I heard Harvard Professor Bruce Western speak tonight at New York University. A short while back I heard him speak at John Jay College and he was nice enough to give me his powerpoint presentation. I use some of it in my class. This is one of those slides: We now lock up 730 people per 100,000. And this rate…
One-in-a-hundred adult Americans is behind bars. This figure has shocked some people since it made the headlines the other day. The Timesquoted a Professor Cassell as saying that our rate of imprisonment has “very tangible benefits: lower crime rates.” But this isn’t true. The prison rate has been increasing since 1970, so why didn’t crime go down until the mid…