Less crime, and fewer incarcerations
Overflowing prison populations and high rates of violent crime once made New York City a metaphor for the urban decay confronting America’s cities. But over the last two decades crime in the nation’s largest city has declined steeply, with murders plummeting from 2,200 in 1990 to 350 in 2015. Given the popularity of incarceration as a crime-control strategy in the United States during this time, a casual mid-’90s observer could be forgiven for hypothesizing that such a miraculous decline in crime would surely be the result of a massive increase in imprisonment. But a paper released today, “Better by Half: The New York City Story of Winning Large-Scale Decarceration While Increasing Public Safety,” suggests quite the opposite. In fact, New York City’s crime decline was coupled with a sustained and dramatic reduction in incarceration, allowing the state to close more than a dozen prisons and save tens of millions of dollars. New...