Smart, well-meaning people on boards such as this refuse to see the Prison Industrial Complex for what it really is...a jobs program for police, courts, judges, jails, prisons, and of course, lawyers and politicians.
One group "increased incarceration" definitely has a non-marginal positive impact on are all-of-the-above.
Can you show me any examples, anywhere in history, where a group that directly benefits from and controls the entry level and duration of access have ever decided to lower their wages and put at jeopardy their livelihoods?
Because at the heart of it, that's the real effect that decreasing incarceration will have...closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes.
And we are surprised when the very people whom benefit from the status quo don't see things the way we do?
This. One of the best comments I have ever read. In the south you also need to account for the lack of voting power of African Americans. %30 of African Americans can’t vote in Florida because of their dealings with the “justice” system.
I don't think it even needs to be controlled by the same people. Look at TurboTax. They built a company to make an insane tax code easy and they lobby against simplifying it.
Once it's big business there's a huge finical and employment incentive to keep the machine running no matter who's running it. Some might say that privatising prisons would even make it worse.
It's hard to stop a multi-billion dollar industry but what the prison system is doing to our population is not OK.
In the US, the prison system is also used to deal with mental illness, unemployment and homelessness.
See NYC for how that works:
1., Create a zero tolerance policy
2., Invest in high police coverage
3., Arrest people on small stuff, like public intoxication, urination, etc.
4., Three strikes is a compounding factor, so three small things and boom, you're off the streets for years.
It did help clean up NYC, but rather going the social housing and mental health way, it simply put a lot of poor people in jail.
Now, is this for societies greater good? Is NYC overall a better, safer place for poor people? No easy answers there.
>Because at the heart of it, that's the real effect that decreasing incarceration will have...closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes.
I don't think reducing prison time would necessarily result in all of those. Closing jails perhaps, but it's possible such a thing would require more police and county court bandwidth, not fewer.
That said, I believe non-violent offenders should never be put in jail. Give them mountains of community service or some other more productive remedy. If it's financial crime, freeze their ability to access the financial system. But sending them to jail is more likely to make them more effective and more hardened criminals.
Ideally, lowering everything about the criminal system is a net good at all levels. Politicians and government are the ones who control expenditure levels along with what is defined as a crime.
Collectively, with would suit all levels of citizenry and government to raise threshold of what constitutes a "Crime", along with massive reduction of forces across all levels. However the first politician to 'defect' and recommend this gets lambasted as being "Weak On Crime". Unfortunately for the politician, it only takes a single person who was let out early and commit some assault/robbery/rape/murder to then show the 'evils and horribleness' of said politician.
Quote from the Slate Star Codex:
For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement.
Actually, given the way many private corporate prisons are operated, a lower occupancy rate directly results in profit. The state is obligated to maintain the prisons at something like a 90%+ fill rate. If they fall below that, the state has to pay multi-million-dollar dines. Arizona recently faced this, paying out $3 million for not providing enough prisoners to one of their private prisons. It provides a monetary disincentive toward granting parole or shorter sentences... probably not a great idea.
When in an ideal world, the justice system would be a tool to minimize the negative impact that the set of individuals and corporations that do not follow a set of agreed apon rules causes to the set of all individuals and corporations in a society.
You forget the other benefit, that incarcerating people makes the non-incarcerated feel better. People like to see other people locked away. It makes them feel safer. That feeling results in votes, votes for the people doing the locking up. It is unfair to blame the police or the courts, or even the legislatures. Blame all those voters who call for "tougher" laws.
Want to really reduce prison populations? Take a hard look at the drug and sex offender laws. That might mean not locking up the meth dealer or rapist, but that is what reducing the prison population means: living with the knowledge that such people will not be entombed far away. That fear is the real issue underpinning the problem.
If you're talking about closing prisons, then yes, there are misaligned incentives.
However, a lot of prison reform policy suggestions would result in increased costs, while making the prison system more humane.
