by Andrew Peyton Thomas

About the author: Andrew Peyton Thomas is an attorney in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of Crime and the Sacking of America: The Roots of Chaos.

Fox Butterfield of the New York Times regularly reports on what he sees as one of the great anomalies of the age: Incarceration rates are rising while crime rates are falling. An August 1998 article titled “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops” was typical. Butterfield began, “The nation’s prison population grew by 5.2 percent in 1997, according to the Justice Department, even though crime has been declining for six straight years, suggesting that the imprisonment boom has developed a built-in growth dynamic independent of the crime rate, experts say.”

By “experts say,” Butterfield meant that many liberal criminologists agree with him. To him and his...