Fewer jailed as crime falls

NEW YORK CITY has accomplished an amazing feat — it has chopped jail and prison incarceration rates by over 50% in the past 20 years.

A new study being released Friday shows the city has cut the combined incarceration rate by 55% since 1996, while simultaneously reducing serious crime by 58%.

“Despite the fact that the city’s population grew by more than a million people between 1996 and 2014, the number of New Yorkers incarcerated in prisons and jails declined by 31,120 during that time period,” according to the study, called “Better By Half: The New York City Story of Winning Large-Scale Decarceration While Increasing Public Safety.”

The decline in the rate of locking people up was so dramatic that it led to a significant decrease in the overall number of people jailed statewide — even though incarceration rates in the rest of state increased over the same time period, the report found.

It also bucked the trend nationwide — as incarceration rates across the country grew 12% over the same time period, while there was a more modest reduction in crime, the study found. By 2014, New York had the lowest crime rate of the nation’s 20 largest cities, and the second-lowest incarceration rate.

“The notion of addressing crime by locking up more people is turned on its head,” said the report’s co-author, Judith Greene. “New York City is leading the way.”

The study, which was based on state, city and other data, says there’s no single reason for the dramatic downturn — it’s the product of a combination of factors, including policing strategies, legislative, prosecutorial and court reforms, and grass-roots activism.

“There’s no home run, but lots of singles and doubles that have added up,” said the report’s co-author, Vincent Schiraldi, a former city probation commissioner. He said the rest of the country should follow New York’s example.

“The whole theory of public safety for the last four decades was we have to lock more people up to be safer — and we cut incarceration more than anybody and we’re safer,” he said.

Criminal justice reform advocate Glenn Martin said the success “emboldens us to be even more audacious,” and noted that further cuts in the inmate population could enable the city to shut down Rikers Island.