For most Americans, the dramatic drop in the nation's crime rate has been a piece of pure good news. But at the New York Times, it has caused deep intellectual puzzlement. After all, if you subscribe to the old-time liberal religion of "root causes," crime rates aren't supposed to go down until poverty and racism are eliminated, and the police have all been taught proper table manners.
No one is more befuddled by the happy turn of events than Fox Butterfield, the veteran Times reporter. Last October, THE SCRAPBOOK noted Butterfield's alarmingly illogical story: "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling." In it, Butterfield pointed out that crime rates have been falling since the early '90s. "So why," he asked with a straight face, "is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up?" His answer: Americans just like to lock 'em up and throw away the key. What Butterfield didn't consider, astonishingly, is the possibility that crime might be going down because more criminals are being locked up for longer terms.
Butterfield and the Times were at it again last week. "Despite a decline in the crime rate over the past five years," he reported breathlessly, "the number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons rose again in 1997." The accompanying graphic is a minor classic: "The crime rate has gone down," it notes, "but the number of inmates continues to rise." Mind-boggling. And still, the idea that locking 'em up might lower crime rates is not even entertained by Butterfield. As younger Americans of THE SCRAPBOOK'S acquaintance so eloquently put it: "Duh."