E. J. McMahon opens New York Crime Hits a Tipping Point with some intriguing stats:
Reinforcing New York City?s improved policing strategies in the 1990s were tougher sentencing laws and a significant expansion of the city and state correctional systems. Would-be criminals in the Big Apple came to realize that they were not only more likely to get caught, but more likely to end up serving hard time.The results have been nothing less than spectacular: by one key measure, serious crime in the city has dropped 70 percent over the past 15 years.
But that success is also yielding another, less widely noticed, dividend: with felony arrests dropping as a result of the falling crime rate, New York?s once-swollen city jails and state prisons are becoming less crowded. This has begun to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings for state and city taxpayers.