These higher cost prison reform policies haven't been put into place, which sort of discredits the assertion that lack of prison reform is primarily driven by misaligned incentives.
> Smart, well-meaning people on boards such as this refuse to see the Prison Industrial Complex for what it really is
Random. When your recidivism rate exceeds 50%, you might as well flip a coin at sentencing to decide whether they go to jail or not; will likely be just as effective as the current system.
>closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes
How will it so any of these things? People will still be arrested and prosecuted for committing crimes. Its the incarceration vs alternative actions and programs that is being discussed here. Prisons would certainly be affected, but they aren't even in your list.
While it's true that prisons could be shut. Its also true that a whole new rehabilitation industry could spring up if alternatives to long term incarceration were enacted.
Because incarceration is penitentiary, which means criminals are made to pay for their crimes - not to be rehabilitated. There other countries where incarceration works, for example Norway [1] - primary because they focus in rehabilitation. Incarceration is not the problem, the typical opinion of the purpose of incarceration is (justice through revenge).
Incarceration is 100% effective for what America wants it to achieve: penance.
> There other countries where incarceration works, for example Norway [1]
The Nordic model works in Norway because of Norway's society and culture. It wouldn't work in US, or South Africa or El Salvador because of what level of violence is deemed acceptable in those countries.
You can try to transpose the Nordic model in US all you want it is not going to work because these are different societies bound by different civil contracts and cultures.
Plenty of societies and countries have a prison system that doesn't focus on rehabilitation,at all, yet the level of violence is still inferior to US by a long shot.
Penitentiary means a place to become penitent, which means to repent for your sins. It was not meant to simply have people pay for their crimes (retribution) but instead to reform the offender by making them see the error of their ways and getting them to ask for forgiveness.
Prison reform movements began to push for both deterrence and rehabilitation over simple punishment in the 17th century. This started with British houses of correction, where people were taught how to make a living for themselves rather than beg or steal. The Penitentiary Act introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, a labor regime, proposed two state penitentiaries, and abandoned gaolers' fees. (These were never built, though) At the same time, capital punishment for minor crimes no longer seemed palatable, so simply being detained also became part of the punishment itself.
In America in the 19th century, states began to implement plans for prisons to be places of reform and penitence, such as the New York system, and the Pennsylvania system, which placed offenders into solitary cells with nothing other than religious literature, and forced them to be completely silent to reflect on their wrongs. Eastern State Penitentiary is one of those, and still stands in Philadelphia as a tourist attraction. It's a building that in some ways even feels like a church or cloister.
Current American prisons are not designed for penance or penitence.
At least in Finland (Nordic country) almost all people in prisons have reduced impulse control in one way or another. Severe alcohol dependency or drug addiction, personality disorders, often combined, attention deficit disorders or other neurological abnormalities.
People get into trouble with law mainly because they have reduced judgment. Idea that longer sentence makes them think twice simply can't work with them. It might work for white collar crime, but that's not usually what is suggested.
> Incarceration is 100% effective for what America wants it to achieve: penance.
“Punishment”, perhaps. It's far less than 100% effective for penance, which is voluntary, self-imposed, and done as an outward sign of genuine acceptance of responsibility and desire to make amends.
Because incarceration is penitentiary, which means criminals are made to pay for their crimes - not to be rehabilitated.
It's a pretty stupid form of payment, I should say. They lose time and opportunity and so on, so they definitely paid something. The state paid a fortune for their incarceration, so the state is also out of pocket. The criminals are paying for their crimes, but they're not paying society. They're not paying the victim. Society actually pays as well! This is so ridiculous. The criminal AND the state are paying for the crimes.
Correct. The primary purpose of incarceration is retributive justice, not rehabilitation; and although the punishment will often lead the perpetrator to see the error of his ways, that is not the goal. In that sense, a prison sentence is always effective.
