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Increased incarceration had a limited effect on reducing crime for the last two
decades: Increased incarceration had some effect, likely somewhere around 0-10 percent,
on reducing crime from 1990 to 2000. Since 2000, however, increased incarceration had an
almost zero effect on crime. Further, a number of states -- California, Michigan, New Jersey,
New York, and Texas -- have successfully reduced imprisonment while crime continued to
fall.
Other factors reduced crime: Increased numbers of police officers, some data-driven
policing techniques, changes in income, decreased alcohol consumption, and an aging
population played a role in reducing crime. In particular, this report finds that the policing
technique known as CompStat is associated with a 5 to 15 percent decrease in crime. A
* Lauren-Brooke Eisen is Counsel and Julia Bowling is Research Associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. They
are co-authors of What Caused the Crime Decline?
review of past research indicates that consumer confidence and inflation also likely
contributed to crime reduction.
Incarceration & Crime in Pennsylvania
As illustrated in Figure 1, Pennsylvania imprisons 394 people per 100,000 a lower rate than the U.S.
at large (496 per 100,000).
In 2012, the state enacted the Criminal Justice Reform Act to reduce reliance on incarceration. The
law allows parolees to return to community corrections centers in lieu of state prison for parole
violations. It also calls for judges to consider risks posed by individuals during sentencing, funds
local law enforcement, and provides localities with incentives to divert defendants to county jails.
Figure 1: Imprisonment Rates in Pennsylvania and the U.S. (1980-2013)
As shown in Figure 2, as incarceration rose from 1980 (when Pennsylvania had 8,171 prisoners), the
effectiveness of increased incarceration adding new prisoners steadily declined. By 1992,
imprisonment increased three-fold to 24,974 prisoners, and effectiveness on crime declined to
essentially zero. The marginal effect on crime of adding more people to prisons remains at
essentially zero today.
This reports findings support further reforms to reduce Pennsylvanias incarcerated population
and show this can be achieved without added crime.