ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the exclusive focus on police and prison that characterizes America’s response to its high crime rate and show the limited role that police and prisons have played in reducing street crime. It reviews the “excuses” that are made for readers high crime rates, and show how they choose to have the crime rates they do. The chapter outlines the Pyrrhic defeat theory that explains the continued existence of high crime rates after decades of policies that fail to reduce crime. In the last 60 years, crime rates have mostly gone up until the 1990s, and then down substantially. As a presidential candidate in 2007, Barack Obama wanted to “reduce the blind and counterproductive warehousing of nonviolent offenders.” Sadly, state and local politicians have generally followed the direction set by national leaders in promoting “tough on crime” solutions, at least until the financial crisis of 2008.
