Over the past decade or so, the rate of violent crime has
reached lows unseen in the United States since the early 1960s.
Between 1993 and 2001, it plummeted by nearly half, and
politicians scrambled to take credit. In 2008, for example, Rudy
Giuliani’s Web site triumphantly proclaimed that he “put more
cops on the street and more criminals in jail. He cut crime in
half and reduced murders by two-thirds.” In Punishment and
Inequality in America, Bruce Western tells the other side of the
story. As crime fell during the last two decades of the
twentieth century, the prison population soared, often with
disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable in society.
Between 1975 and 2001, the number of prison and jail inmates per
one hundred thousand people rose more than threefold. By the
beginning of the new century, the U.S. rate was six times higher
than that of western Europe. Even crime-ridden and authoritarian
Russia did not match that level. The trend toward greater
reliance on incarceration is relatively ne