Both Charles Murray and I have commented on a friendly disagreement we had on crime and incarceration. But I thought it important to clarify one point: Charles believes that increased imprisonment has been the necessary (but not the sufficient) condition for 100 percent of the drop in violent crime. His argument goes like this: Without the massive increase in incarceration, the most that other measures could have accomplished for violent crime (not property crime) is to have slowed the increase. We wouldn’t have seen a decrease at all. But he does believe some of the factors I cited (like target hardening, an increase in private security, and better policing techniques), in conjunction with incarceration, helped to account for the magnitude of the decrease in violent crime.
While this doesn’t change the thrust of what either of us wrote, it is a point worth underscoring, which I’m delighted to have done.
I read Charles Murray's article and Peter Wehner's response. Here are a few facts that I hope add some nuance to what is about the most simplistic argument on crime and punishment I have ever read. Fully 25% of all inmates are mentally ill. Most in desperate need of treatment. None receives as much as an aspirin. Prisons have become the Dickensian asylums of the 21st century. Does anyone who has read this delicate intellectual discussion about crime and punishment and reviewed the neat little charts and graphs think the guards are in control of the cell blocks. Gangs control the prisons and prey on the weak and the ill. It is America's dirty little secret. Guantanamo and Bahgram are pleasure palaces by comparison to most state and federal prisons. Add to this the recent comprehensive study that those too poor to be defended by private attorneys and who are forced to use public defenders receive significantly increased sentences for the same crimes. The "try em" and "hang em" philosophy of Charles Murray is just a bit too 1870s for me. And where are the numbers for recidivism? Or is the new defense law passed by Congress and signed by Obama allowing U.S. Citizens to be held indefinitely without trial our new constitutional solution to reduce crime? There may be some virtue in simplicity but not in ignorance. As the man said, you are entitled to your own arguments but not your own facts.