Stu Bykofsky: Why the crime rate is going down, really
IN DOWN ECONOMIC times, any positive news is welcome, and that's what we got with the announcement that crime in Philadelphia is down, way down, across the board.
The announcement was made jointly by Mayor Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and new District Attorney Seth Williams, who had to feel a bit like President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. (Williams was running for, not in, office during the two years covered by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports.)
What the heck! Champagne all around!
What follows is not intended to pour cold water on the efforts of the mayor, police chief and just-retired D.A., Lynne Abraham. All of them worked hard as gravediggers to break the back of Philadelphia's high crime stats.
But we can't use our glowing numbers to nominate Philadelphia for the "Best Governance" Award. Major crimes dropped in almost all major cities across the United States. We are not alone.
Isn't that odd? Wouldn't you think that in hard times the crime rate would go up?
It's not true that hard times bring high crime, says University of Baltimore criminologist Jeffrey Ian Ross, co-author of "Beyond Bars: Rejoining Society After Prison." One explanation for the decrease in crime - typically the province of younger adult males - is demographics, he says: Fewer people were born 18 to 35 years ago, "and thus there are less of them around today to engage in crime."
Some people make a huge deal of the fact that America has 1 million of its own citizens in prison, the highest per-capita incarceration rate among Western democracies. They pull their hair and wail because 1 million seems like a big number.
But is it really?
Think about it. A million Americans in jail amounts to one-third of 1 percent of 300 million Americans, not all of whom are Rhodes scholars. Do you think only 0.3 percent of Americans - that tiny fraction - are criminals?
Philadelphia would be paradise if only 0.3 percent of us were robbers, rapists or killers. We'd hardly need any cops at all.
One reason the crime rate is going down, I think, is precisely because the prison population is going up.
The longer you keep an armed robber in jail, the longer you are free from him possibly coming through your screen door. And that one felon doesn't represent a single robbery. Since criminals rarely get caught on the first job, cops tell me, locking one up clears several crimes. And by taking him off the street, you prevent six - or 20 - future crimes.
So the next time you hear about 1 million Americans in jail, ask yourself: Is that too many? Or too few?