The New York Times is still mocked in media bias circles for a notorious headline from September 1997, over a story by crime reporter Fox Butterfield, lamenting tougher sentencing guidelines. The article's now-notorious headline: "Crime Rates are Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.” But the paper's hand-wringing liberal confusion over the apparent paradox has a straightforward explanation: Crime was down at least partially because more criminals were locked in prison.
The same misguided lament still flickers in occasional headlines, a subliminal ghost, as different liberal editorial writers and reporters rediscover the same seemingly horrifying statistic. The latest entry came in Friday’s edition over a story by Campbell Robertson, “Crime is Down. U.S. Incarceration Rates? Barely.”
For all the talk of curbing America’s appetite for mass incarceration and bipartisan support for reducing prison sentences, the number of people incarcerated in the United States declined only slightly in 2017, according to data released on Thursday by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The United States still has the largest known incarcerated population in the world.
Only because no reliable figures exist for China.
The decline in the prison population is not connected to the crime rate, which has fallen steadily over the past decades. Instead it is it the result of policy changes and court orders, and has been markedly uneven.....At the end of 2016, the federal report said, more than half of state prisoners had been convicted of violent offenses, even though the country’s violent crime rate has dropped drastically since the early 1990s.
Butterfield said same thing in a slightly defensive version in a 2004 story:
In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery.
The Times was telling this same story in a 2008 editorial:
Criminal behavior partly explains the size of the prison population, but incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen.
The paper was still at it in a 2014 editorial.
In recent polls asking about the most important problems facing the country, crime ranks way at the bottom....That’s because crime is at its lowest levels in decades, even while overstuffed prisons cripple state budgets.
That editorial even acknowledged the paper was opening itself up again to soft-on-crime mockery:
A familiar retort is that crime is down precisely because the prisons are full, but that’s simply not true. Multiple studies show that crime has gone down faster in states that have reduced their prison populations.
