Newsflash: Incapacitating people who commit crime has no effect on the amount of crime.
Do you believe that?
A far left advocacy group, the Brennan Center, wants you to. The press release from their latest propaganda (heralded, as ever, as a "study") states:
Increased incarceration had some effect, likely in the range of 0 to 10 percent, on reducing crime in the 1990s. Since 2000, however, increased incarceration had a negligible effect on crime.
Convincing the public that there is little or no relationship between (1) increased incarceration of people who commit crime and (2) enormous crime reduction over the last quarter century is critical to the efforts of the pro-criminal lobby to sell miniaturized sentences (which they understandably call by the opaque name "sentencing reform"). The lobby knows by now -- in part because of its humiliating failure in Congress to pass the Smarter Sentencing Act -- that the public simply is not going to buy slashing sentences as long as it understands that a crook who's in prison is not ransacking your house while you're at work, or selling heroin and similar goodies to your teenager. Hence the effort to convince us that incarcerating criminals has nothing or next to nothing to do with crime reduction -- arguably the most important domestic policy success of the last fifty years.
Related Newsflash: The centuries-long link between crime and punishment just disappeared.
These people are a hoot.
UPDATE: The Heritage Foundation, which takes the same robust pro-"reform" position as the Brennan Center but is a great deal more honest, recently took the view, through its distinguished Fellow, John G. Malcolm, that increased incarceration could be credited with between 25 and 35 percent of the last generation's crime reduction. See Mr. Malcolm's remarks starting at 7:35 of this tape. Somebody's telling a whooper, and it's not John Malcolm.
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