Why the drop in incarceration for public order crimes?
What IronLizard said seems like the most reasonable and probable answer to me, but I also recall that the Ashcroft Justice Department, specifically the FBI, announced in the wake of 9/11 that pursuit of white collar crime would be deemphasized in favor of going after terrorism, and I also thought I saw my local police department lose interest in all sorts of public order offenses and minor property crimes in favor of looking for signs of possible terror attacks in the offing, and monitoring populations they thought might be the source of such attacks, in coordination with the Feds– to the point that it felt more like an instrumentality of the federal government than anything local.
If memory serves me correctly, in the Australian context (for what it’s worth) “public order offences” are typically generic offences which depend more on police discretion than anything else: “breaching the peace” or being a “public nuisance” for example. The actual incident – say, a bar fight – might be something that could be tried as “assault & battery” or similar, but somehow “breaching the peace” is less difficult to prove, or less restrictive in terms of the elements of the offence. My guess would be that public order offences were simply tried as other offences due to changed legal definitions and/or increased police powers, as winston said.
