Crime, Imprisonment Inversely Related

Since the death of Bill Buckley, George Will now is the grand old man of conservative opinion journalism. In this article from the Washington Post, Will looks at the good that has come from locking up a gazillion career criminals for relatively long stretches. Will writes:

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 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."

Is incarceration a deterrent to potential wrongdoers in society, or does it simply take proven malefactors out of society or both? Whichever...this is a worthwhile article. Pretty clearly the "three strikes" laws have done a world of good.