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Crime and Prison

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

Last week the Pew Center on the States produced a report highlighting the statistic that the prison and jail population has topped 1% of the total population. The press release is here and the full report is here. In reaction, Investors Business Daily had this editorial noting that prison increases coincided with a dramatic drop in crime. Paul Cassell had this post at the Volokh Conspiracy with a similar graph making largely the same point. The graph above shows the rate of violent crime (FBI violent index crimes per 100,000 population, in red on the left scale) and the number of prisoners in each year divided by the number of violent crimes in the same year (in blue on the right scale). Our position has always been that the prison population relative to the crime rate is a more meaningful number than the ratio to the general population...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).