In the first half of 2007, the U.S. experienced a 1.8% decrease in violent crimes and a 2.6% decrease in property crimes. This information is part of the preliminary data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and compares crime statistics for January through June 2007 with the same time period in 2006.  

Some regions of the country had even bigger drops in their crime rates. The northeast had a 5% drop in violent crimes. The western part of the U.S. had the smallest decrease in violent crime.

So how does this compare to prison populations? It’s the states that have experienced the smallest growth in their prison populations that have had the greatest decrease in crime. The western states’ prisons are growing at much faster rates, and crime in those states is not decreasing as dramatically as in the northeast whose prison population increased by 1.7%.

This news brief is based information from the Justice Policy Institute [1] and from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data [2]. If the link is broken, check the organization and agency’s web sites.