jail populations. These may be plausible claims on the part of people
who are unaware of long-term crime trends, but for people who are, they
are disingenuous. The year-to-year crime rate declines are at least as
likely to be merely the continuation of long-term trends as they are to be
effects of policy changes. Nonetheless, such patterns bedevil efforts to
devise rational and humane public policies for crime (and for drugs) be-
cause they seem to provide plausible short-term data that support ideo-
logical and partisan claims that harsh policies "work."

In recent years scholars have been trying to make sense of the seeming
anomaly that public support for harsh crime policies remained high in
the late 1990s even in the face of a substantial and long-term drop in
crime rates. A cynical explanation mentioned earlier, for which there is
some evidence (e.g., Beckett 1997), is that conservative politicians have
found it in their interest to keep voters' attention focused on an issue
about which liberals are reluctant to disagree, and the public attitudes
are simply a predictable response in an era of declining crime rates and
moralized policies.

A related explanation is that the mass media have learned that crime
pays in terms of a mass public fascination with the darker sides of life
and that the fears vicariously enjoyed in front of the television or the
movie screen are generalized to life outside the home. There is evidence
that people's opinions about crime and punishment often are based on
the unusual, dramatic, and unrepresentative cases that they learn about
from the mass media ( Roberts and Stalans 1997).

A third explanation, consistent with Musto's account of drug policy
history and its extension to crime, is that in the 1990s people don't really
care about the effectiveness of crime and drug-abuse policies but instead
support harsh policies for "expressive" reasons ( Doob and Marinos 1995;
Doob 1997; Tyler and Boeckmann 1997). The argument, for which there
is considerable public opinion survey evidence, is that people value the
denunciatory qualities of harsh laws.

Unfortunately, it is always easier to see clearly with hindsight to other
times or, from afar, to other places. The sight lines are impaired and the
images much less distinct in our own time and place. Only time will tell
whether American crime policies can be made more effective and more
humane in coming years--more like those of America in other times or
those of other Western countries today--or whether the United States
will long remain trapped in Musto's paradigm. Until fundamental policy
changes are made, the seemingly inexorable increases in incarceration
and the grossly disproportionate presence of blacks in prisons and jails
will continue.

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