NY TIMES JOHN TIERNEY
Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?
In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?
As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country.
Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals.
..."In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?
As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country." ...the 50,000-foot story from New York is that you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population — and save a huge amount of money in the process.”
Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals. In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?
Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.
New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.
Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article,
“What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.”
An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.
Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.
But New York diverged from the national trend in the early 1990s, when it began expanding its police force and introduced a
computerized system to track crimes and complaints. Officers also aggressively enforced laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes like turnstile jumping in the subways. Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply.
Yet serious crime went down. So though more people were being locked up for brief periods — including many who were unable to make bail and were awaiting trial —
the local jail population was shrinking and fewer city residents were serving time in state prisons.
“Even with more people coming into the system, the overall bed count was declining because people weren’t staying as long,” Dr. Jacobson, who was correction commissioner from 1995 to 1998, recalled.
By not expanding the jail and prison populations, he calculates in his 2011 book, “
The City That Became Safe,” the city and the state have been saving $1.5 billion a year, more than twice as much as it cost to finance the additional police officers in the 1990s.
Policing, of course, is not the only possible explanation for the safer streets. A shift in demographics, the arrival of new immigrants, the waning of the crack epidemic, and other economic and social changes had an impact on neighborhoods in New York — and in the rest of the country, where crime also declined in the 1990s.
But the drop was much steeper and more prolonged in New York than elsewhere. And while researchers attributed about a quarter of the decline in the rest of America to the stricter penal policies, that explanation did not apply to a city that was locking up fewer people.
... studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.
When Dr. Zimring and other criminologists look at this trend, and compare it with the fluctuating crime rates in other cities, they conclude that the retreat in crime in New York is not just a matter of the number of police officers. Those officers must be doing something right, but what exactly?
The most likely answer is a shift in strategy called hot-spot policing.
In the 1970s, research had shown that a small percentage of criminals committed a large share of crimes, so it had seemed logical to concentrate on catching repeat offenders and locking them up.
In city after city, researchers found that half of crimes occur within about 5 percent of an urban area — a few buildings, intersections and blocks, often near transit stops and businesses like convenience stores, bars and nightclubs.
The criminal population keeps changing as men in their 30s drop out and are replaced by teenagers, but crimes keep occurring at the same places.
Researchers suggested: Perhaps the authorities should pay less attention to individual criminals and more attention to the hot spots where they operate.
Dr. Sherman, Dr. Weisburd and colleagues have tested the idea in randomized experiments in Jersey City; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Sacramento; and cities in Britain and Australia.
Typically, a list of hot spots was identified, and then half were randomly chosen to receive extra police attention, like more frequent patrols. Other strategies were also used, like improving street lighting, fencing vacant lots or arresting people for minor violations.
As hoped, there were fewer crimes and complaints at the hot spots chosen for extra attention than at those that were not. And once police officers started to show up often and at unpredictable intervals, they did not need to stay more than 15 minutes to have a lasting impact.
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"We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there. But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010
Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by
showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.
“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”
Many experts also see it as the best explanation for the crime drop in New York...a program called Operation Impact, which was started in 2003 by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.
Commissioner Kelly gives the strategy credit for the continued decline of crime despite the reduced police force.
There is supporting evidence from
Dennis C. Smith, a political scientist at New York University who led an analysis of trends in the dozens of precincts where the city’s police focus on “impact zones,” as the hot spots are called. Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it.
One part of the hot-spot strategy in New York has been highly controversial: the stopping and frisking of hundreds of thousands of people each year, ostensibly to search for weapons or other contraband.
Some critics say that the tactic has been used so often and so brusquely in New York that it has undermined policing by arousing disrespect for the law, especially among young black and Latino men, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Research shows that people who feel treated unfairly by the police can become more likely to commit crimes in the future.
Defenders of stop-and-frisk, including Mayor Bloomberg, argue that when it is done properly and politely, the practice prevents crimes that disproportionately hurt the city’s minorities.