This makes no sense. As far as I can tell they pulled property crime out of their definition of public safety, but left in the cost. This also flies in the face of the fact that the current era is one of the safest in history.
I think many people are sympathetic to reform in the criminal justice system. It would be a good thing to do. Particularly laws around drugs and illegal substances. It also gets to the root of many of these problems. I think that’s a much better way to move the needle, rather than just looking at the money spent and deciding “well, this isn’t working based on my definition, so we might as well not do it”.
Apparently the author(s) think that you're safe if people are breaking into your house and stealing your things as long as you're not getting bashed over the head. Such an odd way to look at it. I don't think a lot of people who have had their house broken into feel just as safe afterwards. I do agree with their premise that prison for drug offenses is a terrible idea, but I hate that they lump drugs in with property crime. Property crime is definitely not victimless.
This is a nice data point in how crazy a "study" can be in how it abuses statistics to detach itself from reality. With a billion variables to control for, you can find many that seemingly account for trends in crime. Basically, locking people up prevents them from committing crimes for that duration. For anything besides organized crime, that's going to reduce crime by removing whatever crimes they'd commit.
> Basically, locking people up prevents them from committing crimes for that duration. [...] that's going to reduce crime by removing whatever crimes they'd commit.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. 1) There is no crime in prison. 2) The imprisoned would have kept on committing crime for their total sentence if they were not in jail. 3) Prisoners 'return' to the world committing the same type/volume of crimes that they were committing when they went in.
For #1: There is crime in prison, a whole lot of it, and (even if you don't have sympathy for criminals) it's bad for society; people may come out worse off than they went in, driving crime up further. Jail is an intense experience, and it seems like the skills that you develop while 'surviving' in jail may not be so constructive for society when you're released.
For #2: As a kid my friends and I made a lot of stupid mistakes and some pretty bad decisions. Purely arbitrary factors (race, affluence, geography, etc) meant that none of us were ever locked up for them. We had the opportunity to correct our behavior, grow out of it. Had we have been punished harshly, it's likely that that our bad behavior would have continued. This is due to #1 (exposure to crime/criminals in prison, and contact with the justice system), but also loss of opportunities, and probably a different exposure or experience with drugs.
For #3: The above two points lead to the possibility that people who come out of jail are more likely to engage in more or worse criminal activity when they're released than when they went in.
So while there need to be consequences for crime, it's not at all evident that increased incarceration, certainly the way we are doing it, would lead to reduced criminal activity.
You've overlooked the "incarceration increasing crime" factors:
> "Incarceration is not only "an expensive way to achieve less public safety," but it may actually increase crime by breaking down the social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime, removing adults who would otherwise nurture children, depriving communities of income, reducing future income potential, and engendering a deep resentment toward the legal system."
> For anything besides organized crime, that's going to reduce crime by removing whatever crimes they'd commit.
That doesn't automatically follow.
First, it ignores crimes committed while in jail, which is totally a thing - but at least hopefully the impact of those on "innocents" is reduced.
Second, if punishment reduces honest opportunities and increases criminal opportunities (networking?), enough new criminal acts may follow to make up for the lost time.
What if I told you that to imprison citizens for small crimes causes them to commit a more serious crime in the future? Does that changes your conclusion?
Your over-simplification does not make sense. And assuming that the people that did the study are just blatantly incompetent without any information is very presumptuous.
How could the opposite ever be true, most incarcerated are not there for life and when they get out they get shit on by the rest of us. Post incarceration opportunities that lead to yearly incomes above the poverty line are reduced 10x probably more. I'm not saying we shouldn't jail people but jail should be like forced education unless your jail term is for life.
I wonder how many people actually understood what the article is referring to when it says "increased incarceration". It's not referring to increased jail sentences for those who commit violent times. It's referring to the imprisoning of non-violent "criminals" such as marijuana dealers.
