Is the Pendulum Swinging Backwards?

In the fifties and sixties, prior to the rise in crime, the violence over people ratio was remarkably low by international standards. The united states had an incarceration rate that was about the rate in other european countries but it was a homicide rate that was very, very high. In many ways, what happened in the seventies was a reaction to that fact, a reaction to the low levels of punitivenesss in the united states. We're stuck in this cycle where we either fight it with prisons, or we pull back once crime gets better, and then the only thing that's available when crime goes back up is to ramp up prisons again.