RUST COMMENTARY: FALLING CRIME: THE REAL STORY BEHIND ALL THE HYPE

I would like to share with you a note and article that I received in the mail recently.

Feb. 13, 1998

Dear Gary:

Someone brought to my attention today an article in the February 1998 edition of The Limbaugh Letter dealing with the fact that prison sentences are responsible for the crime rates going down. I agree 100 percent with everything he says in the piece.

It is an excellent article from beginning to end. I'm hoping you might get permission from Rush Limbaugh to reprint it in your newspaper or to quote extensively from it in your column It is certainly timely and important.

Kindest regards.

H. Morley Swingle

Prosecuting Attorney

RUSH personally granted permission to run the following article ... It's worth your time to read. Cape Police Chief RICK HETZEL (among many other law enforcement officers) is following similar tactics.

The Limbaugh Letter, February 1998

FALLING CRIME: THE REAL STORY

For no less than five straight years crime has fallen in America, a decline headlined by the drop in the number of homicides. The FBI's preliminary figures for the first half of 1997 show that the trend is still strong: Violent crime decreased 5 percent and property crime fell 4 percent during the first half of 1997. All of the nation's cities enjoyed a drop in serious crime for that six-month period, with the largest cities (over 250,000) showing the greatest decline (6 percent).

The FBI'S index of violent crime, which measures murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, scored an amazing 44 percent drop for New York City from 1990 to 1996. Los Angeles had a 25 percent decline over the same period, Dallas a 37 percent plunge, Pittsburgh a 41 percent decline and a 19 percent fall in Atlanta.

Why is there so much less crime? The New York Times stumbled onto the truth while providing a shining example of the liberal establishment's lack of common sense. Here's the headline from last Sept. 28: "CRIME KEEPS ON FALLING, BUT PRISONS KEEP ON FILLING." Did they say "but"? Shouldn't it be "AS PRISONS KEEP ON FILLING"? The story, by Fox Butterfield, begins by noting the decline in crime, then asks: "So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up? Last year, it reached almost 1.7 million, up about seven percent a year since 1990."

Now, ordinary people might think there's actually a connection between throwing criminals in the slammer and crime going down, but to the enlightened ones who choose which news is fit to print, it remains one of the Great Mysteries.

The fact is that of course prisons reduce crime. In the May 1996 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Steven D. Levitt noted that the nationwide incarceration rate nearly tripled between 1973 and 1994 and that violent crime would be about 70 percent higher if the U.S. prison population had not increased over that time. Property crimes would be about 50 percent more frequent, he also found.

Levitt formulated that every time you increase the prison population by 1,000, you get four fewer murders every year, 53 fewer rapes, 1,200 fewer assaults, 1,100 fewer robberies, 2,600 fewer burglaries, 9,200 fewer larcenies and 700 fewer auto thefts. On average, according to Levitt, about 15 crimes per year are prevented for each additional prisoner locked up.

Liberals constantly bemoan the fact that incarceration costs over $30,000 per prisoner per year. "To me, you pay now for college, or you pay dramatically more later for prisons for people who don't get an education and wind up committing crimes," said California State University system chancellor Barry Munitz in Butterfield's Times article. "The state sends us $6,000 per student, but it pays $34,000 a year for a prison inmate."

As if criminals -- those who "wind up" committing crimes (don't you love how these people talk?) -- would be scholars if only the taxpayer had forked over more money. But for those of you who insist on framing this in purely economic terms, just think of the cost of not locking up these worthless shreds of human debris. The average criminal free to roam the streets is responsible for about $53,900 damage to society each year, Steven Levitt found. Do the math: The net benefit to society is about $23,900 per year for each criminal we put behind bars. And needless to say, the value of each innocent victim whose life is saved or whose wellbeing is protected is priceless.

Yet Bill Clinton claims the nationwide drop in crime is a result of his policies -- I guess like the law he signed in Denver on the eve of the 1996 election. Flanked by the Denver D.A., sheriffs and members of the police, the president signed a measure to "strengthen penalties against anyone who uses the date rape drug Rohypnol in connection with violent crime." But it was already illegal to manufacture or prescribe Rohypnol in the U.S. So how many rapes were deterred by that law? None. Nada. Zilch. Zero.

Remember, more than 90 percent of crimes in America are prosecuted at the state level. Washington is out of the picture. Even the left-leaning New Republic has no illusions about Bill Clinton being the reason for less crime. In a cover story in November entitled "Anatomy of a Policy Fraud," staff writer Stephen Glass noted that "While crime is down nationwide, there is little evidence that Clinton's crime bill had anything to do with that decline. The guns Clinton supposedly banned are still readily and legally available; cities can't afford the 100,000 cops [promised by Clinton] ... and the criminologists' fears that the three-strikes law would backfire are starting to come true, putting yet more strain on an already overburdened criminal justice system."

In a 1994 speech to the American Society of Criminology, Attorney General Janet El Reno personally asked the organization to produce a report on the Clinton crime bill's impact. That analysis was long ago concluded, but the dispassionate, objective, independent El Reno Justice Department has been sitting on the report for months, with no intention of making public its embarrassing findings. Among its conclusions are that the three-strikes-you're-out law has forced the early release of convicted felons to make room for those who must be detained under the three-strikes statute.

