Not sure why the Tea Party folks haven't jumped on this, it is a sure money saver ...

Bring Back The Lash?

There are so many errors and downright nonsense in his article, that it obscures his argument.

He claims there was only 338K prisoners in America in 1970, but that the fear of crime, the war on drugs, etc. led to an irrational massive expansion of prisons that has no correlation with the crime rate.

Wrong. In the early 60s the crime rate in Texas was around 2000+ Uniform crimes per 100K population. It started rising nearly every year until the crime rate had doubled by the mid-1970s. Prison construction in Texas, and the rest of the US, lagged way behind. The crime rate continued to climb nearly every year in Texas until it topped out in 1988 at about 8,014 uniform crimes per 100K population, or about double what it had been in the mid-1970s. In 1989 the crime rate began to drop, and in 10 years the crime rate dropped about 35%.

When you consider the crime rate had been on a steady rise for nearly 30 years, that the crime rate didn't just level off, but dropped, and dropped dramatically, is pretty amazing.

So what happened? For years TDC had barely inched up in capacity. By the late 80s, a high per cent of inmates sentenced to TDC were "paroled in abstentia" from the county jails. Generally, most inmates served less than a month for each year of their formal sentence. This was the high water mark of what later legislators would call, "being smart on crime." The State saved tons of money, but victims of crime, and society in general, took it in the neck.

But between 1988 and 1998, Texas got serious about crime, and massively increased prison capacity. We went from a TDC with roughly 40K beds in 1987 to close to 140K beds 10 years later. And it was during this massive prison expansion that the crime rate dropped like a rock. Since then we have not built any more prisons, but we have expanded the capacity of existing prisons, and our crime rate continued to drop, but not nearly as dramatically.

This pattern was repeated all over the US. And as prison capacity went up, crime went down.

In the EU, the country with the lowest incarceration rate--Sweden--has the highest uniform crime rate, about 13,000 crimes per 100K pop. The next several countries with the lowest incarceration rates also have the highest crime rates. The country with the highest incarceration rate, Spain, has the 2nd lowest crime rate. Ireland has the lowest crime rate, and the second highest incarceration rate.

The only way incarceration rates would not have an effect on the crime rate is if one of two situations were true. If the criminal justice system is so inept and corrupt, that it incarcerates people willy-nilly, then incarceration rates will have no effect on crime rates. I am sure the Soviet Union's Gulag did not lower crime, because people were sentenced to the Gulag for non-criminal offenses. Incarceration will not lower the crime rate if criminality is evenly distributed through out the population, so that a 100 nuns are just as likely to have the same per cent of murderers, thieves, and drug dealers, as 100 inmates in prison. But that is obviously not true. A relatively small percent of the population commits a massive percent of the crime. When they are locked up, crime goes down.

He goes on to make other false statements as well. E.g.: those who's only crime is being an illegal alien, are housed with the toughest felons. He makes so many false statements, I can't rebut them all here. But the idea that America's prisons are just like the Soviet Union's Gulag really is disgusting.

I noticed that the author is a sociologist with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, an outfit that is notoriously PC, such that it's scholarship can not be taken seriously. This is just another example of that.

Even so, I happen to agree to some degree with him on his main point. When I was a public prosecutor in Zimbabwe, the standard punishment for male juvenile delinquents were "cuts with a light cane." I believe the maximum number was 8. The JD would be arrested on one day, we'd have the trial the next day, and he would receive his whipping at the local prison the next morning, and then he was let go. Justice was swift, and meaningful. For most JDs, I think this is far superior to what we have in Texas.

Interesting! I also agree with a small premise that gets hidden a bunch of bogus stuff...I think prison is a sort of "quiet" torture. Most of us really don't have to see it like someone in the stockade or getting a public lashing.

Quite often I am shocked that criminals are sent away from our court for long terms with no emotional showing from the defendant at all. I have to think if I was even going to spend one night in jail, I would do it with some screaming and crying. But in 6 years of prosecuting, the most I have seen are tears (and one guy that threw up).