A report released on Thursday argues that throwing hundreds of thousands of people in prison has had only a small impact on the crime rate.
Violent crime has fallen by 51 percent since 1991 and property crime has dropped by 43 percent during that same time, according to “What Caused the Crime Decline,” a report released by the Brennan Center at New York University. During that time, the number of people incarcerated has jumped by 61 percent, with almost all of that increase coming between 1990 and 1999.
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Putting more than two million people behind bars isn’t worth the small benefit of slightly fewer property crimes, the report concludes.
“In times of shrinking budgets or economic prosperity, the government should be in the business of investing in and deploying policies that achieve their intended goals,” the report said. “This report offers lasting support that there is a continued need to rethink policies that are bad investments: costly, harmful to society, and now proven to have diminishing effectiveness to control crime.”
