Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime

No one, not even reformers, doubts that locking up enough people can drive down crime. Nor does anyone question that many felonious types belong behind bars. Alfred Blumenstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, cites a study that found that the growth in imprisonment during the 1990s accounted for about 25 percent of the national decline in crime.

David Muhlhausen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation -- which is an influential voice within the Bush administration -- goes further. He says prison is a fine crime-fighting method. "Putting citizens behind bars works because they can't commit crimes," he said. "It's one of the best tools we have against crime."

But there are powerful counter examples, criminologists say. The nation's prison population rose between 1985 and 1993 -- even as crime spiked sharply. New York was not the only city in which crime and imprisonment fell in tandem during the 1990s. From 1993 to 2001, homicides in San Diego declined by 62 percent while prison sentences dropped by 25 percent.

Casting an eye north of the border, Canada experienced a sharp drop in crime as its prison population fell. "There are several examples of crime crashing without imprisonment rising, but we treat these as outliers," says Franklin E. Zimring, author of "The Great American Crime Decline" and a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "For most of the nation, the 1990s were the era of 'throw away the key.' "

Such heavy reliance on prison, epidemiologists note, carries a considerable social price tag. Hundreds of thousands of released felons cannot vote, cannot obtain driver's licenses and have trouble finding jobs -- a toll that falls disproportionately on blacks, Latinos and poor whites.

Barry Campbell, who works at the Fortune Society, a prison reform organization in Manhattan, did 15 years behind bars on sundry charges. He attributes many of his troubles to a drug addiction that he has kicked. Ask him about New York's experience in driving down imprisonment and crime, and he is not surprised.

"Prison is a place where someone heading down a path of destruction is propelled at 90 miles an hour," he says.

Approximately 60 percent of U.S. convicts serve time for charges related to drug peddling and addiction. In California, 65,000 parolees fail drug tests each year and are recycled back to prison each year. They serve, on average, an additional four months, at a cost of $1 billion.

No public official set out to drive down New York's prison and jail population in the early 1990s. Quite the opposite; crack-fueled homicides had topped 2,000, the middle class was fleeing and Giuliani was elected on a crime-fighting platform.

"If I told Rudy we needed to lock up 40,000, 50,000 people, he would have said fine," Jacobson said. "Rudy can say now that he's a genius, but the drop in prison population was entirely unintentional."

William J. Bratton, Giuliani's police commissioner in the mid-1990s -- now chief of the Los Angeles Police Department -- directed his officers to make swarms of misdemeanor arrests for fare beating, pot smoking, gun possession and the like, charges that result in much shorter incarcerations. Felony arrests, by contrast, dropped sharply, which meant far fewer city residents were sent to the high-security Upstate prisons.

City and state prisons in New York also turned aggressively to drug treatment and mental health counseling. They did so as a matter of enlightened self-interest. The city prison system is the second-largest mental health provider in the nation; only the Los Angeles County system surpasses it.

Commissioner Horn got his start decades ago as a prison guard. Now he occupies the executive office at Rikers Island and is a national expert on what is recognized as an American specialty: mass incarceration.

"I leave it to the economists and the moralists to decide if we've paid too high a cost to imprison," Horn said as he walked out of a shadowed prison block. "But New York proves you can lock up a lot fewer people and get a pretty big impact."

Staff writer Robin Shulman contributed to this report.