Imprisoning more people doesn’t cut crime
It’s a sad fact of criminal justice policy in the UK that the rate of imprisonment isn’t correlated with crime levels but with political rhetoric about which party is toughest on crime.
I blogged recently about how as the crime rate has gone down over the last fifteen years, the rate of imprisonment has gone up.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Over recent years most US states have reduced the amount they use incarceration (driven in great part by economic concerns) and have found that crime rates have gone down. Indeed, as this infographic from the Pew Foundation shows, those states which have cut the use of imprisonment have seen their crime rates fall further than those that haven’t:
