But the best research seems to indicate that while the initial increase in incarceration did have an effect on crime reduction in the 1980s, the two million more put behind bars thereafter did nothing to further reduce crime. And the states that have moved most swiftly to reduce prison populations haven’t seen a crime bump.
Certain tantalizing theories on the drop in crime have literally nothing at all to do with policing, crime, or even economics. For instance, some public health experts argue (persuasively) that the postwar car boom dramatically increased the amount of lead in the atmosphere; then with the elimination of lead in gasoline and paint, crime rates fell. According to proponents of this theory, the varying levels of environmental lead alone accounts for nearly all of the boom and bust in America’s postwar crime rates.
Another explanation involves the changing structure of the drug war and drug markets. The launch of the War on Drugs in 1971 drove an ever-burgeoning black market worth billions of dollars that played, according to those who have studied the matter, a significant role in the rise in crime. In the late 1980s, as crack flowed into America’s poor, urban neighborhoods, it unsettled existing markets, creating new winners and losers. Violence exploded over turf and market control. During the Crack Years of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, homicide rates more than doubled for black boys aged 14 to 17 and nearly doubled for black men aged 18 to 24.
As for “broken windows” policing, its connection to the crime decline is murky. Legal scholars Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig tracked different populations in five different cities and found “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling, nor for the proposition that ‘broken windows’ policing is the optimal use of scarce law enforcement resources.”
But recent research has lent a bit more credence to the basic causal theory about the relationship between crime and disorder. A 2015 meta-analysis of thirty different studies of “disorder policing” found that such strategies “are associated with an overall statistically significant, modest crime reduction effect.” But it also concludes that “aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions.”
In short, despite reams of literature on the topic, we simply have reached no broad-based consensus about what “caused” the crime decline. “If you take every paper that says this factor explains x percentage of the crime drop,” jokes law professor John Pfaff, who studies mass incarceration, “and add them up, you get 250 percent. That’s a huge red flag.”
The crime drop was almost certainly the result of a dynamic combination of factors. But in the absence of a rock-solid case for one specific explanation, anyone with a pet policy can plausibly claim it was that policy that did the trick. And obviously those who worked in law enforcement during the period have every incentive, both political and psychological, to argue that their innovations, reforms, and sustained methodological improvements should get the credit.
Elected officials, for their part, have powerful incentives not to alter the machinery, not to do anything that might draw too much attention. Since no one actually knows why crime is down (though many think they do), the cargo cult of white fear requires certain rituals be maintained, and when they are flouted, a visceral collective anxiety results, stoked unfailingly by demagogues. Everyone tasked with keeping crime from returning has developed deeply held, near-religious beliefs about What Works. We are farmers begging the Gods to keep the drought away; we will give them what they want, if they will spare us their wrath.
Any political momentum to reduce mass incarceration, strengthen police accountability, and rethink our approach to justice rests on the continuation of the oh-so-delicate status quo, in which crime continues at historic lows. But what happens when that changes? In Baltimore, which experienced a horrific surge in murder and violent crime after Freddie Gray, the apparent vengeance of the crime gods ripped the entire city’s political order apart. That same fate hangs over any politician who would take bold steps toward decolonization and integration, if such steps also correspond with an increase in crime. Just ask New York’s mayor.
By the time Bill DeBlasio took office, “stop and frisk” had become a widely deployed tool under Ray Kelly, who helmed the NYPD under Mayor Bloomberg.* In Bloomberg’s final years, grassroots activists exerted increasing political pressure against the policy, then were joined by politicians representing the millions of the city’s black and Latino residents who were being robbed of their constitutional freedoms. As a result, “stop and frisk” started to decline, and DeBlasio made ending it one of the signatures of his campaign. When a federal judge ruled its implementation in New York unconstitutional, DeBlasio did not appeal.
Kelly and the police union fought like mad to preserve the practice, warning in increasingly dire, apocalyptic terms of the hell to which the city would return if random young black and brown men could no longer be detained routinely on a whim for no discernible reason. We will anger the crime gods! they practically shouted. We shall see drought for a thousand years!
But the drought never came, and the vengeance never arrived. The numbers are in. They show essentially zero relationship between “stop and frisk” and crime in the city. But the superstitions live on in other forms.