Last Year's Modest Decline First Since 1972; California Prisons See Very Slight Rise The number of inmates in state prisons fell in the second half of last year, the first decline since the U.S. prison boom began in 1972, according to a Justice Department report released Sunday. The decline was modest, a drop of 6,200 inmates in state prisons in the last six months of 2000, or 0.5 percent of the total, the report said. But it comes after the number of state prisoners rose 500 percent over the last three decades, growing each year in the 1990s even as crime dropped. [continues 534 words]
A poll released by the American Civil Liberties Union has found that Americans are softening their views about how to treat criminals. The poll found that a majority of Americans believed that it was possible to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders and that prisons were failing to prepare inmates for their return to society. The poll also found that 61 percent of Americans opposed mandatory sentences for nonviolent crimes and that 75 percent favored treatment and probation for nonviolent drug use. The telephone poll, conducted in January, surveyed 2000 people, with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points. Fox Butterfield (NYT) [end]
Weymouth, Mass. -- On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, a slow business day, a young man walked into the Walgreens on this town's main thoroughfare and said he had a gun. He did not want money. All he wanted was OxyContin, 1,100 pills of the powerful prescription painkiller, which would be worth tens of thousands of dollars on the street. It was the latest in a series of 14 robberies of pharmacies in Boston and its suburbs in the last six weeks. The robbers have ignored cash registers and other drugs and taken only OxyContin, which gives a heroin-like high without the needles or the stigma. [continues 771 words]
WEYMOUTH, Mass., July 6 - On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, a slow business day, a young man walked into the Walgreen's on this town's main thoroughfare and said he had a gun. He did not want money. All he wanted was OxyContin, 1,100 pills of the powerful prescription painkiller, which would be worth tens of thousands of dollars on the street. It was the latest in a series of 14 robberies of pharmacies in Boston and its suburbs in the last six weeks. [continues 816 words]
The Club Drug Has Broken Ethnic Barriers; High School Students Report Increasing Exposure LOS ANGELES -- It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave the authorities here the first hint that the club drug ecstasy was becoming a serious problem. He had been killed by two hit men sent from Israel, said officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million ecstasy pills, worth $40 million on the street, that the U.S. Customs Service seized at the airport last July. [continues 1023 words]
LOS ANGELES - It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave the authorities here the first hint that the club drug Ecstasy was becoming a serious problem. He had been killed by two hit men sent from Israel, said officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million Ecstasy pills, worth $40 million on the street, that the U.S. Customs Service seized at the airport last July. The pills, labeled clothing, arrived on an Air France flight from Paris, intended for another Israeli dealer here. The authorities say it was the world's largest Ecstasy bust. [continues 901 words]
LOS ANGELES, June 21 -- It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave the authorities here the first hint that the club drug Ecstasy was becoming a serious problem. He had been killed by two hit men from Israel, said Drug Enforcement Administration officials. Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million Ecstasy pills, worth $40 million on the street, that the United States Customs Service seized at the airport last July. The pills, labeled clothing, arrived on an Air France flight from Paris, intended for another Israeli dealer here. The authorities say it was the world's largest Ecstasy bust. [continues 1783 words]
LOS ANGELES - It was finding an Israeli drug dealer dead in a car trunk at Los Angeles International Airport 18 months ago that gave authorities here the first hint that the club drug Ecstasy was becoming a serious problem. He had been killed by two hit men from Israel, said officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Then there was the shipment of 2.1 million Ecstasy pills, worth as much as $40 million, that the U.S. Customs Service seized at the airport in July. The authorities say it was the world's largest Ecstasy bust. [continues 778 words]
The quality of data and research on what works to reduce the supply and demand for drugs is so poor that no accurate assessments can be made, a report commissioned by the Clinton White House and released yesterday has concluded. The report, by 15 economists, criminologists and psychiatrists assembled by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, took no position in the heated debate on whether to give more attention to drug enforcement or drug treatment. [continues 425 words]
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Sgt. Walt Turley has been on the Long Beach police force for 26 years, long enough to know that many of the drug addicts he arrests wind up back on the streets, and long enough to know that prison sentences alone will never solve the nation's drug problem. But Sergeant Turley is worried that Proposition 36, a new law that sentences drug offenders to treatment rather than prison, is also in danger of failing when it goes into effect on July 1. [continues 1216 words]
LOS ANGELES, - It seemed like the perfect solution. Build more prisons and America would be a safer place. In fact, as the nation's incarceration rate has quadrupled over the last two decades, the crime rate has fallen for eight straight years. But only now are politicians and criminologists beginning to confront an unexpected consequence of the get-tough-on-crime philosophy that created the prison-building boom. More prisoners in prison means that, eventually, more prisoners will be let out. This year, a record 600,000 inmates will be released from state and federal prisons nationwide, up from 170,000 in 1980. [continues 3731 words]
