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News Scan

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

Americans in Prison: An Associated Press story by David Crary cites a recent report from the Pew Center on the States indicating that one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison. The report points to habitual criminal sentencing laws such as "Three Strikes" for the high incarceration rate, "Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers," said the project's director. It is worth noting that national crime data from the most recent Department of Justice report indicated that 3.8 per one hundred Americans were crime victims in 2006. Studies going back thirty years have also found that repeat offenders, the kind locked up by "Three Strikes" laws, commit several dozen crimes per year. A study in the 1990s by University of Colorado Economics Professor Steven Levitt estimated that the annual cost of keeping a criminal in prison amounted to less that two-fifths of the cost of leaving him on the streets, which supports the proposition that not getting tough on criminals is even tougher on taxpayers, not to mention crime victims...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).