Florida's crime rate continues to drop - but credit a strong economy and a decline in drug violence, not the ''tough on crime'' laws passed by the Legislature.

Given that the state last year enjoyed its lowest crime rate in almost three decades, Gov. Jeb Bush's declaration on Monday that "Florida is a safer place" was both warranted and uplifting. His attempt to use the crime data to validate his legislative agenda was neither.

Count how many political backs he patted with this assessment:

"This encouraging decline in crime confirms that Florida's tougher sentencing policies, juvenile justice efforts and law enforcement agencies are on the right track. The era of early release and lenient sentencing laws is over. The policy of zero tolerance for crime, grounded in mandatory-sentencing laws, including 10-20-Life, the Reoffender Punishment Act, the Three-Strike Violent Felony Offender Act, and our 85 percent time-served laws, is restoring communities and saving lives."

Stripped of its political preening, the government's statement does make an important point. Sentencing laws that lock up repeat and violent offenders do provide protection for society and keep those criminals from committing yet more crimes. But that point doesn't begin to explain the social and economic forces at play in Florida and the United States since the early 1970s, and it fails to recognize that law enforcement is but one influence on the rate of crime.

"The governor's explanation is simply not plausible," says Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University. "You can't explain a trend that began a decade ago with policy initiatives that began two years ago."

You also can't make neat and clean correlations between crime and punishment. The United States imprisons its people at a rate surpassed only by Russia yet it has the highest rate of murder in the world. Spain has half as many police officers and a fifth the number of prisoners per capita, yet the United States' murder rate is five times greater. The United States imprisons 10 times more people per capita than Japan, yet our murder rate is seven times as great. There is virtually no research demonstrating that tough sentencing laws deter criminals, and the most recent examination of the "three-strikes" laws across the nation suggests that they might actually cause robbers to be more likely to kill their victims.

What criminologists know about the crime rate is that it has been steadily declining since about 1990, and it is most broadly explained by a strong economy and a decline in the population of young males (who are most likely to commit crime). There is also a less understood phenomenon relating to drug violence. Though people seem to be using illicit drugs at a similar rate as the 1980s, the violence and crime associated with drug transactions has dropped dramatically. Some criminologists theorize that the drug markets, and the gangs that control them, have stabilized.

Florida has done all the things in its criminal justice system that Gov. Bush lauds, including building more prisons and giving longer sentences to people who commit crime. But its best hope for continuing to be a "safer place" has nothing to do with 10-20-Life or Zero Tolerance or Three Strikes laws. The best hope starts in homes and families. As long as we are building a society with opportunity and raising children into responsible, functioning adults, we will continue to see less crime. And that's something we can all celebrate.

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