DUELING EFFECTS

MORE PRISON TIME DOESN'T ALWAYS RESULT IN LESS CRIME

Does putting more people in prison for longer periods of time result
in lower crime rates?

The answer is yes and no, according to national experts.

"The incarceration rate has been going up for almost 35 years, and
during that time period the crime rate has gone up twice and it has
gone down twice," said Todd Clear, a distinguished professor of
criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City
University of New York. "Most criminologists would say there is some
relationship, and it is small."

The issue of rising and dropping crime rates is too complicated to be
attributed to just one factor, said Alfred Blumstein, a professor at
the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Blumstein is a nationally
recognized expert on crime trends.

"It is reasonable to find some effect, but the real problem is the
magnitude of the effect," Blumstein said. "If you send a pathological
rapist away, then chances are good you are going to take his crimes
off the street when you send him to prison.

"If you send a drug dealer away, then the chances are very good he is
going to be replaced by a resilient marketplace as long as the demand
is there."

Unintended Consequences

For example, he said, between 1980 and 1993, the newcomers to the
street drug trade were younger and tended to carry weapons more often.

"The young folks recruited as replacements contributed far more to
violence than the older people they replaced," Blumstein said.

Clear added that studies in five cities have shown that removing large
numbers of people from a community and sending them to prison can have
the opposite of the intended effect.

"As neighborhoods had more and more people removed for incarceration,
after a certain point there was a much stronger impact on crime rates
- - it destabilizes the neighborhood," Clear said. "The crime rate
starts to go up in the following year."

There are blocks in Brooklyn where $3 million was spent in 1998
incarcerating people on that block, Clear said.

"The block didn't change," Clear said. "If you had $3 million and you
were going to spend it on public safety, would you do it this way? The
answer is pretty much no."

Diminishing Returns

Steve Aos, an economist and associate director of the non-partisan
Washington State Institute for Public Policy, said the percentage of
crime reduction that is attributable to prison lockup varies by the
type of crime, and that at some point, there are diminishing returns.

"Prison does reduce the crime rate, make no mistake about that," Aos
said. "Take the two extremes: If you put everyone in your state in
prison, the crime rate would fall to zero. On the other hand, if you
let everyone that is in prison today out tomorrow, the crime rate
would go up.

"So public policy-makers have to decide where they want your state to
be in between those two extremes. Any economist will tell you that at
some point along that curve you reach diminishing returns where each
additional prison cell you build costs taxpayers more than the value
of the crimes avoided."

His cost-benefit analysis in Washington state found that a 10%
increase in the state incarceration rate leads to a 2% to 4% reduction
in the crime rate.

In Washington, putting more violent offenders in prison continues to
generate more benefits than cost, he said. But for drug-related
offenders, it now costs taxpayers more to incarcerate the additional
offenders than the average value of the crimes avoided, Aos said.

No Clear Pattern

Whether there is a relationship between lower crime rates and
increased prison populations is further complicated by what is
happening in other states, Clear said.

For example, he said, New York state is leading the nation in
decreasing crime rates and also has one of the largest reductions in
the size of the prison population.

"Then you have the counter case which is California, where the crime
rate has also dropped but prison populations have increased," he
added. "When you try to look at the relationships of crime rates at
the state level, you get all kinds of different patterns."

Among other factors that influence crime rates are the availability of
jobs and the number of people ages 17 to 30 in the population - the
most crime-prone ages, Blumstein said. Clear added that burglary and
auto thefts have gone down, in part, because of alarm systems and
better technology to protect property.