Washington Post, Michael Powell Friday, November 24, 2006 The correction commissioner walks down a long row of cells painted blue, his footsteps echoing inside the massive Rikers Island jail block. Every cell is empty, and he couldn't be happier."What we've seen in New York is the fastest drop in crime in the nation, and we did it while locking up a lot less people," says Commissioner Martin F. Horn, who oversees the city lockups, including barbed-wire-ringed Rikers Island. "The only people using these cells now are the directors and actors from 'Law and Order.' " It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time. Nearly 2.2 million Americans now live behind bars, about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world. For three decades, Congress and dozens of legislatures have worked to write tougher anti-crime measures. Often the only controversy has centered on how to finance the construction of prison cells. New York City officials, by contrast, are debating whether to turn some old cells in downtown Brooklyn into luxury shops.
really? i've lived in nyc my whole life and was never mugged. **** probably jynxed it. oh well i'll take the taser to work tomorrow.
I don't know what your views are, but you do realize that skinheads and the KKK are in agreement with your opinion about the relationship between legalized abortion and lower crime rates.
so you think we shoudl promote abortion in the projects and other poor neighborhoods since that's where most of the crimes come from?
no, you don't need to promote abortion, its an important enough decision that people are responsible enough to make it themselves. You still didn't answer my last question. Skinheads and the KKK also don't support affirmative action. Are you asserting that if they believe one thing in common with another group that the groups are the same in entirety? I thought you were smarter than that.
I see, and if they're poor and live in the projects, they should first consider abortion the minute they get pregnant because it's the responsible thing to do as a poor person. Afterall, your child has a much greater chance of growing up to be just another burden on society, either direct (criminal) or indirect (welfare). It doesn't make one group the same as the other if they share a similar point on an issue, HOWEVER if that issue is on the same level as equating abortion = lower crime which leads to a bunch of other views, then a that point, I think you need to refocus on what's coming out of your mouth.
You know I've read that a lot of that freakonomics abortion argument data has not held up to subsequent scrutiny...not sure of the details, and don't really care, so carry on.
I'm familiar with the argument linking abortion to dropping crime rates nationwide, but I don't see why it would have what would seem like a particularly large effect on New York City. Can abortion explain why crime dropped faster in New York than any other big city? New York likely has a strong abortion per capita rate, but I don't think that can explain the entirety of the phenomenon here. (As a pro-life aside, what if you counted each abortion as a crime, would New York's crime rate have dropped any? Could it be that criminal behavior in New York has simply shifted to activities that happen to be condoned by the government at this time?)
interesting read, look at both sides http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?page=article&Article_ID=11470 Has Abortion Helped Lower The Crime Rate? YES According to a study by John J. Donohue III, Stanford Law School, and Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago, a large share of the drop in the crime rate, perhaps as much as half, can be traced to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion decision of 1972. That's because many of the children who might have grown up to commit those crimes were never born. Within a few years of the Roe decision, up to a quarter of pregnancies in the U.S. ended in abortion. An analysis of crime rates from 1985 to 1997 examines them as a function of abortion rates two decades before. The timing of the decline in crime coincided with the period when children born shortly after Roe would be reaching their late teenage years -- the peak ages for criminal activity. States that were the first to legalize abortion, including New York, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, were the first to see a drop in crime, and states with the highest abortion rates had larger decreases in crime than states with low abortion rates. The reason abortion has had an impact on the crime rate is the high incidence of abortion among mothers whose children are most likely to be at risk for future crime: teenagers, unmarried women and black women have higher rates of abortion, and their children are statistically at a higher risk for crime in adulthood. The economic benefit to society of abortion in reducing crime may be up to $30 billion annually. NO Declining crime rates are the result of a complex series of factors, and half the reduction cannot be attributed, as Donohue and Levitt suggest, to a single cause. Among the possible reasons for the crime drop: The dwindling of the crack cocaine problem. The improved economy and greater job opportunities for low-income youth. Changing attitudes among teenagers and more innovative policing strategies. And the steady growth of the prison population. News of the report prompted outraged responses ("So fraught with stupidity I hardly know where to start refuting it.") and dismissive ones ("I don't think it has any policy implications whatsoever.") But other critics also questioned both the researchers' knowledge of abortion history and the practical usefulness of the report. That is because the policy implication of the report is that if Medicaid funding for abortion at the federal level was renewed, there would be a potential drop in the crime rate in 17 years. But no interest group is likely to make such an argument. Source: Erica Goode, "Linking Drop in Crime to Rise in Abortion," New York Times, August 20, 1999. For more on Crime: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=14
The poor are like stray dogs who steal food from the rich people's trash cans. They should be neutered and spayed to control their population because the last thing the world needs is more stray dogs.
You realize there is a difference between there being a causal relationship and turning that into a policy proposal, right?
of course, but when people start directly attributing lowered crime rates to abortion and state it as fact and not more than a POSSIBLE casual relationship, it gives me remarkable gratification to poke fun at them. EDIT: The most annoying thing is making note of freakonomics and then stepping back and pretending that they are only making a observation and not realy making any judgments about it. This is the EXACT same excuse that racists have been using for years when they cite stats like "there are more blacks in prison than any other race" and then pretending that they are only making a casual observation.
Have you read the book? It's not a political book. Some people may take their findings out and trying to use them for political purposes, but that has nothing to do with the analysis. If you didn't allow research to find anything that's not politically correct, you'd end up with a lot of bad ideas and bad policy decisions out there. What if abortion really IS a reason for the drop? Wouldn't it be useful to know that when deciding whether to fund another 100,000 cops on the streets? If that policy initiative in the 1990's wasn't a cause for the drop, shouldn't we want to know that? Or the NYC policing initatives? Wouldn't it be good to know these things to make better decisions down the road? Trying to hide statistical findings, whatever they may be, because they have potentially ugly policy implications is a terrible idea if the goal is to best govern in the future.
Dropping murder rate surprises NYC By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY NEW YORK — It's the city's biggest murder mystery: Why is the murder rate, which seemed to have hit bottom, suddenly plummeting again? Murder is down 40% so far this year. There were 85 homicides in the first 2 1/2 months, compared with 141 in the same period last year. The borough of Manhattan has logged 11 murders, a 60% cut. At this rate, by year's end, the city would have 386 murders — the fewest since 1958, when Mantle played for the Yankees, Kennedy Airport was called Idlewild and mugging was what you did for the camera. Murder is widely regarded as the most important and objective crime statistic. But overall, major crime in New York, including robbery and assault, is down a healthy 8% so far this year. New Yorkers, who had become a tad blasé about crime — it has dropped by two-thirds since 1993 — are taking notice. "Something terrific is going on," says Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "If only we knew what was causing it."
