Prisons | Imprisonment Is an Effective Deterrent to Crime

About the author: Morgan Reynolds is director of the Criminal Justice Center of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonprofit public policy think tank. He is also a professor of economics at Texas A&M University.

Prisons have broken the back of our 35-year crime wave. It’s about that simple. An estimated 1.8 million inmates were in prisons and jails at midyear 1998— double the number behind bars a decade earlier. A Justice Department study finds that the average time spent by violent criminals in state prisons rose to 49 months in 1997 from only 43...

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