Fox Butterfield is the now-retired Crime Reporter for the New York Times; and unfortunately the subject of a major joke at his expense.

What is the joke you say?

Well, it is something that James Taranto of Best of the Web Today calls “The Butterfield Effect”

To put simply, Fox Butterfield has a concern that there is an increasing population of criminal inmates in prison, despite a reduced crime rate.

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.

The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990′s that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.

The thing is, in his tenure at the New York Times, Butterfield has written countlessly about this subject of higher inmate count despite lower crime rate. It is obviously something which was important for him to try and understand, but he could never get the solution to this paradox.

In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery.

The problem with Mr. Butterfield’s analysis, is that he put the cart before the horse, or in this case, the effect before the cause.

Try looking at the statement this way:
More criminals in jail spells lower crime rate nationwide.

However, even though Butterfield has packed up his pen and pad, his colleages at the New York Times still cannot grasp this simple idea:
For Example, this Article yesterday, about the plight of young black men in the nation today: Emphasis Mine

Especially in the country’s inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Why is it so difficult to grasp the idea that a drop in crime rate is the expected result when incarcerating criminals?
Is it because the press does not feel that most criminals are guilty?
Is it because the press does not feel that a larger number of people in jail is a good thing?
Is it because the press subconsciously thinks that the criminal justice system is not a good deterent agaisnt crime?

It even works in reverse! As the Seattle Times notes in this Headline:

Portland jail empty, despite rise in crime

So now, whenever there is a prominent headline questioning the growing prison population in a lower crime environment, Taranto (amoung others) calls it “The Butterfield Effect”.