More Prisons, Less Crime -- Go Figure!
In today's Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Simon, a law professor and associate dean at Berkeley's Boalt Hall, seems befuddled by the reality that while California's prison population has gone up, its crime rate has gone down:
We have built more than 30 prisons since 1980, but our inmate population is nearly twice the design capacity of those prisons.... This is happening despite overall reductions in crime in recent years.
Is this really so hard to fathom? More criminals behind bars means fewer criminals on the streets. Fewer criminals on the streets means less crime. The prison boom hasn't happened "despite" the crime drop, it has been a key cause of the crime drop.
James Taranto at OpinionJournal.com has spent years mocking the New York Times' Fox Butterfield, who is similarly unable to make this basic connection. Like Simon, Butterfield expresses bewilderment about the supposed paradox between dropping crime and rising incarceration.
Apparently Butterfield has left the Gray Lady for the Ivory Tower.
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