Crime in the United States fell again in 1999, the eighth consecutive decline, with the murder rate dropping to 5.7 per 100,000, its lowest level since 1966, according to an annual report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation being released today. But experts cautioned that the decline may be nearing an end because murder rates in the nation's largest cities showed the smallest decrease in 1999, and it was these large cities, of more than one million in population, that had led the increase in murder in the late 1980's, during the crack cocaine epidemic, and then also led the drop during the 1990's. [continues 403 words]
After an eight-year drop in crime, the population of the nation's state and federal prisons grew last year at the lowest rate since 1979, 3.4 percent, the Justice Department reported yesterday. The main reasons the prison population has increased even as crime has declined, the report said, are that the number of inmates returned to prison for parole violations increased, the length of the average sentence rose, and drug crimes, which are not included in the overall crime rate computed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, did not drop. [continues 734 words]
High Point, N.C., has not had a drug-or gang-related murder in the past 18 months, after a stunning surge in homicides in the years before that. In Natchez, Miss., the number of murders dropped to one in 1999, after reaching a dozen a few years before. And in Oceanside, Calif., where there were as many as 25 homicides as recently as 1995, there were 7 last year. These drops in murders are an important indication that the decline in the nation's murder rate since 1991, long driven by decreases in homicide in the big cities, is now starting to take hold in small cities, suburbs and rural areas across the country. [continues 747 words]
Report: Minority youths treated more harshly than whites from arrest to sentencing. Black and Latino youths are treated more severely than white teenagers charged with comparable crimes at every step of the juvenile justice system, according to a comprehensive report released Tuesday that was sponsored by the Justice Department and six of the nation's leading foundations. The report found that minority youths are more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested, held in jail, sent to juvenile or adult court for trial, convicted and given longer prison terms, leading to a situation in which the impact is magnified with each additional step into the juvenile justice system. [continues 585 words]
AUSTIN, Tex. -- Law and order has always been part of George W. Bush's politics. Just as his father, George Bush, benefited from televised images of the furloughed murderer-rapist Willie Horton to attack Michael S. Dukakis in the 1988 race for President, Bush ran for governor of Texas in 1994 with a series of grainy black-and-white commercials depicting a man abducting a woman at gun point in a parking garage and, a moment later, a police officer draping a blanket over the woman's body. [continues 2655 words]
The first comprehensive study of the rapidly growing number of emotionally disturbed people in the nation's jails and prisons has found that there are 283,800 inmates with severe mental illness, about 16 percent of the total jail population. The report confirms the belief of many state, local and federal experts that jails and prisons have become the nation's new mental hospitals. The study, released by the Justice Department yesterday, paints a grim statistical portrait, detailing how emotionally disturbed inmates tend to follow a revolving door from homelessness to incarceration and then back to the streets with little treatment, many of them arrested for crimes that grow out of their illnesses. [continues 1059 words]
Fbi Figures Show 9 Percent Drop In Seattle Crime in the United States dropped dramatically last year, the seventh consecutive year it has fallen, according to preliminary figures released by the FBI yesterday. The number of violent crimes and property crimes each fell 7 percent in 1998, creating the largest annual decline since crime began to decrease in 1992. In Seattle, the drop was more dramatic, with the overall crime rate and violent crimes dropping by 9 percent, said FBI figures. [continues 538 words]
OSINING, N.Y. - Baba Eng had been a prisoner at Sing Sing for 22 years, serving a life sentence for murder, when a new inmate walked into the shower room one day and stared at his face. "Dad," the stranger finally exclaimed. The man was his son, whom Eng had not seen since his arrest, and who now was in prison himself for armed robbery. "It was the worst moment of my life," Eng recalled. "Here was my son; he had tried to imitate my life." [continues 2801 words]
OSSINING, N.Y. -- Baba Eng had been a prisoner at Sing Sing for 22 years, serving a life sentence for murder, when a new inmate walked into the shower room one day and stared at his face. "Dad," the stranger finally exclaimed. The man was his son, whom Eng had not seen since his arrest, and who now was in prison himself for armed robbery. "It was the worst moment of my life," Eng recalled. "Here was my son; he had tried to imitate my life." [continues 2803 words]
The recent wave of tougher sentencing laws has succeeded in making criminals serve longer prison sentences and slowed the release of inmates, the Justice Department's first comprehensive study of the new laws shows. This has helped to increase the record U.S. prison population even as crime has dropped in the 1990s, according to the study, which was released Sunday. The report found that the average time served in state prison by violent criminals rose to 49 months in 1997 from 43 months in 1993. Measured another way, the proportion of their sentences that these offenders had to serve before release grew to 54 percent in 1997 from 47 percent in 1993. [continues 185 words]