In addition, the taxpayer money to fund Clinton's supposed 100,000 cops is being squandered. A 1995 study by Congress' General Accounting Office found that localities were getting Justice Department grants for police with no regard to their crime rate or their needs for increased law enforcement. Glass noted that Harleyville, S.C., population 867, took full advantage, increasing its police force to a grand total of three officers -- with a request filed for a fourth. But because there was so little for the third officer to do, Harleyville's police chief ended up turning over much of his own duties to him. One citizen of the town told Glass: "If President Clinton needs 100,000 officers, and we get it almost free, why not stick as many as we possibly can right here in Harleyville?"

"Almost free"? Hardly. Try a national tab of $8.8 billion.

No, the real heroes who have given us safer streets are those at the local level who have reformed the system from the bottom up. Chief among them, of course, are the brave police officers themselves.

Someone who personifies this success is Charleston, South Carolina Chief of Police Reuben M. Greenberg. Chief Greemberg is generous enough to give a small percentage of the credit for the drop in crime to Washington's efforts. But most of the acknowledgment must go to those at the grassroots. "Judges, prosecutors and even public defenders I've talked to in my travels around the country have just gotten sick of seeing criminals get out on technicalities," Chief Greenberg recently told The Limbaugh Letter.

Greenberg is on the cutting edge of police improvement. His methods, similar to those of many other communities, including New York City, employ the "broken windows" ideas pioneered over a decade ago by Rutgers crime researcher George Kelling. The basic concept is that police must put an end to the petty offenses that entice more serious criminal behavior -- just the way that fixing broken windows makes it less likely that a thief will consider a house to be abandoned, and thus safe to burglarize.

Greenberg says his "bible" is Kelling's celebrated book, "Fixing Broken Windows," and he's applied it everywhere. "We go after the little biddy things," Greenberg explains. "We've caught a gang of drug dealers after they failed to respond to a littering citation for throwing their Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes in the street."

In Charleston, they used their "chain gang" statute to have prisoners help fix some of the city's "broken windows." Aggressive panhandlers downtown were a seemingly impossible problem. A federal judge in New York had ruled that panhandling was "speech" and thus protected by the First Amendment. It appeared that police would have to allow winos to bully the townsfolk. But Greenberg reversed the equation. He has his officers approach not the panhandlers but their prey, as they reached into their pockets. Charleston police would implore them not to feed the drug and alcohol habits of these people. They published leaflets entitled, "Spare Change or Real Change," providing a list of Charleston charity organizations to which folks could give their money and rest assured it would provide real help to those in need.

On Greenberg's watch, Charleston police have joined with community organizations to clean up graffiti, and through a partnership program called "Operation Midnight" take kids home who are found out alone after hours. Greenberg placed 12 percent of the force on foot patrol (15 percent on foot and horse combined), and even set up a small unit that devotes itself solely to keeping criminals from getting parole.

Greenberg, a former probation officer, knows that it's impossible to keep many parolees from committing further crimes. This special unit testifies against criminals at parole board hearings, sees to it that the relatives of the victims are present, and even files Freedom of Information Act requests for the criminal's conduct record in prison. If members of the parole board -- appointed by the governor -- vote in favor of a violent criminal getting parole, Greenberg will hold a press conference and make their lives miserable. Over 16 years, the department has been 96 percent successful in preventing the parole of every imprisoned rapist, armed robber and burglar.

Greenberg believes that one of the worst things that ever happened to policing is taking the cop off his regular beat and sticking him in his patrol car -- and "broken windows" crime researcher George Kelling adamantly agrees. Kelling told The Limbaugh Letter that this whole trend toward improved crime fighting is a "from the bottom up" phenomenon. "The critical factor is not more cops, but what you do with them" according to Kelling. "New York City had 38,000 cops who weren't doing much of anything until Mayor Giuliani said, `Let's energize them.'"

In spite of all the good news, however, America's crime situation should not be seen with rose-colored glasses. Criminologists say that a significant portion of the nationwide drop in crime may have come thanks to changing demographics. The baby boom generation has reached adulthood and there are fewer youths of prime crime age than there were a decade ago. In the next decade, the population of 14-to-17 -year-olds will grow by more than 20 percent.

Meanwhile, the current generation of juveniles has already plagued this country with the worst juvenile crime rates ever. The National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas reports that since 1965, the juvenile arrest rate has more than tripled, while over the last ten years the homicide rate has more than doubled among 14-to-17-year-olds.

Another disturbing trend: The increase in the juvenile murder rate coincides with an increase in "stranger murders." In the past, most murders occurred between family members and friends, but the FBI reports that more than half the homicides are now committed by strangers. And those who commit these "stranger murders" have a better than 80 percent chance of not being punished.

The fact remains that an American is still more than twice as likely to be victim of a violent crime than to be in a car accident. Barely one criminal is imprisoned for every 100 violent crimes committed, and approximately one in three violent crimes is committed by someone on probation, parole or pretrial release.

In truth, the crime problem is nowhere near solved. But at least we're starting to win the war -- thanks not to Washington, but to those on the front lines, those courageous crime fighters who properly deserve the kudos for getting the bad guys off the streets.

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.