Some true facts about crime

 

We must acknowledge that there are people who for whatever reason lack conscience or empathy, a condition for which there is no sure cure, and who cannot be in an uncontrolled environment. They are rare in real life, but very common on TV. We're not talking about Ted Bundy or Dennis Rader here. They don't constitute a blip in the statistics. However, they are the staple of TV police procedurals, which means that they constitute people's idea of what crime and criminals are all about.

 

In the next slide, I've lined up a graph showing the U.S. prison and jail population over time with the reported crime rate. We don't have reliable data on the crime rate going back as far as 1925, so the matchup begins in 1960. 

 

 

 

 I'm sorry if the dates are a little hard to read, but basically, the crime rate started to rise around 1975 and peaked in the early 1990s. The rate of incarceration followed that trend at first, but when the crime rate started to fall after 1995, the incarceration rate just kept going up, and didn't peak until 2010. Now it has come down a bit, but not nearly proportionately. The crime rate now is back to just a bit more than where it was before the increase began, and is probably pretty close to where it was throughout most of the 20th Century. So yes, we did have a troubling, and rather mysterious epidemic of violent crime, but it's been over for a while now. However, the corporate media, the general public, and politicians haven't gotten the memo.

 

We'll get back to why this may have happened. I personally think there's a pretty powerful single reason for it, but in order to understand it, we first need to consider who the people are who are incarcerated and involved in the criminal justice system. I remind you, that's not entirely congruent with the population of people who actually commit crimes, but it is in the minds of the public.