Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration … assessment of whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the U.S. criminal justice system. We argue … that the crime is certainly lower as results of this expansion and the crime rate in the early 1990s was likely a third …

We evaluate whether California's state proposition 47 impacted state violent and property crime rates. Passed by the …-level crime rates that exploit heterogeneity in the effects of the proposition on local criminal justice practices. We find little … evidence of an impact on violent crime rates in the state. Once changes in offense definitions and reporting practices in key …

local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the … violent crime and evidence of modest effects on property crime, auto theft in particular. These effects are considerably … considerably lower. We corroborate theses cross-county results with a synthetic-cohort analysis of state crime rates in California …

approximate 20 percent decline in total property crime arrests, and shifts in the composition of arrests away from felonies …