
steadily rose -- from one spectacular record high to another.

Texas has more prisoners in state and county lockups alone than the
combined prison populations of Germany, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. In California, the prison system
is at double its maximum capacity and the governor has declared the
situation to be a state of emergency that he intends to relieve by
spending many billions more building new prisons. And still crime is
rising.

Of course, conservatives can respond that we shouldn't make too much
of the fact that rising prison populations now coincide with rising
crime. That's nothing more than a simplistic correlation, they may
say. Many other factors are in play. Those factors may have changed
and are now obscuring the crime-fighting benefit that comes from
rising prison populations.

And they would be right: It would be simplistic of me to say the
coincidence of rising crime and rising prison populations proves
incarceration doesn't reduce crime, or to go even further and say
rising prison populations cause rising crime. But the whole
conservative argument is based on nothing more than exactly this same
sort of simplistic correlation: Prison populations went up; crime went
down; therefore prison works.

So how about we make an agreement? Let's all stop using cheap,
meaningless correlations to score political points. If conservatives
will stop saying they're right because crime dropped after Rudy
Giuliani became mayor of New York City, liberals will stop saying
they're right because crime dropped in Canada after conditional
sentences and all the other "soft on crime" measures conservatives
hate so much were passed.

Actually, I only wish liberals would say that. Most liberals have
swallowed the conservative cant on justice whole. Even Jack Layton --
Jack Layton! -- has said mandatory minimum sentences are an effective
way to reduce crime. But the fact remains: Throughout the 1990s, while
the U.S. was busy passing Russia as the world's top jailer, Canada
introduced a series of policies explicitly intended to reduce the use
of incarceration to a bare minimum. Canada's incarceration rate
declined. And crime dropped.

Yes, it dropped. Unlike the crime drop in the U.S., and particularly
the drop in New York, the crime drop in Canada got little media
attention. But it happened. In fact, it was eerily similar to the
American crime drop: It started precisely when the U.S. decline
started and ended when the American decline ended. It wasn't quite as
big as the U.S. drop -- it was about 70 per cent of the relative
magnitude -- but then Canadian crime hadn't risen as steeply as
American crime in the years before the drop.

Today, Canada's incarceration rate is less than one-sixth the American
rate. As a result, we have saved tens of billions of dollars and made
a lasting contribution to a more humane society -- without sacrificing
public safety.

I know many people -- not only conservatives -- will find all this
hard to swallow. For them, I would suggest reading a new book called
The Great American Crime Decline (Oxford University Press). Author
Franklin Zimring is one of those "turtlenecked criminologists" at the
University of California, Berkeley, but no fair reader would dismiss
the book as the product of wooly theorizing.

In fact, Zimring is a numbers man who methodically gathers and
analyses data, and then uses it like a wrecking ball to demolish all
the popular assumptions and explanations about crime in the U.S. More
prisoners, less crime? Smash. Rudy Giuliani and the "Broken Windows"
doctrine? Crash. There's even a chapter demolishing the
abortion-did-it theory popularized by the best-selling book
Freakonomics.

For Canadians, The Great American Crime Decline isn't only a necessary
corrective for the false conclusions conservatives are importing from
the U.S. Zimring also makes extensive use of Canadian experience and
the chapter comparing the Canadian crime drop in the 1990s with that
of the U.S. is probably the best summary of the evidence available.

The Post's editorialists might want to have a look. MPs should also
read it before the next delusional, destructive, costly crime bill
comes up for a vote.

Of course I'd also love it if Prime Minister Stephen Harper and
Justice Minister Vic Toews read the book, but I suspect it's more
likely that Art Hanger will announce he's come out of the closet than
that the prime minister and justice minister will give serious
consideration to evidence that contradicts conservative ideology.

Citizen columnist Dan Gardner is on book leave.