Crime

In 1994 Bill Clinton signed the crime bill and since that time crime has gone down. Prier to the signing crime rates were about 600 per 100,000 people but since then there has been a steady decline down to 350 per 100,000. The interesting thing about this is that there are numerous articles on the Internet attesting to the fact that the number of people in prison does not correlate with crime rates because the numbers in prison had been going up before the law was passed. For many years leading up to 1980 the prison population was around 200,000 but then it started to rise. By 1986 it was up to 400,000 and in 1994 the year the law was passed it was 600,000. Since then it has continued to rise and is now at 1,500,000. This is the kind of thing that makes statistics so tricky.