When the Pew Report announced that we have reached the pinnacle of prison success, a full 1% of our population in prison, former federal judge  Paul Cassell wrote that this proves that imprisonment reduces crime.  I was unpersuaded.

Undeterred, Judge Cassell  found an ally in his quest to show that the more people we put in prison, the better off the rest of us will be in Kent Scheidegger at Crime and Consequences, a blog sponsored by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, whose motto is “Give ’em a darn good trial before you put ’em to death.”  For apparently good reason, Judge Cassell didn’t include a link to Kent’s post lest we note that he’s a shill for the prosecution.

Frankly, I’m hurt that Paul Cassell didn’t link to me.  As a Utah lawprof and victim’s rights advocate, his credibility is judged on his ability to address the challenges presented by those who disagree with him.  Instead, he pulls Kent out of the chorus to support his singing the lead.  The gist of this new-found claim is that the same statistical showing, that more people in prison means less crime, can be tracked back to the 1960s per Kent, when it was only tracked back through the 1990s in the Pew Report. 

The problem is that this wasn’t the challenge to Judge Cassell’s argument that locking people up en masse doesn’t have an impact on crime.  So, while he’s given us more of the same, he still has refused to recognize the failing of this statistical showing to prove his point in the first place.  Or address it.

Others, far better with stats than me, have shown how the statistical correlation between incarceration rates and crime rates fails.  There is no direct inverse relationship between the increase in incarceration and the decrease in crime.  The two lines operate independently, and the assumption that because they tended to trend in the same direction meant that there was a direct correlation doesn’t hold true.  Us non-statisticians tend to assume a lot about statistics because we just don’t understand them very well.

Even if we ignore the statistical failings of the argument, however, the issues of logic remain unresolved.  If we were to lock away 1000 people at random, we would have a reduction in the crime rate because some of our randomly selected prisoners would have committed a crime.  What about the rest of the randomly selected prisoners who would not have committed a crime?  Square that up with your victim’s rights position, Judge.  They would be victims too.  Victims of your philosophy.

It would be awfully nice if Judge Cassell would link to me from time to time, as I would really like to know why there are some victims that are worthy of his devotion and others that he will happily throw away.  How exactly do you chose which victims are worthy?  Just asking.