Thirty years ago, crime was out of control. Then came ‘broken windows’ policing. Are politicians forgetting its lessons?
When it comes to crime, America has undergone a political sea change. Last week President Trump signed the First Step Act, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and aims to relieve the problem of “overincarceration.” Many states—including right-leaning Georgia, Texas, South Dakota and Utah—have enacted criminal-justice reforms with the same goal.
What a difference 30 years makes. In 1988 George H.W. Bush, seeking the presidency against Gov. Michael Dukakis, made an issue of Massachusetts’ lenient prison-furlough program. Four years later Gov. Bill Clinton was so anxious to prove himself tough on crime that he left the campaign trial and returned to Arkansas to sign the death warrant for a murderer who had damaged his own brain in a pretrial suicide attempt.
Crime has since declined dramatically. The number of homicides nationwide peaked in 1991, at 24,703, and declined some 42% by 2014, to 14,249, even as the U.S. population increased by one-fourth.
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Mr. McGurn is a Journal columnist and member of the editorial board.
George Kelling is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal