CrimeLess crime, and fewer incarcerations: As New York became a safer city, prisons closed too
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. 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 York is now not only the safest big city in the United States, but also one with the fewest incarcerations for its size.
Slowly, but surely, prison populations decline // Source: theconversation.com
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-1990s 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 last month, “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 York is now not only the safest big city in the United States, but also one with the fewest incarcerations for its size.
The paper was co-authored by Judith Greene, executive director of Justice Strategies, and Vincent Schiraldi, senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management and a former New York City probation commissioner.
“Not only does the New York story show that substantial reductions in incarceration are realistic and attainable, but also that safety can be improved at the same time,” said Schiraldi. “While prison and jail populations grew across the nation and even within the state of New York, New York City actually made an about-face on incarceration and crime. Cities can actually be safer with substantial decreases in incarceration, and states should follow the lead of this remarkable reform.”
The paper documents that between 1996 and 2014, New York City’s serious crime rate fell by 58 percent, while the combined jail and prison incarceration rate fell by 55 percent. Despite the fact that the city’s population grew by more than a million during this time, the number of residents behind bars declined by 31,120. In contrast, the same period saw the national incarceration rate grow by 12 percent, accompanied by a more modest decrease in serious crime of 42 percent.
