MORE PRISONERS, LESS CRIME

MAJOR CRIME in the United States is at a 30-year-low, and The
Christian Science Monitor can't understand it.

In a story this week headlined "A drop in violent crime that's hard to
explain," the Monitor's Alexandra Marks reported on the latest data
from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the US Justice
Department. According to the bureau, there were 23 million instances
of violent and property crime last year -- 48 percent fewer than the
44 million recorded in 1973. (The numbers don't include murder, which
is measured separately by the FBI.) In just the past 10 years, the
violent crime rate has plummeted by a stunning 54 percent, from 50
crimes per 1,000 US residents in 1993 to 23 per 1,000 in 2002.

The plunge in serious crime is pervasive; it crosses racial, ethnic,
and gender lines and shows up in every income group and region. But
welcome as they are, the new data are only the latest extension of a
downward trend that first appeared in the 1980s, not long after the
nationwide crackdown on crime got underway. The dramatic drop in
criminal activity followed an equally dramatic boom in prison
construction and a sharp surge in incarceration rates. The conclusion
is obvious: Stricter punishment has led to lower crime.

But it isn't obvious to the Monitor. Marks's story makes no mention of
prisons or prisoners. It claims that criminologists are actually
"quick to list the reasons" why crime should be going up, such as the
soft economy, cuts in local government spending, and the diversion of
police from walking neighborhood beats to guarding public facilities
against terror.

The only explanation Marks can offer for the continuing reduction in
crime comes from Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University, who
speculates that post-9/11, Americans may be treating each other more
considerately. "The only thing I can think of," Blumstein says, "is
some sense of cohesion that's emerging as a result of the terrorist
threat."

To be fair, Marks and the Monitor aren't the only ones with a blind
spot for the nexis between crime and punishment. In the Associated
Press story on the Justice Department data, there is no mention of
incarceration until the 11th paragraph. "Some criminologists," the AP
grudgingly notes, "say tougher prison sentences and more prisons are
key factors."

None of those criminologists is quoted; instead, the point is
dismissed as "political rhetoric" by the Justice Policy Institute, an
anti-imprisonment advocacy group.

No one disputes that more criminals are being locked up in this
country or that they are spending more time behind bars. The Justice
Department reported in July that the nation's prison population had
reached an all-time high of 2.1 million in 2002, with violent
criminals accounting for most of the increase. At year's end, 1 of
every 143 US residents was in a state or federal prison or jail.

That is a much higher level of imprisonment than is found in other
modern democracies, a fact liberal critics point to it as evidence of
American vengefulness. "The price of imprisoning so many Americans is
too high . . . 5 to 10 times as high as in many other industrialized
nations," admonished The New York Times in a recent editorial.
"Locking the door and throwing away the key may make for good campaign
sound bites, but it is a costly and inhumane crime policy."

Actually, keeping known criminals locked up is a sensible and
effective crime policy. The Times laments that it costs $22,000 per
year to keep each inmate in custody, but that is not an exorbitant
price for preventing millions of annual murders, rapes, armed
robberies, and assaults. The cost to society of a single armed robbery
has been estimated at more than $50,000; multiply that by the 12 or 13
attacks the average released prisoner commits per year, and $22,000
per inmate looks like quite a bargain.

While crime has been tumbling in the United States, it has been
soaring elsewhere. "Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris,
Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major
cities," Eli Lehrer wrote in The Weekly Standard last year. "In a 2001
study, the British Home Office found violent and property crime
increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United
States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in
Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime
rates in the European Union, Australia, and Canada have recently begun
to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden,
once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime
victimization rate 20 percent higher than the United States."

Not every inmate belongs in prison. Petty drug offenders, for example,
are better suited to intense probation and treatment than to jail. But
on the whole, America's policy of locking up large numbers of
criminals for long terms is doing just what it was meant to do: making
us safer. Maybe the Europeans should follow suit.