Crime Rates and Incarceration Rates

This wikilog article is a draft, it was not published yet.

by: Ryan • February 16, 2015 • no comments

Key paragraph from this post by Kevin Drum, which includes an analysis showing no correlation between prison reduction and an increase in crime rates:

Mass incarceration hit the limit of its effectiveness in the late-80s and since then has been running dangerously on autopilot. It ruins lives, costs a lot of money, and has gone way beyond the point where it affects the crime rate. It's well past time to reverse this trend and get to work seriously cutting the prison population.

The chart that prompted Kevin Drum's post came from a post at Vox.com which based it on this report:

An analysis by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project found that the states that shrunk their incarceration rates the most over the last five years experienced a slightly bigger drop in crime as the states where incarceration rates grew: 12 percent versus 10 percent.

The Washington Post noted the Pew analysis but also discussed the Brennan Center's report:

Recent evidence, particularly from states that have reduced their prison rates, refutes this logic. But if anyone is still unconvinced, this jaw-dropping finding from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU should undermine once and for all the notion that mass incarceration makes us safer: We've locked up so many people in the U.S., that increasing incarceration long ago ceased to have any real impact on crime in this country.

As economists would put it, there are diminishing returns to incarceration. Lock up one criminal in town, and crime will decline. Lock away two, and it will probably decline further. But each criminal in prison yields a smaller and smaller impact outside of it — until finally, there's no new impact at all. Now we're effectively imprisoning more and more people with no benefit to public safety.