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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

even when there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime by more than a small amount.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_gen...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_th...

The ny times editorial board is either living in a dream world, or is willfully lying and actually wants a return to the levels of property and violent crime from 40 years ago.

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Nice graphs, but where is the evidence linking those trends to higher incarceration rates?

There's also been a fall in other Western countries that don't have the same level of incarceration.

Unleaded gasoline/Abortion, and for the part where violent crime is caused by a large minority there is still a massive population that is just incarcerated for no good reason and will not contribute. That population is huge. Save them.

Here's a Mother Jones article discussing the correlation between the rise and fall of leaded gasoline usage and the rise and fall of violent crime during the 20th century.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

For those interested, here is the section of the study that discusses "The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration."

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18613&page=130

When recidivism rates are so high (67%), I highly doubt that locking more people up is, in the long run, going to reduce crime better than methods which actually attack the root cause of crime.

Cool, you established causation. Next step is to show that crime rates decreased because of mass incarceration and not a plethora of other factors.

(Good luck, you'll need it.)

I think you meant "correlation"?

Yep. Edit window passed, so I can't fix it!

You need to read Freakonomics!

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