Writing for City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes a good argument that “Incarceration Works.” In short, locking up the roughly one in twenty who commit most of the felonies protects the nineteen in twenty who, mostly, do not. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.
We had this argument back in the “Three Strikes” era of the early 1990s, and it worked. Very many of those so imprisoned were black. Civil rights activists claimed we were locking up too many individuals whose life experiences ‘doomed’ them to a life of crime.
This claim of course ignored that many others with similar “life experiences” did not become career criminals. It continues to be true that separating the violent few from the not-violent many is good social policy. And apparently this is an argument we are doomed to repeat every few years.
