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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (64536)	3/4/2008 1:15:34 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The reason we put criminals away isn't because it costs more, less or the same as a Harvard education, but to mitigate the awful damage to American civil life that criminals do. Nothing more. It's not as if those who were thrown into the hoosegow would have gone to Harvard instead. Repeat: More Prisoners = Less Crime By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 4:20 PM PT Crime: The number of adults imprisoned in the U.S. has hit an all-time high, a new report says, bringing with it fresh concern about "our priorities." Don't know about you, but we think this is a good thing. The 1.5 million people now in U.S. prisons represent nearly 1% of the adult population — an all-time high, according to the Pew Center on the States. This, Pew says, has led to much higher costs. Last year alone, states spent $49 billion on corrections, an outlay that's been growing at a real rate of 6% for 20 years. Over the same period, real spending on prisons has risen 127% compared with a 21% increase in spending on higher education. The folks at Pew — along with others — have a problem with this. "For all the money spent on corrections today," says Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project, "there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety." We respectfully disagree. Quite the opposite, in fact. The good people at Pew look at only one side of the equation. The nearby chart shows the other. It plots the number of people in prison vs. the violent crimes rate. Turns out that all those people in prison must have been doing a lot of bad stuff, since once they were deprived of their freedom the crime rate dropped. Last year, as the prison population swelled, the violent crime rate hit at a postwar low. It's not hard to figure out why. Prison is a deterrent, just what it's meant to be. Saying the number of people behind bars has risen is, by itself, meaningless. It's only meaningful when compared with what the increased imprisonment is supposed to alleviate: Crime. And as we see from the chart, it seems to do that quite well. As for the other arguments, such as the high cost of incarceration, that's also rather trivial when you compare the far higher cost of crime to society. Sure, states spend $49 billion on corrections. But according to more than one study over the past decade, crime costs the U.S. a lot more. One such study, published in 1999 in the University of Chicago's Journal of Law and Economics by economist David Anderson, found a net loss of more than $1.1 trillion a year, or $4,118 per American, due to crime. That's a lot of money, and it surely has grown substantially since the study was done. Other studies come up with equally scary costs for crime. Indeed, there's no reputable study of which we're aware that says it's more costly to society to put criminals in prison than to let them keep committing crimes. As for the claim we now spend more on jailing young men than on sending them to college — or, as one blogger summarized it, "Harvard Costs Less Than Prison" — that, too, is irrelevant. The reason we put criminals away isn't because it costs more, less or the same as a Harvard education, but to mitigate the awful damage to American civil life that criminals do. Nothing more. It's not as if those who were thrown into the hoosegow would have gone to Harvard instead. Why compare the two? As for well-meaning "reformers" who would close our prisons and send more criminals to live among us, they aren't doing any favors. With a small handful of exceptions, the 1.5 million people in prison have committed very bad crimes. And they've found themselves in prison only after receiving due process and court trials, at considerable public expense, in the fairest justice system in the world. They are where they deserve to be, and we are all the safer for it. ibdeditorials.com