The proportion of new prison inmates who were drug users at the time of their arrest increased this decade, while drug treatment in state and federal prisons fell sharply, according to a study released on Tuesday by the Justice Department. "What is particularly tragic," said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, "is that drug treatment in prison, where it can be coerced, has proven to be effective as an anti-crime program. "This is an unintended consequence of prison expansion," Rosenfeld said in an interview. "Each time we spend a dollar on building a new prison or expanding an existing one, it is one less dollar for drug treatment." Also Tuesday, President Clinton announced that he would propose $215 million in his next budget for testing and treating prisoners for drug use. About $115 million is currently budgeted for combating drug use by prisoners, parolees and probationers. [continues 598 words]
New statistics released Sunday by the Justice Department are helping criminologists resolve a contentious mystery -- why violent crime has dropped seven straight years after an upsurge in the 1980s. The statistics, showing that robbery fell a stunning 17 percent in 1997, suggest that while there are many factors behind the decline in crime in the 1990s, the crucial ones may be the withering away of the crack market and police efforts to seize handguns from criminals and juveniles. The two crimes that have fallen the most sharply since 1991 are homicide and now robbery, the two most often committed with handguns and most associated with the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s, criminologists say. [continues 931 words]
Statistics released yesterday by the Justice Department are helping criminologists resolve a contentious mystery -- why violent crime has dropped for seven consecutive years after an upsurge in the 1980s. The statistics, showing that robbery fell a stunning 17 percent in 1997, suggest that while there are many factors behind the decline in crime in the 1990s, the crucial ones may be the withering away of the crack market and police efforts to seize handguns from criminals and juveniles. The two crimes that have fallen the most sharply since 1991 are homicide and now robbery, the two most often committed with handguns and most associated with the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s, criminologists said. [continues 914 words]
NEWARK, N.J. -- At first glance, Bernice Jones is not your typical college student. At 33, she is a little old, and she arrived for her criminal-justice class at Rutgers University straight from work at the Essex County Prosecutors Office, neatly dressed in a navy blue suit, blue pumps and matching handbag. There is also what she delicately calls "my family background in the criminal-justice system." Her two brothers served time in prison for drug convictions (one of them has since died), and the father of her 2-year-old daughter is serving a 10- to 15-year sentence for armed robbery. But both her job and her family situation make Ms. Jones representative of the multitude of students flocking to criminal-justice courses, making criminal justice the fastest-growing major in the United States, according to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, a professional organization. From an obscure discipline scorned by most academics, with only two small doctoral programs as recently as 1970, criminal justice has exploded to 350,000 undergraduate majors at colleges and universities, said Freda Adler, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers and a former president of the American Society of Criminology. [continues 1284 words]
Falsely Reported Statistics Reveal Pattern of Pressure on Police PHILADELPHIA---Senior police officials around the United States are concerned that a sharp drop in crime in recent years has produced new pressure on police departments to show ever decreasing crime statistics, and might be behind incidents in several cities in which commanders have played self-serving games with the data. So far this year, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime statistics in New York, in Atlanta and in Boca Raton, Florida. The charges have resulted in the resignation or demotion of high-ranking police commanders. [continues 717 words]
PHILADELPHIA -- Senior police officials around the nation are concerned that the sharp drop in crime in recent years has produced new pressure on police departments to show ever-decreasing crime statistics and might have led to incidents in several cities in which commanders have manipulated crime data. While Austin police say they're confident local crime statistics are accurate, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime statistics in Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta and Boca Raton, Fla., resulting in the resignation or demotion of high-ranking police commanders, this year. [continues 740 words]
Falsely Reported Statistics Reveal Pattern of Pressure on Police PHILADELPHIA---Senior police officials around the United States are concerned that a sharp drop in crime in recent years has produced new pressure vn police departments to show everdecreasing crime statistics, and might be behind incidents in several cities in which commanders have played self-serving games with the data. So far this year, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime statistics in New York, in Atlanta and in Boca Raton, Florida. The charges have resulted in the resignation or demotion of high-ranking police commanders. [continues 714 words]
TALLULAH, La. -- Here in the middle of the impoverished Mississippi Delta is a juvenile prison so rife with brutality, cronyism and neglect that many legal experts say it is the worst in the nation. The prison, the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, opened just four years ago where a sawmill and cotton fields once stood. Behind rows of razor wire, it houses 620 boys and young men, age 11 to 20, in stifling corrugated-iron barracks jammed with bunks. >From the run-down homes and bars on the road that runs by it, Tallulah >appears unexceptional, one new cookie-cutter prison among scores built in >the United States this decade. But inside, inmates regularly appear at the >infirmary with black eyes, broken noses or jaws or perforated eardrums >from beatings by the poorly paid, poorly trained guards or from fights >with other boys. [continues 2937 words]
