AS CRIME KEEPS DROPPING, IT'S NO TIME FOR BACKSLIDING

Our View: Budget Cuts Threaten Gains From Longer Sentences, New Technology.

At the beginning of the 1990s violent crime was soaring, and some
experts predicted that it would go even higher as a generation of
"superpredators" came of age.

When the rate began going down instead, the predictions and
explanations continued anyway. One popular theory was that the drop
was merely the result of the settling of gang turf wars related to
crack cocaine. Another was that crime was heavily influenced by
economics, so it would naturally go down at a time of surging growth.

As it turned out, the downward trend has continued for nearly 20
years, through good economic times and bad. According to the FBI, the
rate of violent crime in America has dropped in every year but one
since 1991. If the bureau's preliminary findings from the first half
of last year pan out for the whole year, 2009 will register yet
another drop, even in the midst of the worst recession in decades.
Once-confident crime experts now exhibit the kind of humility about
predictions that we wish could be emulated by economists, stock market
touts and other pundits.

It's not hard to see why the crime experts would be baffled and
humbled. Many of their explanations have been completely or partially
discredited. The age of the superpredator never arrived, except
perhaps in video games. The 40% drop in violent crime has been much
bigger than a reversal of the crack-related increase.

And if there is a firm relationship between jobs and crime, it is hard
to see. Crime dropped after the tech bust and subsequent recession in
the early 2000s. It has dropped in the early stages of what has been
called the Great Recession. The single year it went up, 2006, was one
of robust expansion.

At the risk of being humbled by future trends, let us point to a
couple of possible explanations, and a note of caution about what lies
ahead.

One convincing reason for the crime drop is that incarceration works.
In 1990, according to the Justice Department, the U.S. prison
population was 773,119. Today the total is about 1.6 million.

Getting repeat violent offenders off the streets and keeping them
behind bars longer is sure to have had some significant impact. The
most recent long-term study of recidivism by the Justice Department
found that 67.5% of the prisoners released in 1994 committed another
crime within three years. (The department is studying the class of
2005.) More jail cells and longer sentences reduce the population of
released prisoners and push them into an older age group, when they
are less likely to be involved in the most violent crimes.

Another credible explanation is that law enforcement officials at all
levels of government have been effectively employing community
policing, rapid response teams and new technologies.

Despite these positive trends, however, there are reasons for concern.
States and localities are under extreme financial duress as the result
of a sour economy combined with mandated spending tied to health care
and overly generous retiree benefits.

Some are responding by cutting law enforcement and releasing prisoners
early. That's shortsighted. There is no more important function of
government than public safety. If officials do not take that
responsibility seriously, crime will no doubt go back up, reversing
one of the truly good news stories of the past two decades.