9/14/97
NUMBER OF PRISONERS IS LOW BY HISTORICAL STANDARDS 
By Linda Seebach 
 
     The conventional wisdom has it that the United States imprisons a disgracefully large proportion of its population _ ``more than any other industrialized country'' is the way it's commonly stated. 
     People who talk like that seem to think that it matters whether people work in farms or factories, but it doesn't matter at all how many crimes they commit. Because by one crucial measure, the probability that someone will be imprisoned for a serious crime, the U.S. incarceration rate is far lower now than it was in the 1950s, when the crime rate was much lower. 
     No coincidence, that. 
     The National Center for Policy Analysis, based in Dallas, recently issed Crime and Punishment in America: 1997 Update, by Morgan Reynolds. It documents the common-sense conclusion that when the probability of punishment goes up, as it has been doing in recent years, the number of crimes goes down. 
     Just since 1993, the probability of going to prison for murder is up 17 percent, and the murder rate is down 23 percent. 
     Rape: down 12 percent, incarceration rate up 9 percent. 
     Robbery: down 21 percent, incarceration rate up 14 percent. 
     Aggravated assault: down 11 percent, incarceration rate up 5 percent. 
     Burglary: down 15 percent, incarceration rate up 14 percent. 
     And as the history of the past half-century shows, the relationship holds in the opposite direction as well. When the probability of punishment goes down, crime goes up. 
     The probability is calculated as the the number of prison sentences divided by the number of such crimes. If it seems low, that's because the number of less serious crimes such as burglaries, which are rarely solved, greatly exceeds the number of more serious crimes such as murder, which have a comparatively high rate of conviction. But the pattern is clear and consistent. 
     Probability of prison for serious crime: 
       1950 5.27 percent 
       1960 3.63 percent 
       1970 1.33 percent 
       1980 1.57 percent 
       1990 2.39 percent 
       1995 2.68 percent 
     And moving in concert (with a certain lag time while potential criminals figure out that the rules are changing): 
     Serious crimes reported to the police, per 1,000 population: 
       1950 5.0 
       1960 5.9 
       1970 14.3 
       1980 22.8 
       1990 19.7 
       1995 16.7 
     The crime rate is continuing to move down, but it's still three times what it was in 1950, and the likelihood that someone will be convicted and sent to prison is still only about half what it was then. 
     Because states' policies have changed at different rates, it's possible to observe the pattern on a smaller scale. 
     California and Texas, the report notes, have followed opposite paths. In 1980, the California state prison population was 30 percent below the national average, and its rate of violent crime was 40 percent higher than average. A decade later California's prison population was three times higher and its crime rate a third lower. 
     Texas started the decade with a prison population 50 percent above the national average and crime 5 percent higher; by 1989, the prison population in Texas had fallen 5 percent below the national average and its rate of serious crime was 38 percent higher. 
     The conventional wisdom complains that it's too expensive to put all these people in prison _ ``We're spending more on prisons than on colleges.'' That's like complaining that Californians spend a lot more on earthquake preparation than Minnesotans. They have more earthquakes, and you spend as much as you have to to protect yourself. 
     Criminals, unlike earthquakes, chose their opportunities. If prison spending is inadequate to punish crime, the result is more crime. 
     As victims and their families can testify, that's even more expensive.