The Volokh Conspiracy - More Prisons, Less Crime?

As Orin points out in a recent post, one out of every hundred adults in now behind bars in country. The source for this factoid is the Pew Center on the States, which released its report "One in 100" to much fanfare. The Pew Center claims that we are not really getting anything in return for the moneys spent on prisons. But curiously, despite the claim that this expenditure is "failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," the study never attempts to assess the impact on overall crime.

As a quick way of assessing the return is interesting to compare the moneys spent on prisons over the last twenty years(collected in the Pew report) and crime rates over the same period of time. This chart plots one against the other:

[click to enlarge]

As can be seen, significant increases in spending on prisons has coincided with significant reductions in crime. Of course, proving causality would require a more sophisticated analysis. But it would be remarkable to think that the prison growth has had nothing to do with the fact that violent crime rates have reached their lowest point in recent years, according to the Dept. of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics.

To be clear about my own views, we should be smart about who we incarcerate. And of course we should explore alternatives to prison. But all too often factoids like the Pew Center's are used to urge bans on further prison construction without considering the very tangible harms to crime victims that such an approach would produce.

	[Paul Cassell, March 3, 2008 at 1:08pm] Trackbacks More Prisons, Less Crime? As Orin points out in a recent post, one out of every hundred adults in now behind bars in country. The source for this factoid is the Pew Center on the States, which released its report "One in 100" to much fanfare. The Pew Center claims that we are not really getting anything in return for the moneys spent on prisons. But curiously, despite the claim that this expenditure is "failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," the study never attempts to assess the impact on overall crime. As a quick way of assessing the return is interesting to compare the moneys spent on prisons over the last twenty years(collected in the Pew report) and crime rates over the same period of time. This chart plots one against the other: [click to enlarge] As can be seen, significant increases in spending on prisons has coincided with significant reductions in crime. Of course, proving causality would require a more sophisticated analysis. But it would be remarkable to think that the prison growth has had nothing to do with the fact that violent crime rates have reached their lowest point in recent years, according to the Dept. of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics. To be clear about my own views, we should be smart about who we incarcerate. And of course we should explore alternatives to prison. But all too often factoids like the Pew Center's are used to urge bans on further prison construction without considering the very tangible harms to crime victims that such an approach would produce.