Okay, the headline in the Sept. 28 New York Times wasn't that outrageous, but it came close: "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling." Gee, there's a paradox. And lest you think the headline writer, in a stab at euphony, has misrepresented the story, here is the lede on Fox Butterfield's thumbsucker: "It has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder. So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up?"
Astonishingly, the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate merits only one tiny subordinate clause in the article, which argues instead that rising prison populations may soon lead to a crime wave. How's that? Well, locking up more and more felons has diluted the "stigmatizing effect" of imprisonment. Wow. Sociologists say the darndest things, and reporters who spend too many years pondering the "root causes" of crime sometimes parrot them. But whatever happened to the stigmatizing effect of an editor's derisive laugh?