BOSTON -- After a generation of believing that the mentally ill are no more violent than other people, psychiatrists and advocates for the emotionally disturbed are wrestling with studies that show that the mentally ill may indeed be more violent in some circumstances. Their difficulty was underscored Thursday in a report of the latest of these studies in The Archives of General Psychiatry, a publication of the American Medical Association. The studies found that mental patients discharged from a hospital stay are no more violent than other members of their community, unless they have been abusing alcohol or drugs. Substance abuse increased the rates of violence by mental patients by up to five times, the study concluded, while it tripled the rate of violence by other people. [continues 1073 words]
One theory: U.S. Has Finally Adjusted To The Convulsive Changes Of The 1960s Crime has declined dramatically for six years, but new studies prepared for a national conference of academic experts Saturday in Chicago suggest that criminologists still don't completely understand why. ``The closer we look at the drop in crime, the more complex it gets,'' said Eric Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California-Los Angeles. The papers, commissioned by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University School of Law, restated the favorite explanations: improved police tactics, more criminals behind bars, a better economy and inner-city young people's revulsion for drugs and guns. [continues 501 words]
Crime has declined dramatically for six years, but new studies prepared for a national conference of academic experts on crime suggest that criminologists are no closer now to understanding the reasons than when the downturn was first detected. "The closer we look at the drop in crime, the more complex it gets," Eric Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, said in an interview before the conference, which took place in Chicago on Saturday. "It's like cancer," said Monkkonen, an expert on the history of homicide in American cities. "The more we know, the more what looks like one problem becomes a series of problems." [continues 1000 words]
1.8 million are jailed despite drop in crime The number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again last year, to a record 1.8 million, though crime rates have dropped for seven consecutive years, the Justice Department reported Sunday. The number of Americans behind bars increased 76,700, or 4.4 percent, well below the average annual increase of 7.3 percent between 1985 and 1998, suggesting that the dramatic growth in incarceration has at least begun to slow down. [continues 563 words]
In This Article THE JAIL: Faulting System In Los Angeles THE DELINQUENT: Young, Mentally Ill And Bound for Jail THE ASYLUM: Well-Meaning Plan To Close Hospitals LOS ANGELES -- Michael H. had not had a shave or haircut in months when he was found one recent morning sleeping on the floor of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in suburban Lancaster, next to empty cans of tuna and soup from the church pantry. There was little to suggest that he had once been a prosperous college graduate with a wife and two children -- until he developed schizophrenia, lost his job and, without insurance, could no longer afford the drugs needed to control his mental illness. [continues 3476 words]
BOSTON -- Despite a decline in the crime rate over the past five years, the number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again in 1997, led by a sharp increase of more than 9 percent in the number of people confined in city and county jails, according to a study released Sunday by the Justice Department. The total number of Americans locked up in jails and prisons reached 1,725,842 last June, the Justice Department said, meaning that the national incarceration rate was 645 per 100,000 persons, more than double the 1985 rate of 313 per 100,000. [continues 751 words]
BOSTON -- Despite a decline in the crime rate over the past five years, the number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again in 1997, led by a sharp increase of more than 9 percent in the number of people confined in city and county jails, according to a study released Sunday by the Justice Department. The total number of Americans locked up in jails and prisons reached 1,725,842 last June, the Justice Department said, meaning that the national incarceration rate was 645 per 100,000 persons, more than double the 1985 rate of 313 per 100,000. [continues 758 words]
At a time when many politicians and lawenforcement officials are saying their innovative police tactics are responsible for the sharp drop in homicide rates over the past five years, a new Justice Department study has found that the most important reason for the decline may be the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic. The Justice Department report, commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno, acknowledges that improved police work, along with longer prison sentences and improved emergency medical care, have all contributed to the lower homicide rate. But the report suggests that the close link between crack and homicide may be a fundamental dynamic that explains why homicide rates have declined not only in cities like New York, which have instituted aggressive police strategies, but also in cities like Los Angeles, where the police have been demoralized or have not adopted new methods. [continues 1247 words]
By FOX BUTTERFIELD New York Times SAN DIEGO With little public notice, property crimes in the United States have fallen sharply since 1980, data from the FBI show, with burglary rates down by almost half. That gives New York a lower burglary rate than London, and Los Angeles fewer burglaries than Sydney, Australia. The drop in property crimes burglary, larceny and auto thefts has been obscured by the high level of violent crimes like murder and robbery, which spurred demands for tougher sentencing laws. [continues 834 words]
