Last Revised: 5/6/99

        OUR STATE AND FEDERAL PRISON SYSTEMS CURRENTLY host some 1,100,000 badpersons, and most goodpersons view the figure as far too low. They observe that malefactors still abound on the streets, and they grasp the steely logic of Ben Wattenberg's dictum that "the thug in prison can't shoot your sister." The alternative view, more sympathetic to prisoners and long cloven to by the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the figure is too high: that penal punishment is a failure and the huge inmate totals a national disgrace. Alvin Bronstein, longtime head of the ACLU's National Prison Project, has opined that "locking up more people has no impact on crime rates." When the feds opened up their new high-tech prison in Florence, Colorado, Alvin was quoted as aghastly stating, "The Agriculture Department regulation for the housing of primates would not allow monkeys to be locked up in Florence." He could be right about the regs.
         This brings us to a marvelous irony. The ACLU has made it possible to prove that higher levels of imprisonment mean lower crime rates.
         How so? Begin with the fact that scholars trying to demonstrate this relationship have long been frustrated by the "simultaneity problem"-the problem being that high crime rates in an area rapidly translate into high imprisonment rates, so the two trend lines always seem to be moving together, which makes it hard to show that more hoosegow time leads to less crime.
         A neat, ingenious solution to this problem was broached a while back by Harvard economist Steven Levitt. Writing in the May Quarterly Journal of Economics, he focused on 12 states that once had high levels of imprisonment but were forced by court orders to cut back. The orders typically reflected lawsuits brought by the ACLU against prison overcrowding. Nexis has 1, 124 articles mentioning "prison," "overcrowding," and "ACLU."
         Data for the 12 states show plainly that lower levels of imprisonment mean higher levels of crime. Levitt writes: "In the three years following the court's handing down a final decision, prison populations are estimated to grow a total of 13.7% to 19.7% more slowly than if there had been no litigation, while violent crime rates are 7.9% to 8.3% higher, and property crime rates are 5.7% to 6.2% higher." The typical guy in prison has committed 15 serious crimes a year. Putting away 1,000 extra bad guys for a year reduces the expected number of murders by four, rapes by 53, assaults by 1,200, robberies by 1,100, burglaries by 2,600, auto thefts by 700, and other larcenies by 9,200.
         The economics of putting people away are attractive. Incarceration costs around $33,000 a year, while estimates of the monetary and quality-of-life costs of crime-admittedly tougher to calculate-average around $60,000. We need more prisoners.
         How many more? Levitt's article does not squarely address this question, but his calculations indicate that we could raise the prison population to 1,350,000 before we would be putting away people hose crimes cost less than their incarceration.
         The figure implies that we need a 23% boost in prisoner totals. To be sure, no such precision is really possible, given the inescapable wobbliness of the quality-of-life cost estimates. There is, however, no doubt that some increase is needed-maybe more than 23%, maybe less. Either way, your sister will be safer.

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