Do Prisons Prevent Crime....really!? (the Comments edition)

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

A previously published editorial of mine got some comments that are startling, if only because one commenter who read the article, simply did not comprehend the argument. It made no difference in his thinking.

Here are some comments:


Keith Olsen says:
September 14, 2024 at 8:03 am


“DO PRISONS PREVENT CRIME?”

Short answer is YES,
Think of all the crimes that don’t get committed because people don’t want to end up in prisons.



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Another commenter answered Keith:

 Adam Eran says:
September 15, 2024 at 3:19 pm Keith, you’re under the impression that fear is the sole human motivation. It’s a powerful one, I’ll grant you, but hardly the only one. The lower crime rates that accompany lower incarceration rates in France and Canada are evidence to the contrary. There’s not nearly as much incarceration, yet crime is lower than the seven-times-higher incarceration US. How is that possible? The studies that find crime diminishes when people are treated better also contradict your conclusion. One example not mentioned in the article: the Swiss legalized opiates, including heroin, distributing the drug at reasonable prices from (legal) clinics. Crime declined 85% around the clinics. So both fear (being busted for opiates) and crime diminished. There are too many examples like this to take your hasty conclusion seriously.

The Ridiculous Retirement Crisis

Re the 9/11/24 Sacramento Bee Op Ed title: Why aren't we talking about America's retirement crisis*
© Mark Dempsey

What’s the retirement crisis? Why we’re running out of money! And everyone knows dollars grow on billionaires. That’s why a country that makes its own currency must borrow from its population! Don’t you know this? Okay, sarcasm doesn’t become me, but you get the point. All of the hand wringing about Social Security running out of money is baloney…heck, it’s baloney squared.

We don’t even print most dollars any more–they exist as electronic entries in the Federal Reserve’s computers. The Fed (for short) is the US central bank, and to make a dollar, a technician sits at a special computer terminal and types a “one.” He’s just made a dollar. Add three zeros, and he’s made a thousand, three more zeros and he’s made a million… et cetera. We’ll run out of dollars when the Bureau of Weights and Measures runs out of inches. Never. I’m not saying we need to make infinite dollars, but worrying about running out is ridiculous.

The worry that Social Security taxes (FICA) won’t keep up with the demand for Social Security payouts is equally baloney. The government is the only fiscally unconstrained player in the economy. It would be like a household, if households made dollars….but they don’t. Taxes create the demand for dollars, they do not supply the creator of dollars with dollars it needs. (See former Fed governor Beardsley Ruml’s paper “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete” … from 1945)

The Bee's editorial talks as though national “debt” is a problem we have to solve by cutting those programs–a talking point that originates with a fundamental misunderstanding of double-entry bookkeeping. Your mortgage may be your liability, but to the people collecting the payments, it’s an asset. Your bank account is your asset, but the bank’s liability. You could march down to the bank and demand it reduce its debt, but all they would do is reduce the size of your account. Not very sensible.

National “debt” includes the dollars in your wallet. They are “Federal Reserve Notes” (“note” is legalese for an IOU). Andrew Jackson’s administration eliminated national debt entirely in 1835. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with specie (monetized gold) and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes, of varying reliability. It was a nightmare. After people’s savings got sucked out of the economy, there was a massive wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures called the Panic of 1837. In fact, whenever there’s been a significant reduction of national debt the economy tanks…100% of the time following such fits of “fiscal responsibility™.”

Why aren’t we talking about America’s retirement crisis? Because it’s as real as the monster under the bed…useful to scare the children, but certainly not real.

*(authors: Christopher D. Cook is a senior writer at the New School for Social Research. Teresa Ghilarducci is professor of economics and director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, and author of "Work, Retire, Repeat.")


Update: The British debunk of the same American false anxiety:

Do Prisons Prevent Crime?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

I've said it before, but people are very easy to influence, particularly with the stories we tell ourselves, via Hollywood. These stories include crime dramas, police procedurals, detective stories, and courtroom dramas. Solving the crime typically drives the plot, and the bad guys perish, or are appropriately punished roughly 90% of the time. Is there any murder plot so complex Perry Mason can't solve it? I don't think so!

In real life, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes--13% in California in 2022 (says the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice here).

Meanwhile, Hollywood's stories have an effect. Between 1982 and 2017 the US population increased 42%, while spending on policing increased 187%.  The influence also appears in US prison spending. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 25% of its prisoners–five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate, seven times Canada’s or France’s rates, per-capita. Is Canadian or French crime worse than US crime? No, it's a little lower.

What’s different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate? For one thing, the US has more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France have none. 

Could bankruptcy drive people to consider desperate solutions like crime? Could treating people better rather than driving them to bankruptcy for health problems have an influence on crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, there are several studies (here [pdf], and here, etc.) that demonstrate treating poor people better lowers crime rates.

Yet the US continues to believe desperation cures crime, not treating people well. The impulse to punish more has local support, too. Rather than house the homeless, open local health clinics, or experiment with basic income guarantees for the poor, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors has voted to spend nearly a billion dollars enlarging the County jail.

In fairness to the County, the current jail is full, but 60 - 80% of the prisoners are convicted of nothing but being unable to afford bail. They're doubly poor too, because they'll lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail. 

The County avoids any discussion of supervised release, or no-cash bail. Opponents of this kinder approach might cite a neighboring (Yolo) County that had a less-than-optimum experience (more crimes, and more recidivism) when they released inmates during COVID times.

Yet Washington D.C. and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses. In fact one headline from Illinois--“Nearly 8 months into Illinois' new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower”--suggests there are ways to successfully do this.

There are also ways to sabotage kinder programs. Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that measure as a failure. They tried to get police to offer the alternative–rehab–with tickets. The addicts were not impressed, to say the least, and police didn’t handle addicts’ defiance well. 

Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical treatment for addiction (rehab), and has a lower success rate. One study says: “if 40 percent of offenders receive rehab vs. incarceration, it saves the system $13 billion. Choosing drug treatment leads to fewer crimes, lower addiction rates, and saves society money.”. Other countries--Portugal and Switzerland among others--have successfully decriminalized drugs.

I’d suggest our addiction to incarceration is as bad an addiction as any drug. To start to address this, perhaps what’s needed, besides a change of heart, is something like tobacco's warning labels for crime shows. Here are a few:

Warning:This show might lead you to believe police solve all crimes. They don't even solve half.

Warning: Believing abuse cures criminal behavior is worse than believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.

Warning: Believing punishment cures criminal behavior is expensive an ineffective.

Culture Catches Up With Technology...-ish

 

Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium, 1994 pic.twitter.com/gQwNnoCcP9

— Daniel Feldman (@d_feldman) September 2, 2024

The cartel responsible for the explosion in homelessness and homeless people dying

This is a discussion of the homelessness (and homeless deaths) that are a product of rent hikes, and the collusion that has produced those hikes. The conclusion (from here):

As Matthew Fowle with the University of Pennsylvania Housing Initiative and co-author of the February study showing the skyrocketing death rate of homeless Americans put it:

“It’s unlike any other mortality trend that we really see in demography. It’s comparable to something like a natural disaster or war.”

That’s probably because it’s a class war, and there’s no shortage of war criminals.

Accompanying video: