Here’s an interesting sentence about prison sentences:
Although crime has broadly fallen since the 1990s, imposing longer terms for serious offences means the incarcerated population has doubled, from around 40,000 to 85,000 (see chart).
What would happen if we removed the word “although” and added the word “because”?
AlthoughCrime has broadly fallen since the 1990s, because imposing longer terms for serious offences means the incarcerated population has doubled, from around 40,000 to 85,000 (see chart).
The sentence is from an article in The Economist, which also included the following graph. What if we removed the word “Not” from the title?:
I don’t have strong views either way—but it’s worth thinking about different possibilities.
File under “never reason from a change in the prison population.”
READER COMMENTS
jdgalt
Oct 26 2023 at 10:55pm
The last graph has only one explanation I find plausible, and that is that serious crime is really increasing but most of it is no longer getting counted because police and prosecutors in most cities now maliciously allow crimes by favored ethnic groups to go uninvestigated and unpunished, for fear that doing their jobs honestly would cause the Left to (wrongly) consider them racists. They’d rather really be racists and let civilization fall than be embarrassed. This is why (for instance) Tommy Robinson is still under house arrest and a gag order. The same holds true in Democrat-run US cities, though the favored ethnic groups are not the same.
Dylan
Oct 27 2023 at 11:18am
What’s the basis for that belief and when do you think this began? Looking at the graph, the downward trend in crime flattened out around the ’05-’11 period, but then continued the downward trend that it has been on since the mid 90s. Was there some event in the UK in 2012 or so that would have precipitated this decrease in policing? Or, are you saying the decline was real earlier, but more recent data you don’t trust?
AndyG
Oct 27 2023 at 10:35am
It is possible that longer sentences for career criminals lowers the incidence of crime. It is very hard to tell a definitive narrative based on these two graphs. Any serious model should probably incorporate demographics and rates of recidivism.
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