Another flawed 'study'.

Citizens twice as likely to land in NJ prisons as legal, illegal immigrants

by Brian Donohue/The Star-Ledger
Saturday April 12, 2008, 9:33 PM
U.S. citizens are twice as likely to land in New Jersey's prisons as legal and illegal immigrants, according to new data that counter some of the most widely perceived notions about the link between immigration and crime.

Non-U.S. citizens make up 10 percent of the state's overall population, but just 5 percent of the 22,623 inmates in prison as of July 2007, according to an analysis of New Jersey Department of Corrections and U.S. Census data by The Star-Ledger.

As part of the federal government's attempt to fix an immigration system that has allowed deportable criminals to go back on the streets, federal agents started scouring the inmate rolls of New Jersey's state prisons last year.

The goal was to identify criminal aliens so they could be deported once they finished their sentences. That effort yielded another dividend: the first-ever snapshot of the non-U.S. citizen population in New Jersey's state prisons.

The statistics fall directly in line with several other new studies by sociologists that consistently have found the immigrant incarceration rates equal or lower to that of U.S. citizens. The findings contradict one long-held conception about immigrants and crime.

The New Jersey statistics also come to light at a significant juncture, as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seeks to give local police departments a greater role in enforcing immigration laws in New Jersey and across the country.

"I first got into this because I heard all these terrible complaints that immigrants were a big part of the crime problem," said Anne Morrison Piehl, an economics professor at Rutgers University who has researched incarceration rates among immigrants in California.

"When you look at incarceration rates, you find immigrants much less likely than the native born to be incarcerated," Piehl added. "Once you control for the fact that immigrants are generally younger and less educated, then the data you find is even more surprising."

Advocates of tougher enforcement say the numbers do nothing to lessen the need to crack down on immigrants who commit crimes, including using local police to do it.

"I don't want anyone to think the illegal immigrant population in general causes any more crime than the legal population," said Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello, who has applied to a federal program to deputize the town's police officers as immigration agents. "That's not my position and statistics show that. But we already have enough of our own criminals and we don't have to invite criminals in."

MYTH OR REALITY?

ÂÂ