> "Higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates, because expanding incarceration primarily means that more people convicted of nonviolent, "marginal" offenses (like drug offenses and low-level property offenses) and "infrequent" offenses are imprisoned."
I'm all for legalizing marijuana and other soft drugs, but not for going easy on rapists and murderers. Do increased jail sentences have a deterrent effect? A quick Google search shows that the answer is yes, up to a certain point, and this makes perfect logical sense. If the punishment for committing armed robbery consisted solely of one day in prison, so many more people would give it a go. As you increase the sentence from one day to multiple years, you would weed out the less hardcore would-be criminals.
We can debate the inflection point where the effects start to taper off. But there is no doubt that having some threat of jail time, has a extremely significant impact on crime.
The data show that areas with high incarceration rates generally have higher crime rates; and areas with lower incarceration rates generally have lower crime rates.
The article then deduces that high incarceration rates CAUSE high crime rates when it seems blatantly obvious to me that the causation runs in the OPPOSITE direction.
Areas with high crime rate cause high incarceration rates because as crime rate goes up, more people must be put in prison.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article's agenda (to support prison reform) but the reasoning seems shockingly lacking.
Also, the article mentions that the incarceration budget went up by 340% with no meaningful change to public safety, but fails to mention that inflation during the same time period was 240%....so the budget didn't really increase all that much.
This is just a correlation study, showing that states where incarceration went up did not simultaneously have decreasing crime rates.
The study can't tell you what would have happened if that state had reduced incarceration rates.
People who get cancer treatment are far more likely to have cancer than the general population. This does not mean that reducing cancer treatment reducing cancer treatment will reduce cancer incidence!
Why can't the focus ever be on the prevention of crime in the first place? These discussions always dissolve into the same cesspool of blaming prisoners and politicians. The government can never be relied on to fix things. The single biggest predictor of living in poverty or doing time in prison is growing up with no father around. 80% of prisoners today had no father in their life.
Seems like we should be looking at things like that. I never shook those conversations here though. W have to empower single motherhood (heroism) and not discourage it here... Well look at where that has led us.
While I'm sympathetic to this point of view, it's really hard to take seriously a conclusion like "no impact".
California's murder rate peaked around 1994. Three-strikes sentencing was enacted that same year in CA and about a dozen other states. Are we to believe that the 50% decline in murders since then is not, at least in part, a result of the incarceration of repeat criminals?
I guess we'll find out soon enough now that 3-strikes is being considerably softened.
Property and violent crime rates started dropping in California in the early 90s[1], along with the rest of the country, before three-strikes was enacted. Crime in California has also declined at rates similar to states without three-strikes policies (e.g. Illinois).
Primary evidence being that the crime rate started dropping everywhere in a similar proportion around that time, even in states without a 3 Strikes rule.
This is just a correlation study, showing that states where incarceration went up did not simultaneously have decreasing crime rates.
The study can't tell you what would have happened if that state had reduced incarceration rates.
People who get cancer treatment are far more likely to have cancer than the general population. This does not mean that reducing cancer treatment rates will reduce cancer rates!
Whenever this topic comes up, I like to link to this [1] study done by the ACLU. It is a study on people that have received life without parole for nonviolent offenses. It is truly shocking that US lawmakers have allowed even one of these sentences to happen. The "land of the free" is anything but. Here's one of the more salient quotes:
"...thousands of people are serving life
sentences without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue."
Too many politicians and voters are in the habit of ignoring facts and instead going with their gut feelings, even when the facts directly contradict their "feelings". And unfortunately fear mongering for votes can be very effective.
Here's Newt Gingrich's classic "debate" between FBI crime statistics and his own "feelings". Notice particularly the language he uses to frame actual facts that don't agree with his ideology:
Not surprised at all. Born and raised in a country with criminal punishments a lot harsher than here in Canada yet the crime rate is 5-10 times higher.
[+] [-] cubano|7 years ago|reply
One group "increased incarceration" definitely has a non-marginal positive impact on are all-of-the-above.
