Is the crime rate just shifting, not really declining?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this provacative new piece by Christopher Glazek, sent my way by a kind reader, appearing in the magazine n+1.  The piece is titled, "Raise the Crime Rate," and here is an excerpt:

According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at any time in the last forty years.  In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in New York City.  In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent.  Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble.  What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall during the recession.  On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s.  This seemed odd.  Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem — progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con.  Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States — it’s been shifted.  Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells.  The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie — but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole.  What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union.  We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

The rest of this commentary does an effective job discussing various problems of mass incarceration and the so-called "prison-industrial complex," but the claim that crime has merely shifted from outside to inside the prison walls is misguided both statistically and normatively.  We have literally thousands fewer murders outside the prison walls each year now compared to two decades ago, and there are usually only a handful of murders in prison each year.  The rape story is much more complicated and the notion of a mere crime shift here is a bit more plausible.  But, critically, unless sent to prison based on a wrongful conviction, those enduring crime within prison walls are not properly described as a "luckless minority."  Bad luck can often play some role in whether, when and how one gets sent to prison for a crime, but the average citizen can entirely avoid this luck by avoiding any serious criminal wrongdoing.

These concerns notwithstanding, this commentary still makes for an interesting read and it concludes with these sentiment which I consider very sound in many respects:  

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now.  Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low.  The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy — and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed — it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends.  The prison crisis was created by centrists.  Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis.  Prisoners and ex-cons, the most abused population in United States, will have to rely on political extremists, on both the left and the right, to turn the page on what will one day be recalled as one of American history’s darkest chapters.