Abstract

How the war on crime imprisons America

For at least a generation, anxiety about crime has been central to the landscape of U.S. politics. This is emotional, contradictory and bewildering terrain. The drop in the crime rate, particularly in the rate of homicides and assaults with guns, is not some media creation. The tone and many of the arguments justifying this backlash emanate from a report issued January 05, "The State of Violent Crime in America," by a group calling itself the Council on Crime in America. Its author is John Dilulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton. While New Haven, Connecticut, today is hardly crime-free, young people are substantially less likely to be shot. The same is true, with local variations, in cities around the country; in New York, the homicide rate was down 31 percent in just the first six months of 1995.