I saw this article in SL&P about Bernie Sanders' campaign promise:
But, here is a pledge I've made throughout this campaign, and it's really not a very radical pledge. When we have more people in jail, disproportionately African American and Latino, than China does, a communist authoritarian society four times our size. Here's my promise, at the end of my first term as president we will not have more people in jail than any other country. We will invest in education, and jobs for our kids, not incarceration and more jails.
Bernie's pledge is deconsructed for the nonsense it is, but the deconstruction itself misses two of the most obvious flaws.
First, Bernie is willing to take at face value China's report of its prison population. Talk about credulous! (This is from someone who wants to be President of the United States). This is like being willing to take at face value Iran's report of it's plutonium stockpile.
Second and far more important, Bernie holds forth on the prison population without a single word about why criminals are in jail to begin with. Pledging to reduce the prison population while omitting any mention of the prevalence of crime is like pledging to reduce the hospital population while omitting any mention of the prevalence of disease. So far as appears in Bernie's statement, there is no such thing as the cunning or violent criminal; there is only the woe-begotten inmate, deprived of his freedom for no reason worth mentioning, much less exploring.
The deconstruction, by Leon Neyfakh at Slate, warns, inter alia:
This would be a good time to remember...that Congress' current efforts to bring down the prison population by enacting very modest sentencing reforms appear to be falling apart in slow motion because there are enough lawmakers in Washington who think it's too dangerous to set anyone free, ever. And this is at a time when there's supposed to be a historic bipartisan consensus over the need for reform.
The proposition that "there are enough lawmakers in Washington who think it's too dangerous to set anyone free, ever" is a point-blank lie, as the author could not help knowing when he wrote it. This is sentencing reform's way of pretending that there is no legitimate opposition to its elitist narrative. Thus, it is no mere oversight that Mr. Neyfakh says little about recidivism rates, and whites out entirely the Wendell Callahan early release child murders. Dead children are just no match for The Received Wisdom of sentencing reform.
Sanders' statement is a perfect example of coming to a conclusion and then looking for facts to support it rather than looking at the facts and then coming to a conclusion.
It is the same procedure employed by most of academia including our favorite "evidence-based" criminologist.