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 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.