Sentencing reform: I'm going to present a false dilemma [View all]

[Recursion]

I'm going to present this knowing it's a false dilemma, with all of us agreeing we all know it's a false dilemma, because I still think it's a good mental experiment.

In 1992, the prison population was 883,000, or 0.3% of the population.

Today, the prison population is 2,300,000, or 0.7% of the population.

In 1992, the violent crime rate was 757 per 100,000
Today, the violent crime rate is 367 per 100,000

(Note that incarceration is slightly more than twice what it was in 1992, and violent crime is slightly less than half of what it was in 1992. I think that's to some extent a coincidence, but it's worth pointing out.)

Recognizing that actually reducing incarceration would not necessarily bring violence back up to 1990s levels, would you support a hypothetical trade in which we returned to both 1992 levels of violent crime and 1992 levels of incarceration? (Never mind the "how" -- something about society changes and we wind up back with 1992 incarceration levels and 1992 crime rates. Would you consider that a good trade-off?)

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