Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries.

[Lucinda F. Boyd]

Awesome news! U.S. Department of Justice reports show that violent crime has dropped by over half in the last 15 years. What incredible, uplifting news we can celebrate! But you haven't heard about this. Why was this news censored?

To verify this inspiring news, see the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) graph and information here and here. The biggest drop occurred between 1994 and 2004.

Unfortunately some key data on the DOJ website is not very up to date, but you can find more recent data using other reliable sources. Violent crime experienced a mild increase in 2005 and 2006, but again decreased both in 2007 and 2008.

As recently reported by Associated Press (AP) and BusinessWeek earlier this month, "The FBI says violent crime nationwide dropped by 2.5 percent last year. Nationwide, murder and manslaughter dropped 4.4 percent in 2008. The country also saw a huge drop in car thefts – more than 13 percent." This intriguing article further comments:

The latest data shows violent crime fell for a second straight year, after increases in 2006 and 2005. Those two years, the crime rate began to rise after historic lows that began during the Clinton administration and continued into President George W. Bush's first years in the White House.

The AP/BusinessWeek article mentions historic lows in 2004, yet you likely have never heard about this. Even more interesting is that like almost every report for many years on this topic, this article fails to mention the spectacular and wonderfully inspiring news that overall violent crime has dropped by over half since 1994.

Not only does the article fail to mention this, the title of the article is "FBI: Crime falls in US, but small town violence up." It seems that the media can't give some good news on crime without also mentioning in the title the bad news that violence is up in small towns.

Could it be that someone or certain powerful groups don't want you to know this amazing news? As I've shown in other articles, highly inspiring information often fails to be reported by the major media. One article I wrote on this was even censored by Google. It almost seems like the media wants us to live in fear and focus on all the destructive and depressing news which fills the airwaves and newspaper pages.

Another reason to keep this inspiring news quiet might be that the powers that be don't want us to look at the connection between violence and imprisonment rates. If violent crime has dropped over 50%, we might expect the number of people in prison to have declined.

Yet the fact is, imprisonment rates have climbed rapidly in the last few decades. Below is a graph from the DOJ website showing this rapid increase.

It's also possible that the increased prison rates are at least partially responsible for the decrease in violent crime. Yet even if this is th case, the United States has become much less the "land of the free" than it used to be. A 2008 New York Times article titled "U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations" drives the point home:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

Those invested in the prison-industrial complex are making millions as huge amounts of our tax money pay for an explosion in prison population. Are we imprisoning too many people? Why isn't the media asking the hard questions here?

We can be thankful that citizen-based news websites like examiner.com are now enabling informed citizens like me to report both the awesome news about the decrease in crime rates, and the concerning fact that this news is being censored. The fact that you are reading this article shows that there is a shift happening thanks to the amazing tool of the Internet, which empowers caring citizens to spread the news that the media is failing to cover. We are slowly breaking through the censorship. That's exciting news!

The box immediately below provides several ideas on what you can do to educate yourself and spread the good news. We also invite you to comment below and let us know what you think. What's up with the media's failure to report good news?