Can you show me any examples, anywhere in history, where a group that directly benefits from and controls the entry level and duration of access have ever decided to lower their wages and put at jeopardy their livelihoods?
Because at the heart of it, that's the real effect that decreasing incarceration will have...closing jails, firing police officers, lowering ridiculous attorney fees, and shutting down county court complexes.
And we are surprised when the very people whom benefit from the status quo don't see things the way we do?
[+] [-] ransom1538|7 years ago|reply
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/political-pulse...
[+] [-] everdev|7 years ago|reply
Once it's big business there's a huge finical and employment incentive to keep the machine running no matter who's running it. Some might say that privatising prisons would even make it worse.
It's hard to stop a multi-billion dollar industry but what the prison system is doing to our population is not OK.
[+] [-] shadowtree|7 years ago|reply
In the US, the prison system is also used to deal with mental illness, unemployment and homelessness.
See NYC for how that works:
It did help clean up NYC, but rather going the social housing and mental health way, it simply put a lot of poor people in jail.Now, is this for societies greater good? Is NYC overall a better, safer place for poor people? No easy answers there.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|7 years ago|reply
I don't think reducing prison time would necessarily result in all of those. Closing jails perhaps, but it's possible such a thing would require more police and county court bandwidth, not fewer.
That said, I believe non-violent offenders should never be put in jail. Give them mountains of community service or some other more productive remedy. If it's financial crime, freeze their ability to access the financial system. But sending them to jail is more likely to make them more effective and more hardened criminals.
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|7 years ago|reply
Ideally, lowering everything about the criminal system is a net good at all levels. Politicians and government are the ones who control expenditure levels along with what is defined as a crime.
Collectively, with would suit all levels of citizenry and government to raise threshold of what constitutes a "Crime", along with massive reduction of forces across all levels. However the first politician to 'defect' and recommend this gets lambasted as being "Weak On Crime". Unfortunately for the politician, it only takes a single person who was let out early and commit some assault/robbery/rape/murder to then show the 'evils and horribleness' of said politician.
Quote from the Slate Star Codex:
For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement.
[+] [-] otakucode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donquichotte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
Want to really reduce prison populations? Take a hard look at the drug and sex offender laws. That might mean not locking up the meth dealer or rapist, but that is what reducing the prison population means: living with the knowledge that such people will not be entombed far away. That fear is the real issue underpinning the problem.
[+] [-] Yhippa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallgovt|7 years ago|reply
However, a lot of prison reform policy suggestions would result in increased costs, while making the prison system more humane.
These higher cost prison reform policies haven't been put into place, which sort of discredits the assertion that lack of prison reform is primarily driven by misaligned incentives.
[+] [-] akira2501|7 years ago|reply
Random. When your recidivism rate exceeds 50%, you might as well flip a coin at sentencing to decide whether they go to jail or not; will likely be just as effective as the current system.
[+] [-] DuckHuntMaster|7 years ago|reply
How will it so any of these things? People will still be arrested and prosecuted for committing crimes. Its the incarceration vs alternative actions and programs that is being discussed here. Prisons would certainly be affected, but they aren't even in your list.
While it's true that prisons could be shut. Its also true that a whole new rehabilitation industry could spring up if alternatives to long term incarceration were enacted.
[+] [-] makemoniesonlin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|7 years ago|reply
Incarceration is 100% effective for what America wants it to achieve: penance.
[1]: https://m.phys.org/news/2016-08-norwegian-prisons-criminal.h...
[+] [-] nostalgeek|7 years ago|reply
The Nordic model works in Norway because of Norway's society and culture. It wouldn't work in US, or South Africa or El Salvador because of what level of violence is deemed acceptable in those countries.
You can try to transpose the Nordic model in US all you want it is not going to work because these are different societies bound by different civil contracts and cultures.
