August
27, 2003, 9:45 a.m.
Crime Drop
Are we safer?
Is that good enough?
By Eli Lehrer
merica's
crime-victimization rates, falling for ten years now, hit another record
low last year, according to a new study. Crime fell just about everywhere
in the country: suburbs and cities, small and large towns. Old, young,
rich, poor, black, and white: Americans of all sorts became safer. Reading
the Bureau of Justice Statistics's 2002 National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) page-by-page, it's hard to find
even a hint of bad news. In all, BJS says, Americans fell victim to about
four million fewer crimes in 2002 than in 2001. Not a single meaningful
statistic moved in the wrong direction. The declines in crime over the
last decade are so sharp that there's little doubt that America has become
vastly safer: Total victimizations per household have fallen 54 percent
since 1993. The U.S. is safer but, ironically, the very things that are
creating this safety may open the country up to even worse threats in
the future.
Two things make
the America's criminal-justice system unique in the developed world: Police
operate in a decentralized fashion, and criminals serve very long sentences.
Rather than responding to distant bureaucrats at a national or regional
government, American police must answer to city councils, mayors, and voters.
A city that fails to police itself adequately will simply not retain its
population, since Americans can easily pick up (without switching jobs)
and find a place with a public-safety record they like better. American
thugs, likewise, get what they deserve. French robbers, on average, serve
about eleven months behind bars. Americans, on the other hand, do five years.
Combined with a variety of other factors — including favorable demographic
trends in the mid-1990s, better efforts to design buildings to keep out
crime and, perhaps, widespread gun ownership — the United States is,
by most measures, the safest large, developed country. Murder rates remain
reasonably high in comparison with other countries, but they are at their
lowest level in nearly 30 years even as they soar elsewhere in the developed
world. Both decentralization and long prison sentences, however, may cause
severe problems down the road.
To begin with, America's
highly decentralized police system seems uniquely ill suited to fight
the terrorists who seek to destroy Western civilization. Local police
agencies, justifiably, focus on driving crime out of town but have a dim
view of the national situation. When it comes to fighting crime, this
"hyper-local" approach works well. As Edward Banfield observed,
criminally inclined people have short-term vision. If police make it difficult
or impossible for them to commit crimes near home, they will find other
ways to gratify their needs. Indeed, John Eck's landmark work has shown
that crime falls every time police manage to shift geographic focus. For
ideologically driven terrorists, simply shifting their base of operations
won't work: A terrorist operative told to live in the United States as
a means of preparing for an operation several years down the road will
likely have the resources and wherewithal to avoid the police altogether.
Truly national police forces, on the other hand, can keep tabs on large
criminal syndicates like terrorist organizations much better than America's
patchwork of 16,500 local police agencies. Better federal intelligence
gathering, improved efforts to share intelligence with local police, and
a national commitment to interagency cooperation can overcome some disadvantages
of America's police forces but none will likely prove effective against
terror as the regional and national police agencies common in the rest
of the developed world.
Long prison sentences
certainly keep away the thugs who threaten the social order but, in time,
they may prove very costly. In her excellent new book, When
Prisoners Come Home, University of California-Irvine professor
Joan Petersilia outlines the utter failure of the United States to integrate
convicts back into society. The solution isn't the sort of criminal coddling
that many left-wingers prefer (it simply doesn't work) but, rather, a
hard-nosed insistence that prisoners quit doing drugs, abstain from violence
behind bars, and, through a restoration of traditional parole, actually
have some incentive to improve themselves. With so many people going to
prison, it is imperative that we do something to make sure that punishment
is effective. Many Americans, however, favor a throwaway-the-key mentality
that makes the very real horrors of prison rape a suitable
topic for light comedy. Even infamous prisoners who guards should
make special efforts to protect often meet untimely ends; John J. Geoghan,
Boston's pedophile priest, was brutally murdered in prison this past weekend.
While he was certainly a wicked person, he did not deserve his fate.
At least when it
comes to prison reform there are some signs of real progress: Congress
has passed a bill to reduce prison rape and efforts to test prisoners
for drugs have become more common in recent years. Still, since over 95
percent of those sent to prison will eventually come back out, doing something
to make sure that they don't come out worse is crucial if crime rates
are to remain low. So far, however, few politicians or ordinary citizens
display much sympathy for the idea of a comprehensive prison-reform movement.
America has become safer than other industrialized nations because of
a unique criminal-justice system. Few Americans would like to see the
sources of this uniqueness vanish. But both decentralized policing and
long prison sentences will make things more difficult as Americans continue
their struggles against crime and terror.
— Eli Lehrer is an associate editor of The
American Enterprise and a homeland-security manager for a Fortune
500 company.
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
merica's
crime-victimization rates, falling for ten years now, hit another record
low last year, according to a new study. Crime fell just about everywhere
in the country: suburbs and cities, small and large towns. Old, young,
rich, poor, black, and white: Americans of all sorts became safer. Reading
the Bureau of Justice Statistics's 2002 
