03/25/2008 - Here's a funny thing about this presidential campaign season: Two crime dramas--"The Wire" and "Law & Order"--have gotten more attention than actual crime. Twenty years ago, with the crack epidemic peaking, George Bush rode to victory using Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis. Now, with the violent crime rate one-third lower, Republicans no longer try to paint Democrats as soft on crime, and Democrats no longer feel the need to prove themselves tough on the issue. Campus shootings in Virginia and Illinois have barely registered politically, and President Bush's evisceration of aid to local cops has received little attention on the campaign trail. Even Rudy Giuliani, who made his name fighting murder and mayhem in New York, included nothing on crime among his major campaign planks.
Although the end of law-and-order demagoguery is welcome, America still has a crime problem--or, rather, two crime problems. On one hand, the crime drop of the 1990s has ended, without delivering real relief to many communities. For example, while murder is down dramatically in New York and Chicago, homicide rates in Baltimore and Detroit are about the same as in 1995--and 25 percent higher than New York's rate at its 1990 peak. In many inner cities, violence and the fear of violence remain central facts of life that drive away jobs, small businesses, and successful families. Overall, the country's homicide rate is still three times higher than England's or Australia's, and twice that of Canada. According to the University of Chicago's Jens Ludwig, crime costs the United States on the order of $2 trillion a year.
At the same time, America's incarceration rate--the highest on earth--continues to balloon. According to a recent report from the Pew Center on the States, one in 100 U.S. adults is now behind bars, the largest percentage in our history. The racial imbalance is even more disturbing: One in 106 white men is in prison, compared to one in 15 African-American men. Overall, our incarceration rate is four times higher than it was in 1980, and more than five times that of England or Canada.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (for whom my wife works) have talked a little about reducing penal excesses, like the five-year minimum sentence for selling five grams of crack cocaine. But it is hard to imagine many politicians taking a serious run at sentencing reforms without reassuring the public they will keep crime down. And achieving those two goals together can seem impossible. Conservative scholars like James Q. Wilson have long drawn a straight line from more prisons to fewer crimes. When Pew announced its findings last month, former judge Paul Cassell, a Bush appointee, told The New York Times that the study overlooked the "very tangible benefits [of incarceration]: lower crime rates." And that link seems intuitive to most voters.
But the story is more complicated.
To read more, go to The New Republic.
