Part of the problem is going to be that, now that this is such a huge business, with many communities relying on prisons for economic life, any effort to reduce the prison population will be cast by opponents as "job-killing regulation." Watch.

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What about gentrification? It is also a major factor in crime reduction.

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yep, especially when you notice that many prisons are privately owned. in some cases, they are guaranteed X amount of prisoners per year by the government. jailing people is good business!

if governments really wanted to end incarceration, they'd start with the victimless witch hunt that is the war on drugs.

This is why prisons are big business: http://www.cnbc.com/id/44762286/Billi ... erica039s_Prison_Industry

With more than 2.3 million people locked up, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One out of 100 American adults is behind bars ? while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

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Yes, I did notice that, I am looking forward to hear him speak because ward A is tired of the same BS we deserve better than what we have been getting for the last 4 yrs just lip service.

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Interesting - one of the candidates for city council in Ward A, Frank Gajewski, is quoted in the article. Beginning on page 3. This is a great example of why Fulop put him on his ticket.

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 25, 2013

Now that the United States has the world?s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?

In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City?s example?

As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country.

Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals.

?The precise causes of New York?s crime decline will be debated by social scientists until the Sun hits the Earth,? said Michael Jacobson, a criminologist who ran the city?s Correction and Probation Departments during the 1990s and is now the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice research group. ?But the 50,000-foot story from New York is that you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population ? and save a huge amount of money in the process.?

New York?s singular success has attracted attention across the country from public officials whose budgets have been strained by the prison boom. The 2.3 million people behind bars in America, a fifth of the world?s prisoners, cost taxpayers more than $75 billion a year. The strict penal policies were intended to reduce crime, but they have led to a historic, if largely unrecognized, shift in priorities away from policing.

?The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,? said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. ?In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it?s more than three times higher. In Japan it?s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.?

Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.

New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.

Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, ?What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,? was soon known as the ?nothing works? thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies ?cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.?

An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.

Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his ?nothing works? conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.

But New York diverged from the national trend in the early 1990s, when it began expanding its police force and introduced a computerized system to track crimes and complaints. Officers also aggressively enforced laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes like turnstile jumping in the subways. Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply.

Yet serious crime went down. So though more people were being locked up for brief periods ? including many who were unable to make bail and were awaiting trial ? the local jail population was shrinking and fewer city residents were serving time in state prisons.

?Even with more people coming into the system, the overall bed count was declining because people weren?t staying as long,? Dr. Jacobson, who was correction commissioner from 1995 to 1998, recalled.

?It was a nightmare to administer because there was so much churning and turnover, but it was good news for the city.?

Saving $1.5 Billion a Year

Even as the city grew by nearly a million people in the last two decades, the number of New Yorkers behind bars fell by a third, to below 40,000 today.

If the city had followed the national trend, nearly 60,000 additional New Yorkers would be behind bars today, and the number of city and state correction officers would have more than doubled since 1990, said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Now if we can get our JC politicians to pay attention.