A shift in arrest policies in New York City has led to a decrease in the state’s overall correctional population and a reduction in the city’s crime rate, according to a new report.
Between 1998 and 2008, crime in New York City dropped 72 percent, from 719,887 reports to 198,419, according to a study by the Vera Institute for Justice titled How New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration: A Model for Change?
The report finds one of the factors was police making fewer felony arrests and more misdemeanor arrests since the 1990s.
Other factors included reducing the number of people in jail awaiting trial who pose no risk to public safety, providing programs in state prisons to ease re-entry once an offender is released, and increasing the use of probation.
Those policies had a significant affect in decreasing the state’s correctional population without affecting public safety, the report states.
“The reduction in felony arrests should not be viewed as a decision by the NYPD to ignore serious crime. Rather, it reflects a shift in police strategies to focus on so-called ‘quality of life,’ ‘zero tolerance,’ or ‘broken windows’ approach which turned into the ‘stop and frisk’ strategy. These policies focus law enforcement resources on misdemeanor crimes such as loitering, trespassing and vagrancy,” the report states.
“To what extent New York City’s policing strategy contributed to the drop in the crime rate is a complex question unanswered by the data in this report,” the study noted.
Unlike most other areas in the state and country, New York City has a vibrant array of alternative sentencing programs that the report believes have contributed to its lowered crime and incarceration rate. This may also explain why the number of individuals sent to prison in New York counties outside of the city did not decline during the same period.
Despite the decline in the state prison population, the Department of Corrections operating budget for New York actually increased from $1.5 billion in 1998-99 to $2.5 billion in 2006-07. According to the study, this initial increase resulted because the state did not close any facilities. But beginning in 2011, the budget began to stabilize with the closure of 10 prisons as well as many other camps, housing units and dorm facilities.
“These results show that policy changes at the local level can have a dramatic and lasting impact on state prison as well as jail, probation, and parole populations,” the report states.
The report concludes that the case of New York’s reduced prison population and crime rates demonstrates why local policies are just as vital as state legislation, and that other states could benefit from similar strategies to “reduce the national epidemic use of mass incarceration.”