George Will offers some amusing headlines from the New York Times, whose logic (or lack of it) will be all too familiar to anyone who reads the liberal press in Britain:
1997
Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling1998
Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops2000
Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction2003
More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime
How maddeningly perverse and inexplicable that putting more criminals behind bars would coincide with a fall in crime!
For the benefit of such liberal journalists, Will explains the problem with all those despites and althoughs:
James Q. Wilson, America's premier social scientist, notes that "the typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses)" and Wilson says that 10 years of scholarly studies "have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways -- poverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the population -- that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works." It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.
[Also see There was a Giuliani effect.]