Plenty of societies and countries have a prison system that doesn't focus on rehabilitation,at all, yet the level of violence is still inferior to US by a long shot.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
Prison reform movements began to push for both deterrence and rehabilitation over simple punishment in the 17th century. This started with British houses of correction, where people were taught how to make a living for themselves rather than beg or steal. The Penitentiary Act introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, a labor regime, proposed two state penitentiaries, and abandoned gaolers' fees. (These were never built, though) At the same time, capital punishment for minor crimes no longer seemed palatable, so simply being detained also became part of the punishment itself.
In America in the 19th century, states began to implement plans for prisons to be places of reform and penitence, such as the New York system, and the Pennsylvania system, which placed offenders into solitary cells with nothing other than religious literature, and forced them to be completely silent to reflect on their wrongs. Eastern State Penitentiary is one of those, and still stands in Philadelphia as a tourist attraction. It's a building that in some ways even feels like a church or cloister.
Current American prisons are not designed for penance or penitence.
[+] [-] nabla9|7 years ago|reply
People get into trouble with law mainly because they have reduced judgment. Idea that longer sentence makes them think twice simply can't work with them. It might work for white collar crime, but that's not usually what is suggested.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
“Punishment”, perhaps. It's far less than 100% effective for penance, which is voluntary, self-imposed, and done as an outward sign of genuine acceptance of responsibility and desire to make amends.
[+] [-] unit91|7 years ago|reply
In fact, I teach a class every week to 33 prisoners, inside the prison itself. Rehabilitation is absolutely the goal.
[+] [-] EliRivers|7 years ago|reply
It's a pretty stupid form of payment, I should say. They lose time and opportunity and so on, so they definitely paid something. The state paid a fortune for their incarceration, so the state is also out of pocket. The criminals are paying for their crimes, but they're not paying society. They're not paying the victim. Society actually pays as well! This is so ridiculous. The criminal AND the state are paying for the crimes.
[+] [-] atlantic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mberning|7 years ago|reply
I think many people are sympathetic to reform in the criminal justice system. It would be a good thing to do. Particularly laws around drugs and illegal substances. It also gets to the root of many of these problems. I think that’s a much better way to move the needle, rather than just looking at the money spent and deciding “well, this isn’t working based on my definition, so we might as well not do it”.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|7 years ago|reply
Is it also one of the safest in history in other nations that have not increased their incarceration rates?
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|7 years ago|reply
If this were solely limited to incarceration rates the United States would have the lowest crime rate in the world.
[+] [-] google_censors|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] furyg3|7 years ago|reply
You're making a lot of assumptions here. 1) There is no crime in prison. 2) The imprisoned would have kept on committing crime for their total sentence if they were not in jail. 3) Prisoners 'return' to the world committing the same type/volume of crimes that they were committing when they went in.
For #1: There is crime in prison, a whole lot of it, and (even if you don't have sympathy for criminals) it's bad for society; people may come out worse off than they went in, driving crime up further. Jail is an intense experience, and it seems like the skills that you develop while 'surviving' in jail may not be so constructive for society when you're released.
For #2: As a kid my friends and I made a lot of stupid mistakes and some pretty bad decisions. Purely arbitrary factors (race, affluence, geography, etc) meant that none of us were ever locked up for them. We had the opportunity to correct our behavior, grow out of it. Had we have been punished harshly, it's likely that that our bad behavior would have continued. This is due to #1 (exposure to crime/criminals in prison, and contact with the justice system), but also loss of opportunities, and probably a different exposure or experience with drugs.
For #3: The above two points lead to the possibility that people who come out of jail are more likely to engage in more or worse criminal activity when they're released than when they went in.
So while there need to be consequences for crime, it's not at all evident that increased incarceration, certainly the way we are doing it, would lead to reduced criminal activity.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
> "Incarceration is not only "an expensive way to achieve less public safety," but it may actually increase crime by breaking down the social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime, removing adults who would otherwise nurture children, depriving communities of income, reducing future income potential, and engendering a deep resentment toward the legal system."
