Ancestral Vices: A sense of perspective is important when you deal with statistics.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy clearly lost his when he responded to a study on the number of drug offenders in prison by saying:
"Over the same period of time, drug use has gone down and crime is at an all-time low. (Drug Offenders Jailed at High Rate, AP, Jul. 27) While crime has gone down recently, it still has not reached the low levels it began to leave behind in the late Sixties. Murder rates are lower than in the gangster-ridden 1920's and 1930's, but far above the levels of the 1950's and the first two decades of the century."
Of course, we don't have the data to talk about crime levels before that, but perhaps the spokesman had something else in mind. When Cain murdered Abel, after all, the homicide rate peaked at 25,000 per 100,000 individuals. And the Garden of Eden suffered a 50 percent larceny rate, which was, naturally, motivated by a desire for illegal substances.
--http://www.stats.org/awards/dubious00.htm 1/4/00