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Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes



Criminologists generally agree that the prison-building binge of the last 25 years, in which the number of Americans incarcerated quadrupled to almost two million, has helped reduce the crime rate simply by keeping criminals off the streets. There has been more debate about whether longer sentences and the increase in the number of prisoners have also helped to deter people from committing crimes. The new report, some crime experts say, suggests that the answer is no.



"The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked," said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole.
You build more prisons because you have more prisoners to house, duh! Of course building more prisons isn't going to cut back on the ricidivism rate. What I'm curious about is why it's taken this long to crank out a study of statistics from 1994. Does that 67% include crimes committed over the last eight years? For the 1983 figures, how long did they wait before declaring a recidivism rate?

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