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The research wars: hard-liners gave long prison sentences credit for the drop in crime. They were mostly wrong.

Article Excerpt
Walking to my hotel through Amsterdam's deserted early morning streets, I felt a sharp poke in my back and heard an accented voice behind me. "Do you know what this is? It's a knife. Now, you are going to give me your money or else I will stab you, and kick you, and kill you, and throw you into the river."

"That's a canal, not a river," I replied, before a second poke persuaded me to hand over the cash.

In 1985, James Q. Wilson wrote, "There aren't any liberals left.... They've all been mugged by now." Wilson had a point. Thoughts of humanitarian treatment for the perpetrators of violent crime flew out the window. If sending muggers to prison for life could make the streets safer, so be it.

David Mulhausen, who studies crime at the conservative Heritage Foundation, concurs. "I'm a first-strike guy," he says. "You rob a bank, you should go away for the rest of your life. People who burglarize aren't accidentally walking into someone's house."

Things haven't quite come to that in America, but after undergoing something of a collective mugging between 1963 and 1973, when the murder rate more than doubled, the United States began a massive expansion of its prison population unparalleled in the democratic world. The number of people behind bars in the United States grew more than 600 percent in the past 30 years, while the population grew just 72 percent. Largely, however, it is the result of tougher sentencing criteria and longer prison terms.

The psychology behind this expansion is easy to understand, but assessing whether or not it works is a much more difficult task. Simplistic analyses of the relationship between crime and incarceration can produce pretty much any result the investigator desires.

In an October 2000 National Review article, Eli Lehrer, arguing that the expansion of the prison system from 1,148,702 combined state and federal inmates in 1990 to 1,893,115 in 1999 was well worth the price, wrote, "Had the 1999 crime rates been the same as those of 1990, America would have seen about 7,800 additional murders, 20,000 or so additional rapes, and nearly a quarter-million more armed...