From 2000 to 2012, the U.S. violent crime rate fell over 23 percent. Such an improvement in the social fabric would be cause enough for celebration. But the crime drop of the 2000s followed an even larger decline in the previous decade: 32 percent from 1993 to 2000.Mac Donald comes up with a shopping list of possible causes, but doesn't settle on any of them. At COTTonLINE we think we know the two main causes of the decline: an aging population and higher incarceration rates.
The U.S. has an aging population. Most groups have fewer children than they did in the post-war period, so the number of young men has dropped. Young men commit most of the crimes so ... less crime.
The other major cause is the proliferation of three-strikes laws; the long-term sentencing of repeat felons. Most crime is committed by a relatively small subset of the population who each commit many crimes. Locking most of those up until they reach their late 40s or early 50s keeps their criminal behavior safely behind bars. In other words, they victimize primarily each other.
We have no realistic method of rehabilitating most career criminals. Isolating them is a very expensive but ultimately worthwhile expenditure of public funds.
Doing so is no new idea, Europe once sent the career criminals it didn't hang to penal colonies in Georgia or Australia or Devil's Island. Perhaps we could transport ours to central Nevada and create a penal colony there, or perhaps hinterland Alaska could house a Siberia-style gulag?
