Free-speech via the social networks and P2P would appear to
be assisting in lowering the crime rate.

In the USA,
Internet was an available public commentary resource before any other country
in the western world.

1992 was the year that competition hit the USA
with tremendous growth in pay-based online services, like Prodigy, GEnie. AOL
and Compuserve.

Compuserve introduced the first known WYSIWYG e-mail content
and forum posts, with forums growing rapidly to allow individuals to post opinions
and commentary on a wide variety of subjects.

The Compusurve (and other competitive offerings) forums
evolved into the present day Blogshere and social networking that has taken the
Internet by storm and gave the people of the world a non edited conduit to their peers.

1992, was curiously also the year that crime rates started
to drop in the USA;
and 1998 was the year that another noticeable dip occurred. The year that
Napster was born.

Of course this is anecdotal at this stage. (I'm an Economist, not a social-behavioral Psychologist.) But it would seem
that when the population have an alternative – (economically priced entertainment) they turn away from crime.

On that basis, since the Internet “commercialised” in the USA,
the US Government have saved an estimated $58,151,289,000 (Calc @$50 p/day) on prisoner “accommodation costs” alone, with obvious additional monies saved
in transportation, arraignment, trial and public attorney fees.

This does not include the insurance moneys saved, the decreased
crime rate effect on consumer psychological well being and the lives and property saved.

I trust that the new Internet Czar keeps all of this in mind
when handing out his “stop the people talking to each other” solution to
prevent the spread of Internet “rumours”.

Source: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

(Calculation based on 3,186,372 prisoners not serving one year or 365 days in prison between 1992 and 2007.)

Update 30th of July.

It has been suggested on the Zeropaid forum that the US “Three Strikes Initiative had more to do with lowering crime rates than anything else.

The Three Strikes Legislation was introduced throughout the USA in the years 1995-1996.

Whilst it may hold true (to some extent) for the reduction in crime after that time, it does not allow for the drastic drop in crime in the years 1992-1995 which preiod saw a reduction of over 500,000 prisoners in the US for the period.

Further a research report entitled:

Three Strikes and You're Out: A Review of State Legislation Series: NIJ Research in Brief
Published: September 1997
20 pages 39,472 bytes

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

And sumarised by

Jeremy Travis, Director
September 1997

Concluded that:

Several States had preexisting habitual offender laws that allowed for, but did not require, enhanced sentences; the new laws make such sentences mandatory.

Early evidence shows that, with the exception of California, most of the laws will have minimal impact on those States' prison systems because they were drafted to apply to only the most violentrepeat offenders. Only broadly defined two-strikes provisions like California's have the potential to drastically alter existing sentencing practices.

http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/165369.txt

Further, (Warner) stated that
We test the role of local social ties both as a mediator between
structural conditions and crime rates and as conditional upon
neighborhood characteristics using data on 100 Seattle census tracts.
We find that local social ties decrease the assault rate significantly,
but have little mediating effects between community structure and crime
rates. The effect of social ties on burglary, however, is contrary to
social disorganization hypotheses. More importantly, we find that local
social ties have differing effects in different types of neighborhoods.
Specifically, social ties significantly and negatively affect assault
rates in predominantly white neighborhoods, while they have no
significant effect in predominantly minority or racially mixed
neighborhoods. These latter findings have particular significance for
the development and refinement of community and crime models.

And Armour,

Using data gathered from the 2000 Census and various local institutions across Columbus, Ohio, I find negative effects of participation in some stabilizing institutions and positive effects of non-stabilizing institutions on the crime rate.

References:

Barbara D. Warner, ‌ Pamela Wilcox Rountree‌ “Local Social Ties in a Community and Crime Model: Questioning the Systemic Nature of Informal Social Control”

Armour, Stacy. “Local Institutions and Neighborhood Crime: Does Participation Matter?” Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association, Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel, San
Francisco, CA,, Aug 14, 2004 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p108697_index.html>

This entry was posted on July 24, 2009 at 6:35 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Main Page by Tom Koltai No Comments Yet