At long last, America is making progress against crime. While this is progress, we have much further to go, as a comparison with the 1960 rates shows. The rates of forcible rape and robbery each remain about 3.4 times the respective 1960 rates. Compare ibid . That means about 246,000 people were robbed and 63,000 were raped who would not have been if crime rates were at 1960 levels.
Crime is a complex problem with multiple causes and hence no one solution.
The importance of this component must not be underestimated. The dotted line in Figure 1 shows the strength of sentencing policy as measured by the number of criminals in custody relative to the crime rate. Lenient sentencing in the 1960s and 1970s was followed by a skyrocketing crime rate, and tougher sentencing from the 1980s forward was followed by a dropping crime rate. This is not a coincidence. Incapacitation, however, is not debatable.