Conservatives claim that the increase in imprisoned criminals is a cause of the drop in the crime rate. Of course, the numbers in the second paragraph makes it clear that the decline in crime rate was negligible. Furthermore, it’s not automatically clear whether the additional prisoners are hard-core criminals. I’m not sure either side is right. There may be separate causes for the drop in crime rate and rise in prison population.
Is it surprising that crime went down when prison population went up?
Is it to be expected that crime would go down when prison population goes up?
Or, do the two statistics have nothing to do with each other?
But, the deb
Don’t rule out a third, independent cause. For example: abortion. There is some evidence to suggest that today’s low crime rates are a benefit of the millions of abortions performed in the last 30 years.
P.S. I didn’t actually bring that issue up to argue it – although it was kinda fun to toss it out like a candy bar in a swimming pool – but to exemplify that you can’t simply take two extant trends and claim that they are necessarily causally related.
I’d look at demographics first. Most crime is committed by males between the ages of (something like) 18 - 34. As that demographic goes up or down, so does the crime rate, all other things being equal.
I would also posit that the 0.2% drop in crime is really statistically insignificant; it would be within the margin of error for such a figure to have had a small crime increase actually occur.
I’m not sure if you’re being snippy or not, but I think it’s possible you misunderstood the numbers given in the OP. 2.1 million represents the 2002 prison population, which is higher (by 2.6%, or about 53000) than the 2001 population. If there was a correlation, it would suggest that imprisoning these 53000 people caused a 0.2% drop in crime.
Personally, I think the correlation exists but unless you make an effort to identify lock up the hard-core criminals (i.e. those who are really dangerous and likely to reoffend regardless of punishment/rehabilitation) it’s a stunningly inefficient way to reduce crime.
