As the nation's rate of incarceration continues to swell, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted the city's drop in prison rates and credited several initiatives to lowering numbers, the Associated Press reported.
"New York City has not only kept our city safer; we've done so while locking fewer people up," Bloomberg said at an event in Jamaica, Queens. "While crime has decreased in our city, so has incarceration - through the end of last year, New York City's incarceration rate was 30 percent below that of the nation's. That success is neither accident nor coincidence: It's the product of a coordinated focus across our entire criminal justice system."
Bloomberg and prison officials said the decline in prison rate was matched by a decline in crime by 32 percent between 2000 to 2012. They claimed their methods to reduce crime and use of alternatives to prison for misdemeanors and substance abuse as key to their success.
The mayor added that city programs created to keep people out of criminal activity has aided their process. Additionally, Bloomberg said a new program will help defendants with mental health issues but providing them with community-based services so they can seek proper treatment.
"New Yorkers live in the safest big city in the nation and we should be proud to be a national leader in another respect, too, and that is that New York City also continues to buck the national trend of ever-increasing reliance on prison and jail," Bloomberg said.
According to city officials, the number of people sent to prison in New York City fell from 669 per 100,000 in 2001 to 2012 to 448 per 100,000 while the nation's increased from 662 per 100,000 to to 641 per 100,000.
However, a decrease in spending on prison did not accompany the drop in prison rates. As the Independent Budget Office notes, New York City spent $168,000 annually on each of it's 12,300 inmates last year while they only spent $92,500 on each of it's 14,500 inmates in 2001.
"We've kept our city safer while locking up fewer people," Bloomberg said. "The bottom line here is that the murder rate here and other crime rates have come down dramatically more than anybody could have possibly predicted."
