Despite the best efforts of social scientists, crime and punishment has never been complicated business, and two recent news reports confirm what common sense has been telling us all along. If you want to reduce crime, focus on controlling criminals, not average citizens. With crime declining over the past eight years, the paper seemed puzzled by the continuing growth in the prison population. There is no contradiction, after all, between a rising prison population and a falling crime rate. In recent years, crime has declined, not disappeared.
Innocents continue to be robbed, raped and killed every day.
Predators continue to be brought to justice. And, even with crime rates down, the number of criminals going into prison is greater than the number coming out. The two are inversely related, with one tending to go up as the other comes down. America's incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1980. With so many more lawbreakers behind bars, it should be no surprise that crime rates have declined.