Motivations count

I am glad people are beginning to focus on the size of the prison population as something that needs to be addressed. While I wish that there were low hanging fruit to get the numbers down, I suspect it is going to be much harder than is envisioned. In many states, it is very hard, with plea agreements, and non-incarceration punishments, to actually get into prison in the first place. Those who do get there tend to be the most persistent of recidivists.

The root of my concern is that reformers treat this as an issue of numbers rather than of human behavior. These people aren't in prison by accident. They did many dreadful things to get there. The root issue is their capabilities, values and behaviors. Without fixing those issues, simply releasing them back into the general population will likely have little positive effect and quite likely some "unexpected" negative outcomes.

Nor is everyone approaching prison population reduction with the cleanest of motives either.

From When will mass incarceration end?, America fact of the day by Tyler Cowen.

Three states stand out for making significant cuts in their prison populations in the past decade: New York (19 percent), California (17 percent), and New Jersey (17 percent). The reductions in New York and New Jersey have been in part a function of reduced crime levels, but also changes in policy and practice designed to reduce the number of lower-level drug offenders and parole violators in prison. But the pace of reductions in most other states has been quite modest. Moreover, 22 states still subscribed to an outdated model of prisoner expansion in 2012.

I don't think you have to be unduly cynical to note that the three states with the largest prison population reductions are also three of the states with the most parlous state finances.

In the worst case scenario, felons are pawns in a financial budget balancing game. Pawns who will be sacrificed to political expediency. Politicians and bureaucrats release the felons in order to balance the budget. Felons, with no expensive support or other militating strategies to change their capabilities, values and behaviors, repeat their prior patterns of behavior and end up back in prison. The budget remains unbalanced, citizens will have been victims of crime that could and should have been prevented. Felons will become ever more mired in their dysfunctional state of low capabilities, poor values and bad behaviors. The citizenry's perspective that politicians and government cannot be trusted will be further reinforced.

None of this is good.