The 1970s Crime Wave

mercatus.org

1 point·paulpauper··4 comments

It's unpopular to say, but mass incarceration works at mitigating crime. Tough recidivism laws gets criminals off the streets. It also acts as a deterrent. One can point to high relapse rates or that there is still a lot of crime, but one must consider the counterfactual and control for demographics. Controlling for demographics and culture, would there be less crime with more lenient sentencing? I think not. It's possible that societies where leniency works are advantaged culturally or demographically in ways that the US isn't, so it works better there. Or maybe citizens or politicians have higher tolerance for crime.

If only that justice was applied in a way that was devoid of classism, racism and just plain not giving a f by other humans, this might be a valid take.

Mass incarceration creates better criminals. Please show your math on how the death penalty prevents murders.

Locking up people who are driven to acts doesn't solve the root problem. Even in programming/engineering, this is a shortsighted, and prone to failure direction.

Other countries have had lower crime rates than the USA without mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration brings a lot of other problems, not the least of which is the moral repugnance of for-profit-prison companies.

Various people in various situation have various motivations to commit various crimes. There's no one-size-fits-all solution. And then there's further complications regarding the definition and adjudication of crime in different cultures as well as feedback loops.

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