The New York Times Room for Debate must have had a really tough time finding anyone, or at least anyone with some shred of credibility even if only bestowed by some title from some godforsaken advocacy group, to be the loyal opposition.  You see, the problem was the subject of the debate:

Would We Be Safer if Fewer Were Jailed?

Jails in New York and throughout the country dealing with overcrowding and brutality, are often filled with inmates who might not need to even be incarcerated. Some of them are awaiting trial for nonviolent offenses, others have mental health needs.

Can the use of jails be reformed to reduce the number of inmates without increasing society’s risks?

Without spending too much time on the obvious, being the number 1 jailer in the world is no mean feat.  It’s not easy to find anyone with any knowledge on the subject to do the “we are number 1, Yay!” cheer.  And yet, with five voices in harmony singing the horrors and wastefulness of over-incarceration, who would provide the shrill, off-key note?

Enter our old buddy, Kent Scheidigger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which advocates for the pre-emptive incarceration of all non-cops and the imposition of life plus cancer for any offence for which an attempt is possible.

The other five voices lay out the well-understood reasons why filling jails with pre-trial detainees who can’t make their $1000 bail for non-violent offenses, where they are given the option of joining gangs or dying in the hole at the hands of gang-related guards, if they want to make it to trial.  Oh wait, no trial, three years later, then tossed. Have a nice day.

Yes, they aren’t all like this. But the question isn’t whether to jail no one, but whether to jail as many as we do for the reasons we do.  Who will disagree?  Hai, Kent.

Some local jails in this country are mismanaged, to be sure. Media reports of Rikers Island actually recruiting gang members with criminal records to be guards are deplorable. Those who have engaged in such mismanagement need to be fired, and competent administrators need to be hired in their place.

It’s unclear whether Kent really meant to write that the media reports about Rikers are deplorable, or what happened there is deplorable. Or whether that was a Freudian slip. Nonetheless, an acknowledgement of mismanagement, even if some would call intrinsic systemic violence by a more pejorative word, is heart-warming.

Predictably, though, America’s left-leaning advocacy organizations and think tanks are attempting to leverage this scandal to promote their pet panacea. Indeed, their cure for every ailment is to put more prisoners back on the street.

And there’s the Kent we know and love, chomping at the bit to blame those commie, pinko lefties promoting their pet panacea.

The claim is not a new one. In 2000, Rand Corporation released a study of Los Angeles County Jail prompted by concerns of overcrowding and the hope that it could be relieved by releasing inmates who did not need to be there. The answer, in a nutshell, is that the people in the county jail really did need to be there, and the ones who were good candidates for alternative sanctions were already on them.

Did they?  Did each and every one of them “really need to be there”? Don’t worry your pretty head over the answer. Don’t ask for proof or cite. Kent says so. Would he lie?

Local jails occupy an important place in the range of sanctions available in our penal system. At the low end are the alternatives to incarceration, at the upper end is state prison, and county jail is in the crucial middle. These parts do not operate independently. They depend on each other.

Well, this is certainly true, as local jails are part of the spectrum of sanctions available, and no one has ever argued that the alternatives should only be the polar extremes of the system. But then, this has nothing whatsoever to do with either the question or the problem. No one has ever suggested the elimination of jails.

Getting addicts into treatment is much touted as an alternative. Wonderful. How do you keep them in treatment? Some have their act together sufficiently to stay voluntarily, but those are the ones who had the best chance of making it without treatment. For the tougher cases, jail needs to be a realistic backup sanction. Electronic monitoring sounds good, but what if there is no penalty for cutting off the monitor? Where the jails are so lacking in capacity that they have revolving doors for all but the very worst offenders, the alternative sanctions become toothless and lose their effectiveness.

And again, Kent matches strawman with non-issue. No one has ever suggested that jail not be available as an alternative. But that fails to address the question of whether drug treatment in jails should be available, or the length of jail sanctions, or pre-trial detainees spending years in jails, or…well, the list goes on for every relevant permutation that Kent ignores.

Kent goes on to focus on California, cherry picking issues like the failure of property crime to drop as precipitously as other crimes, without bothering to connect it to any cognizable issue in the debate.  He then concludes:

As the satirist H.L. Mencken said, for every problem there is a solution: neat, simple and wrong. The idea that we can save money and solve our overcrowding problem by simply releasing prisoners and do so without endangering law-abiding people is incredibly tempting, and many well-meaning people have fallen for it. It is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

Because the lefties are all screaming that the solution is “simply releasing prisoners.”  On the bright side, the other five voices in the debate offer not only substantive, and non-nonsensical, rationales for reducing the extreme level of incarceration.

But should you feel badly for Kent, left to dangle in his bizarre world of irrelevant arguments against his delusional commie enemies, he’s not completely alone.  His comrade in arms, Bill Otis, still loves him:

Let’s recast the question to focus on facts rather than speculation:

WERE we safer when fewer were jailed?

The answer to that question is beyond any sane doubt. Here are the figures: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

And if we jail everyone, and the only people left out are cops and prosecutors, imagine how safe we might be.  But then, the police will be very sad with no one to play with.