DATE: Monday, May 12, 1997                  TAG: 9705090001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B6   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: BY DAVID C. ANDERSON 

                                            LENGTH:   85 lines

THE MYSTERY OF THE FALLING CRIME RATE

In the mid-'80s, crack and guns produced a surge of urban crime, and politicians responded to public fear and anger with tougher prisons, longer sentences and new limits on the discretion of judges and parole boards who might be tempted to reduce them. In the mid-'90s, the violent crime rate is declining. Did the stiffer punishments make the difference?

They certainly swelled the prison population. Between 1984 and 1994, according to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of convicts admitted each year to the nation's state and federal prisons grew by 120 percent, from 246,260 to 541,434. The taxpayers' bill for corrections also more than doubled to $31.5 billion.

But what, in fact, was all this money buying? On this point, the statistics are hardly reassuring. The issue is one of scale. Perhaps half of serious crimes are reported to police. Of these, only about one-fifth result in an arrest, and less than two-thirds of those result in a conviction. In the end, while some 20 million serious crimes are committed each year, only about 500,000 criminals go to state or federal prison, many of them for nonviolent offenses.

Even if each convicted felon is responsible for multiple crimes, how can incarceration of so small a fraction of serious criminals have much effect on the crime rate, either directly or as a deterrent? And how to justify spending $31.5 billion - a third of the overall budget for police, courts and corrections - on punishing such a tiny percentage of serious crimes?

Call it the ``back-end/front-end'' debate. Back-enders focus on the retribution dispensed at the conclusion of the criminal-justice process; front-enders look for earlier interventions: more creative policing, gun control, drug treatment and other alternatives to prison. While back-enders talk about the crime they prevent by incarcerating criminals, front-enders point out that eventually most criminals are released and return to crime.

Indeed, while 541,434 criminals were sent to prisons in 1994, 456,942 came out - for a net reduction that year of only 84,492 criminals. This does represent an increase over 1984, when there was a net reduction of 24,492.

But it's hard to see how incapacitating 60,000 more criminals, a figure that includes nonviolent drug offenders, can have more than a modest impact on serious crime rates.

Couldn't some of the $31.5 billion spent each year on locking them up be put to better use?

The most striking evidence that it could comes from New York City. The violent summer of 1990 prompted the city's first black mayor, David Dinkins, to push through a significant expansion of the police force - and a tax to pay for it. This was a gift of immeasurable value to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who defeated Dinkins in the next election, and to his new police commissioner, William Bratton.

Bratton's approach was to disperse responsibility for crime fighting downward to precinct commanders and hold them strictly accountable for results. He ordered up reams of statistical data, and police computers began to map out crime and enforcement patterns with unprecedented precision and timeliness.

At the same time, Bratton mounted a citywide campaign against ``quality of life'' offenses - drinking in public, urinating on the street, general rowdiness. Though the endeavor sounded like a public-relations stunt, it was deadly serious - the mechanism for an aggressive form of ``stop and frisk'' patrolling targeted on youthful lowlifes.

Bratton asserted that these measures caused a steep decline in New York's homicide rate, and the evidence so far supports him. The nation's big-city homicide rate turned down after 1991 and has continued to fall through 1996. But New York's decline far exceeds the national figure.

The success of police-based approaches to crime control in New York and elsewhere encourages thinking about other front-end measures. For example, improving the nation's overcrowded and underfunded lower courts would give judges more power to intervene meaningfully after a first or second minor offense rather than waiting for the offender to commit a serious crime.

Making available more treatment for drug-involved offenders may wind up costing less overall than sending them to prison for short terms, then returning them to lives of addiction and crime, even if a sizable percentage don't make it through treatment programs. Getting serious about gun control might also make a bigger difference in violent-crime rates, at lower cost, than the current practice focused so narrowly on prison.

The question should not be what is the most gratifying way to take revenge on criminals, but what are the most effective ways to fight crime. MEMO: David C. Anderson is the author, most recently, of ``Crime and the

Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American

Justice.'' This article is adapted from the May-June issue of The

American Prospect.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu