Gordon Witkin The Crime Bust Analysis

This article demonstrates how Bill Bratton, as the Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) from 1994 to 1996, William J. Bratton fought crime throughout the city of Ney York with legendary achievement, leading a national revolution in attitudes toward policing. Bratton adopted a “broken windows”1 community policing strategy of zero tolerance for minor offenses and championed statistical analysis to prevent crimes before they occurred. In the 70s and 80s, as Bratton continued his career in policing, institutional theories seemed dominant. Nixon’s brand of “tough-on-crime” and “law and order” conservatism meant that community relations were largely ignored by police. In 1982, James Wilson sought to re-establish some balance.

Freakonomics is a book written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner which was published after they met each other in an interview for New York Times. After the article was published, the two went on to have an unanticipated partnership. Freakonomics, a book of problems and answers with no unifying theme, is supposed to make you look at a situation a different way. One of the problems in the book included the monumental drop in crime across America in the 1980’s when it was expected to rise significantly. Levitt came across this problem by first looking at the accepted reasons for the sudden drop such as more police, stronger capital punishment, changes in the crack market, and the aging of the population.

Many people, before reading this article, might not have been aware of the rapid increase of incarceration rates and the overcrowding issue. This appeals to the reader’s sense of logic by stating that the vast majority of them are nonviolent because it shows them that that is where the overcrowding issue resides. This gets the readers thinking that alternative ways of dealing with nonviolent offenders might be necessary to solving the issue in the criminal justice system. Zuckerman makes the reader understand that reforming the prison system is a reasonable solution to the many problems generated by non-violent offenders being imprisoned. Not only does the author make the reader aware of the issue, but he provides a logical solution for it.

Over the past 40 years U.S. incarceration has grown at an extraordinary rate, with the United States’ prison population increasing from 320,000 inmates in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million inmates in 2013. The growth in prison population is in part due to society’s shift toward tough on crime policies including determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, and mandatory minimums. These tough on crime policies resulted in more individuals committing less serious crimes being sentenced to serve time and longer prison sentences. The 1970s-1980s: The War on Drugs and Changes in Sentencing Policy Incarceration rates did rise above 140 persons imprisoned per 100,000 of the population until the mid 1970s.

In the article, “Bring Back Flogging” by Jeff Jacoby states that flogging should be brought back for criminals instead of putting them in prisons. The United States imprisons more people than any other country. Crime is getting out of control and the crime rate is a 250 percent increased since 1980. Many inmates that are convicted of felons are released to early or not locked up at all. The price of keeping criminals behind bars is about $30,000 per inmate per year.

Many factors of the crack epidemic influenced the crime drop. First, the “precipitous rise in crack cocaine in the mid-to-late 1980s in America” made violence and crime increase drastically (Baumer and Wolff, 2014, p. 21). Since crime shot up, it made statistics seem to drop even more in the 1990s, especially for homicides, as stated by Levitt (2004). The shift from young people to a “graying” society is another point at which Baumer, Wolff and Levitt can all agree could be a cause for the crime drop of the 1990s (Baumer and Wolff, 2014, p. 20).

In this day and age, There are five times as many people in jail as there were in the 1970s. Almost 5 percent of the population of the United States will go to prison at in point of their life. Conservatives believe that imprisonment reduces crime in two ways: it removes criminals from the public so they can not commit more crimes, and it also discourages people who would commit a crime as they consider the consequences. Unfortunately, neither of these outcomes have come to be true. In fact, mass incarceration and “tough on crime” laws have been extremely ineffective that instead of reducing crime, it increases it.

They point to statistics that show a decrease in crime rates in New York State since these laws were enacted. Additionally, they argue that the threat of longer prison terms deters some individuals from committing violent crimes in the first

One of the theories it speaks of is the Pyrrhic defeat theory. This theory states that the criminal justice system is created to function in a particular fashion in order to create an image of crime where crime is actually seen as the “threat from the poor”.(Reiman, 2010, p.5) “Reimans’s theory suggests that those who have power to change the system benefit from the way it operates: they can go on committing harms and accumulating wealth without punishment, while the country remains focused on street crime and poor minority criminals. ”(Leighton 2010) In order to accomplish this “The system must actually fight crime-or at least some crime-but only enough to keep it from getting out of hand and to keep the struggle to substantially reduce or eliminate crime.

Stud Terkel quoted in his book "Hard Times," “What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.” (pg. 195). During the Hard Times crime rate increased as the family lost everything. This ultimately led people, to do anything to gain money. Hence, the growth in crime

In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place.

Chicago and other major cities remain in the news, as they continue to struggle with high murder rates. In fact, the city of Chicago has witnessed a 50 percent increase in its murder rate in only a one year period, and this area is not alone. Thankfully, cities across America and noticing violent and property crime rates remain at historic lows. The new adminstration has noted the increase in murder rates, but needs to also consider that other crimes on are the decline, which is always a good thing.

Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

As discussed within 13TH and according to Pressbooks (n.d.), since the implication of the "get tough" on crime policy, which started in the 1970s, people have questioned whether the policy has reduced crime and its cost. While the "get tough" on crime policy was intended to increase harsher punishments, it ultimately led to higher and more costly incarceration rates. The policy, according to Pressbooks (n.d.), had done more harm than good as mass incarceration rates skyrocketed. Not only were the rates and cost of policy an issue, but people's rights and liberties, specifically African Americans, were being infringed as their sentences were cruel and unusually long. According to Pressbooks (n.d.), the situation of the "get tough" on crime policy became so bad that upon examining the effects of the policy, advocacy groups were created to call attention to the unjust policy and to showcase to the state and federal legislators the urge of needing to reform the sentencing practices to help inmates and those being introduced into the system.

The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for several reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. This literature review will discuss the ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system and how mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism has become a problem.