CRIME BY THE NUMBERS

The U.S. Shows That Filling Up Prisons Won't Make Our Streets Safer

For years, conservatives have claimed the best way to cut crime is clear:
Do what the United States is doing. Send more offenders to prison. Keep
them locked up longer. Make them live in harsher conditions. After the U.S.
introduced this "tough-on-crime" program, conservatives point out, crime
plummeted to the lowest level in a generation. Case closed.

This simple argument has persuaded many people, in Canada and elsewhere.
But it's wrong.

On Monday, the FBI released the latest American crime data. In 2001,
murders rose 3.1 per cent. Robberies went up 3.9 per cent. Car theft jumped
5.9 per cent and burglary went up 2.6 per cent. Overall, crime in the
United States rose two per cent. It was the first such increase since
American crime went into freefall in 1992.

What happened? As far as American criminal justice is concerned, nothing.
In 2001, American law was as punitive as ever. There were about two million
people in American jails and prisons, almost one-quarter of all the
prisoners in the world. And yet, all that tough criminal justice failed to
stop a serious increase in crime.

For conservatives, this is perplexing. But not for criminologists. All
along, criminologists have insisted that the ability of justice systems to
influence crime rates is far less than politicians and the public believe.
Broad social trends -- demographics, economics, community structure and so
on -- are what drive the general direction of crime. Criminal justice can
only play a marginal role; nations cannot simply rely on punishment to make
the streets safe.

If conservatives had bothered to compare crime trends in other countries
with those in the United States, they would have known this. Just like the
U.S., Great Britain and Ireland experienced major drops in crime throughout
the latter half of the 1990s. That happened without a shift to
American-style tough justice.

The crime increase in the U.S. may also be afflicting the British Isles.
The latest U.K. figures haven't been officially released, but Prime
Minister Tony Blair has admitted that for the first time in years, crime
rose in 2001. Apparently, British crime remains on precisely the same track
as American crime -- even though the British incarceration rate is less
than one-fifth that of the U.S.

Canada makes for an even more startling comparison.

In 1980, Canadian criminal justice was roughly as "tough" as American law.
As a result, we had an incarceration rate about one-half that of the United
States (it was lower because crime rates were lower here). But over the
following two decades, the U.S. toughened its criminal justice systems
while Canadian law either held the line or even, in some instances, tried
to reduce the use of imprisonment. As a result, Canada's incarceration rate
today is a just little more than one-sixth the American rate.

Despite the radically different paths taken by the two countries, Canadian
and American crime trends over the last two decades are "quite similar," in
the words of a Statistics Canada study. From 1980 to today, property crime
in both countries fell fairly steadily. Violent crime rose until 1992
(modestly in Canada, dramatically in the U.S.) and then fell until recently
(again, modestly here, dramatically in the U.S.).

Canada also seems to be mirroring the American upturn in crime. The
American turnaround began in 2000, when the steep decline in crime slowed
almost to a standstill. In Canada that year, property crime went down,
while violent crime rose slightly, producing a scant overall drop of one
per cent. Canada's data for 2001 will be released in July. Given the U.S.
and U.K. results, expect an increase.

Also expect howls of outrage and demands to adopt American policies.
Ideology, not evidence, drives the tough-on-crime movement. But for those
who prefer fact to dogma, the case is clear: We cannot simply punish our
way to a better society.