If you read the news, you know about the prison population “crisis” where domestic prison populations have literally exploded over the past two decades. An odd thing about this though and one that doesn’t get written about is the correlating drop in violent crime rate. Stated simply, as our country’s prison populations have swelled, our nation’s violent crime rate has gone down down. We at Independent Sources understand the difference between correlation and causation. However could it be that the reason crime is going down is simply because career criminals are locked up? That can’t be, can it? A quick look at recidivism rates makes a strong case that it is…Norman Lear, Mike Farrell, et. al. notwithstanding.

On a related but different topic, if you are a victim of a violent crime in the United States, what are you most likely to be struck with? According to the Unified Crime Index , “personal weapons” — hands, fists and feet — were used in 31.1 percent of violent crimes. Other dangerous weapons, like golf clubs, hammers and baseball bats were used in 27.8 percent of violent crimes. Firearms were involved in 26.2 percent of violent crimes, and knives and other cutting instruments in 14.9 percent.

Finally, it turns out that about 1 out of 142 people in the U.S. is in some form of jail. Is this bad? I’m not so sure. If you lined up the people from my high school, I can think of more than 1 out of 142 that were pure jerks and deserving of a life in jail. Using this proxy for our overall population, it might be that 1/142 is just about the right number.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 8:23 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.