The Great American Crime Decline - Book Review

Michael Connelly at Corrections Sentencing offers an insightful book review of "The Great American Crime Decline". The book travels the road that many others have undertaken in trying to delve into the reasons behind the decline of crime in the 90's. A excerpt follows

In the past I've used the example of drought and efforts to relieve it to talk about whether or not government action has the impact on crime that policymakers frequently believe or assert. If you have four areas, all suffering from drought, and one brings in rain dancers, another cloud-seeders, another fervently praying ministers, and one does nothing, and they all end up getting enough rain the next month to break the drought, what happens? The first says the rain dancers did it, the second the seeders, the third the prayer, and the fourth, . . . well, the fourth says nothing because it did nothing. The first three will engage you at least emotionally in how their "solution" turned the trick when Mr. Spock, looking at the four, would rightly conclude that something else was at work. In the case of crime and public safety, it's not that what government does has no effect at all. It's that the magnitude of the effects claimed do not bear the scrutiny, much less the hyperbole, and maybe we ought to be making more effort to find out what that "something else" was and use our resources on maximizing it (them). Corrections Sentencing