High Incarceration Rate May Fuel Community Crime High Incarceration Rate May Fuel Community Crime Laura Anderson and her husband, John L. Anderson, kiss after a June visit at the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee, where he was imprisoned on an armed robbery charge. After years of spiraling out of control, crime had been declining sharply in this neighborhood of rickety frame houses and tumbledown carryouts that forms the historic hub of this city's African American community. Observers credited a variety of aggressive police tactics, including more and longer prison sentences for offenders. But in 1997, the declining crime rate in Frenchtown began to level off, failing to keep pace with drops in similar Tallahassee neighborhoods.
Many people assume that incarceration reduces crime.
But when incarceration gets to a certain density, that is when you see the effects change. With high incarceration rates, she argues, prison can be transformed from a crime deterrent into a factor that fuels a cycle of crime and disorder by breaking up families, souring attitudes toward the criminal justice system and leaving communities populated with too many people hardened by the experience of going to prison. Frenchtown provides abundant evidence for the thesis. There are few men available to volunteer in the youth programs at the Fourth Avenue Recreation Center. And every day, dozens of men line up in front of a soup kitchen run out of a small frame house in the heart of Frenchtown.