The history of American crime and drugs situation, as well as strategies of managing crime rates, is full of contradictions. As positions of authors regarding the effectiveness of crime policies and the roots of the problems vary, it is quite difficult to find out the nature of increasing quality of prisons, growth of crime and violence rates as well as associated issues. This paper is purposed to analyze the reasons of American crime drop, evaluate the effectiveness of crime policies, reveal the contradiction between crime drop and raising incarceration and provide analysis of the war on drugs and crime and its consequences. Drugs and crime are tightly connected. Thus, to solve this problem, it is necessary to rethink crime and to consider other social problems that require a complex approach.
American Crime Drop
As crime and violence have always been the most crucial and topical issues for the U.S., the decline in crime and violence rates interests the researches. Regarding the roots of such an unexpected decline, it is worth separating those who believe that crime drop is temporal and those who think that it is genuine. However, Walker claims that this question is no longer valid: crime drop is real because evidence demonstrates that previous crime rates have not returned. Among the factors that confirm that crime drop is genuine, it is worth mentioning the statistics, namely, the results of NCVS report that proves a decline in crime, which is considered to be very reliable. A decline in crime has been lasting for 15 years, it allows to conclude that this drop is not temporal. FBI Uniform Crime Report confirmed the results of the NCVS report and demonstrated that significant crime drop for the last 15-20 years took place. The decline in crime is confirmed by other social phenomena such as the decline of teenage pregnancy and infant mortality, which demonstrate positive changes in American criminal behavior, even though the unemployment rate has recently risen.
The reasons for this situation include incarceration, community policing, reduction of crack and cocaine use and positive shifts in the economy. In order to find out the reasons of crime drop, Zimring compared the decline in crime in the U.S. to other countries. Canada has also experienced a decline of violent crimes, even though the policy directed towards solving the problems was opposite to the U.S. policy. For instance, the U.S. increased incarceration, while Canada reduced it. Moreover, the quantity of police officers in Canada has reduced, whereas the police in the U.S. has increased in numbers. Zimring argues that it is difficult to explore the roots of these contradictions, which requires comparing not only visible social factors but also a broad cultural situation in the U.S. and Canada concerning the behavior of the population.
Effectiveness of Crime Policies
Among the factors that affect criminal behavior in the U.S., the authors distinguish contextual factors and policy factors. Contextual factors include demographic factors: “the rise and fall of the crack cocaine epidemic, and changes in labor markets”. The criminal justice policies that influence violent crimes rate are gun control policies, increased incarceration, consequent anticipation of offenders and some innovations in policies. None of these dimensions alone is considered to reduce violent crimes. Walker offers a sensible approach, according to which interplay of different policies and factors affects the decline in violent crimes. In order to measure the effectiveness of crime policies, it is necessary to analyze communities in which consequences of criminal justice policies are visible.
Evidence-Based Crime Policy.
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of specific crime policies, a new standard called evidence-based crime policy was created. This approach is a good point to start rethinking of current policies and strategies to improve public health and safety. This is a scientific standard that is used in criminology and health care policies. It gets evidence from the valid research, while the quality of evidence determines the effectiveness of policies. The contribution of the evidence-based approach is that of scientific rigor for policy debates. The application of this approach means that a new vision on the reliability of judgments has been constituted. Specifically, intuition and assumption are no longer sufficient arguments for or against certain policymaking. Instead, scientific methods are declared to be the only ways to determine the worthiness of certain crime policies. In order to understand to what extent evidence-based crime policy is effective, it is necessary to recognize that many of previous crime policies were found to be not only ineffective but also even harmful. For instance, Cambridge-Somerville Youths Study, Volunteers in Probation Program, Scared Straight Program, and some others were found to cause harm. The specific of evidence-based policymaking is that it suggests evaluation of a certain program according to scientific standards before implementation.
When it comes to the evaluation of policies against crime, Walker states that most current crime control proposals are nonsense. The author argues that failure to create adequate crime evaluation programs is caused by a misunderstanding of the problem of criminal behavior in the U.S. Two main problems affect this situation. Race, or ethnicity, and income determine individual risk of being involved in criminal behaviors. Community-focused crime policy that considers social factors should be taken into account while measuring the effectiveness of certain crime policies. Many analysts assume that two severe problems in American crime and criminal justice are: one that affects most white, middle-class Americans and another that affects people of color, the poor, and the young people of color in particular.
Community-Focused Approach.
Community-focused programs allow a number of benefits, as they include planning carefully, involving outside experts, working with community groups, developing a partnership with criminal justice and noncriminal justice agencies, using non-traditional responses, and conducting rigorous evaluations to assess effectiveness. The community-focused program has many advantages, as they were developed with the consideration of limitations of traditional programs.
Crime Drop and Imprisonment
As it was mentioned above, when imprisonment increased, the crime rate dropped, whereas in Canada the crime rate declined despite the reduction of incarceration.