An increase in costs for Louisiana to house inmates, because more are being sentenced to jail and fewer are out on parole? Money well spent.
Far leftist media in the state began hyperventilating after the release of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s budget. In it, about $82 million more will go to corrections, fairly evenly split between the state system and in reimbursements to local jailers for housing state prisoners. Landry led the charge with legislative Republicans two years ago to overhaul the state’s criminal justice laws, which several years earlier had been relaxed, to sentence more people to jail and fewer to probation, force convicts to serve the vast majority (or if convicted after Aug. 1, 2024, all) of their sentences in jail, and to reduce the possibility of parole. In addition, Landry has appointed to the Board of Pardons and Parole members who more critically vet potential parolees, which has reduced the proportion of the lower proportion receiving a hearing that successfully attain early release.
These media bemoaned these outcomes, ideologically because of the tougher-on-crime agenda producing them, but also instrumentally in that this means fewer dollars to redistribute from state government to or to go to policies aiding their favored constituencies. The goal is to allege that the new policies largely waste money as they produce little or no benefits, defined as the opportunity for if not actual fact of reduced crime.
Except that the facts aren’t on their side of this argument. Part of their narrative misleads by extending certain exculpatory evidence beyond its proper boundaries. The impact of any one factor on crime rates often becomes entangled with a number of exogenous forces, making it easy to oversimplify, whether intentionally.
For example, reviewing all crimes reveals longer/more severe sentencing has little impact on overall rates, but when isolating serious crimes longer sentencing does have deterrence (foreknowledge of punishment affecting behavioral choices) and incapacitation (keeping miscreants prone to committing crime out of the community) effects and particularly among those where drug addiction wasn’t involved in some manner, although small in terms of cost/benefit analysis. Further, severity’s impact is small at the margins: for low-level offenses with small penalties but also at the other end, practically speaking meaning that life sentences have little more impact that 30 years in the slammer, but between these the impact on crime reduction is much larger. (Capital punishment, however, as a penalty has a wholly different set of dynamics.)
The other misleading argument attempts to deflect and distract from the fact that tougher laws result in absolute reductions of crime by presenting itself in comparative perspective. For example, statistics are reeled off such as five-year recidivism rates of something like 22 percent of parolees is just over half of the rate of all convicts released at the end of sentence, or that the vast majority of parole violations that land supervised inmates back in prison are administrative rather than for criminal activity. The former attempts to paint as more meritorious, and thus deserving of early release, parolees while the latter tries to envision generally parolees as essentially reformed and worthy of community habitation, both of which seek to cast doubt on incarceration as the best solution, if not also being cost-ineffective.
Note how these ask audiences to take their eyes off the ball. The fact is, over one out of five parolees engages in criminal behavior where that would be (at least against society outside of prison) zero out of five if remaining imprisoned. And, just because a parolee is whisked back because of a technical violation doesn’t inoculate a parolee from having a commission of crime after the violation but before end of sentence; those you can’t trust in small matters are hard to trust in greater ones.
Indisputably, harsher sentencing with reduced parole chances leads to less crime – not monotonically and not without qualification, but it does. The real public policy question on the issue comes whether the increased costs are worth it to society. They are, to a point.
Perhaps the most important, but by no means only, priority of government is security, both from abroad with armed forces and at home with criminal justice systems. While the data may show, for example, that the cost of the lengthy process of convicting and punishing with execution a murderer is exceeded by the benefit of a saved life (or lives), even if that weren’t the case because security within a society cannot be valued only in economic terms, there would be policy justification beside that for capital punishment.
Since security is of such paramount concern, in light of that Louisiana’s higher corrections cost is worth it. If things were laxer, more parolees would be out there committing crime and more prisoners released earlier would join them, and regardless it could be that the economic damage they inflict on people and property would be less than the extra money being spent. Nonetheless, because security is valued not just in economic terms, society should be eager to pay more to reach an adequate level.
It is a bounded proposition. If jaywalking were made a capital crime and a jurisdiction actually imposed and carried out such a sentence, there you would see essentially zero jaywalking go on. But such a disproportionate sentence mocks any conception justice from Plato to the present.
In the final analysis, there shouldn’t be handwringing over increased penalties and dollars in dealing with criminal behavior. Society is better off this way, with this extra money wisely spent.
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