since the mid 70s in the u.s property crime rates have
Crime in the United States After World War II, crime rates increased in the United States, peaking from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991. Property crime more than doubled over the same period. Since the 1990s, however, crime in the United States has declined steeply. Several theories have been proposed to explain this decline:
History of United States prison systems Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is "a comparatively recent episode in Anglo-American jurisprudence," according to historian Adam J. Hirsch.[2] Before the nineteenth century, sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America.[3] But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors, if not before.[4] When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in United States, they were, in Hirsch's words, not a "fundamental departure" from the former American colonies' intellectual past.[5] Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts' Castle Island Penitentiary, built in 1780, essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse.[5]