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Down from what? Crime rates have certainly been far lower before the prison population explosion. We still have one of the highest crime rates in the world, especially for a wealthy industrialized nation, and most of our industrialized peers have incarceration rates that are only a only a small fraction of our incarceration rates. Crime rates go up and down. Wait till the economy tanks again. We might see our highest crime rate ever even though we have more people behind bars than ever.

The thing is that most of the people in prison are only there for relatively short stints. Most are probably only in a few months. I work in the criminal justice system in a county with one of the highest incarceration rates in my state, and my state has a higher than average incarceration rate compared to other states. I rarely ever see people going to prison on sentences that will keep them in more than five years. Most will spend a few months, others from a few months to a couple of years, and only a few will spend five or more years in before being eligible for parole. If we were really locking up the really bad guys for a long time I'd believe that had something to do with "lower crime rates," but that isn't the case. Most of these guys are in and out in no time and there are way too many parolees for the parole officers to keep track of. Give it time. Our crime rates will go higher than they've ever been, because all of this revolving door prison craziness is just turning a lot of people into worse criminals with no future in legitimate society. We'll see a lot more organized crime among ex-cons, a lot more sexual abuse perpetrated by people who have been raped in prison or who were raped by people raped in prison. Overall crime will grow despite the fact that we lock up more of our people than any other country in the world.

The crime rate now is lower than it was in the 1960s before we got wise to you guys and started locking you up.

Europe's crime rate is rising, and UK's rate of violent crime is cruising to stratospheric heights seen only in the third world. Over there they've taken to turning criminals loose.

Those guys copping the drug pleas ought to be happy we don't just execute them to save money on prisons.