by Sasha Abramsky

About the author: Sasha Abramsky is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.

Popular perceptions about crime have blurred the boundaries between fact and politically expedient myth. The myth is that the United States is besieged, on a scale never before encountered, by a pathologically criminal underclass. The fact is that we’re not. After spiraling upward during the drug wars, murder rates began falling in the mid-1990s; they are lower in 1999 than they were more than twenty years ago. In some cities the murder rate in the late twentieth century is actually lower than it was in the nineteenth century. Nonviolent property-crime rates are in general lower in the United States today than in Great Britain, and are comparable to those in many European countries.

Nevertheless, horror stories have led to calls for longer...