[+] [-] dllthomas|7 years ago|reply
That doesn't automatically follow.
First, it ignores crimes committed while in jail, which is totally a thing - but at least hopefully the impact of those on "innocents" is reduced.
Second, if punishment reduces honest opportunities and increases criminal opportunities (networking?), enough new criminal acts may follow to make up for the lost time.
[+] [-] kartan|7 years ago|reply
What if I told you that to imprison citizens for small crimes causes them to commit a more serious crime in the future? Does that changes your conclusion?
Your over-simplification does not make sense. And assuming that the people that did the study are just blatantly incompetent without any information is very presumptuous.
[+] [-] pytyper2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarkmoody|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubano|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whack|7 years ago|reply
> "Higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates, because expanding incarceration primarily means that more people convicted of nonviolent, "marginal" offenses (like drug offenses and low-level property offenses) and "infrequent" offenses are imprisoned."
I'm all for legalizing marijuana and other soft drugs, but not for going easy on rapists and murderers. Do increased jail sentences have a deterrent effect? A quick Google search shows that the answer is yes, up to a certain point, and this makes perfect logical sense. If the punishment for committing armed robbery consisted solely of one day in prison, so many more people would give it a go. As you increase the sentence from one day to multiple years, you would weed out the less hardcore would-be criminals.
We can debate the inflection point where the effects start to taper off. But there is no doubt that having some threat of jail time, has a extremely significant impact on crime.
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2016/03/29/longer-ja...
[+] [-] smallgovt|7 years ago|reply
The article then deduces that high incarceration rates CAUSE high crime rates when it seems blatantly obvious to me that the causation runs in the OPPOSITE direction.
Areas with high crime rate cause high incarceration rates because as crime rate goes up, more people must be put in prison.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article's agenda (to support prison reform) but the reasoning seems shockingly lacking.
Also, the article mentions that the incarceration budget went up by 340% with no meaningful change to public safety, but fails to mention that inflation during the same time period was 240%....so the budget didn't really increase all that much.
[+] [-] warbaker|7 years ago|reply
The study can't tell you what would have happened if that state had reduced incarceration rates.
People who get cancer treatment are far more likely to have cancer than the general population. This does not mean that reducing cancer treatment reducing cancer treatment will reduce cancer incidence!
[+] [-] theShowdown55|7 years ago|reply
Seems like we should be looking at things like that. I never shook those conversations here though. W have to empower single motherhood (heroism) and not discourage it here... Well look at where that has led us.
[+] [-] SaintGhurka|7 years ago|reply
California's murder rate peaked around 1994. Three-strikes sentencing was enacted that same year in CA and about a dozen other states. Are we to believe that the 50% decline in murders since then is not, at least in part, a result of the incarceration of repeat criminals?
I guess we'll find out soon enough now that 3-strikes is being considerably softened.
[+] [-] grandmczeb|7 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/crime-trends-1.png
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw
Primary evidence being that the crime rate started dropping everywhere in a similar proportion around that time, even in states without a 3 Strikes rule.
[+] [-] warbaker|7 years ago|reply
The study can't tell you what would have happened if that state had reduced incarceration rates.
People who get cancer treatment are far more likely to have cancer than the general population. This does not mean that reducing cancer treatment rates will reduce cancer rates!
[+] [-] downandout|7 years ago|reply
"...thousands of people are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue."
[1] https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/111813-lwop-complete-repor...
[+] [-] glitcher|7 years ago|reply
Here's Newt Gingrich's classic "debate" between FBI crime statistics and his own "feelings". Notice particularly the language he uses to frame actual facts that don't agree with his ideology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I
[+] [-] wodenokoto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourtypical|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jothezero|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prolikewh0a|7 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/death-penalty-...
[+] [-] arcticbull|7 years ago|reply