Tough Laws Get Little Credit for Crime Drop

Attempting to make sense of a nationwide drop in crime, some of the country’s top criminal justice experts who spoke at a Rand Corp. workshop Saturday rejected a common perception that a reported decline in violent crimes was the result of tougher sentencing laws and increased imprisonment.

The conference was organized by the nonprofit Open Society Institute “to spur rational debate about the country’s binge in incarceration”--a trend that organizers say has prison populations brimming far above their intended capacity and is squeezing local governments. More than 100 law enforcement agents, academicians and elected officials attended the conference at Rand headquarters in Santa Monica.

Craig Cornett, fiscal advisor to the California Legislature, discussed the state’s passage of the three-strikes law, which dramatically boosted the number of inmates in the prison system. He said prisons will run out of space within 2 1/2 years. The law was passed at the same time voters rejected a bond to build prisons, he said.

“Even if we authorized a new prison, we couldn’t build it fast enough,” he said.

Cornett said a bill proposed by Gov. Pete Wilson would further expand the scope of the three-strikes law and put more offenders behind bars.

But beyond contending that the trend toward tougher sentencing might be unsustainable, Saturday’s speakers debated the factors they see fueling the drop in violent crime and how to strengthen them.

A study released last year by the FBI showed that violent crime dropped 7% in 1996, the fifth straight year of decline and the largest on record. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminal justice expert from Carnegie Mellon University, said other contributors to the decline include better law enforcement, improvements in the economy, tougher gun control and shifts in drug markets, such as the declining use of crack cocaine. Although the rate of incarceration has skyrocketed, increasing by 450% since 1970, Blumstein said, the drop in violent crime has occurred at a much slower rate, and only in major cities.

Moreover, Blumstein said, the decline has taken place predominantly among the nation’s youths. He said the rate of violent crime peaked in the early 1990s because as older drug sellers were imprisoned, they were replaced by increasing numbers of youths, who carried guns to guard their stash.

“Kids have never been good dispute-resolvers,” he said, adding that younger criminals are quicker to resort to violence. He cited studies showing that the rate of violent crime among older age groups was in fact steadily declining, while the same offenses among youths was shooting upward.

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According to Blumstein, the decline in violent crime over the last several years is almost exclusively linked to the drop in the number of such offenses committed by teenagers. He attributes stepped-up efforts by law enforcement to seize weapons from youths in major cities.

Lawrence Sherman, a professor and chairman of the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, agreed that gun control has been a crucial factor in reducing violent crime.

Sherman said that a study he developed for the Kansas City police and published in 1994 showed that when officers increased the number of handguns seized by 65%, crimes committed with guns dropped 50%.

In his presentation at Rand, Sherman credited the drop in violent crime to police agencies using computers to target specific neighborhoods in which to focus on gun control. He said that the New York Police Department every week analyzes where and at what hours crimes committed with guns are taking place and is tailoring its patrols to the data.

The effects are reflected, he said, in a study of the number of guns confiscated from offenders trying to jump over subway turnstiles in New York. Of 10,000 jumpers caught in 1990, 50 were carrying guns. Of the same number in 1995, only seven were armed.

Peter Greenwood, head of Rand’s Criminal Justice Program, said the Los Angeles Police Department began targeting specific areas in November with the aid of computers used in a style of policing called FASTRAC.

Speaking about tougher sentencing laws, Greenwood said a Rand study showed that the three-strikes law would increase incarceration 100% while reducing crime only 25%.

He said public support for such laws is bolstered by the media’s increasing focus on crime and by politicians who use sentencing as a “wedge issue.”