During a press conference on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) displayed her impressive imagination as she said that putting violent criminals in prison was not the way to reduce violent crime, instead, we should do things like “build more hospitals” and “pay organizers.”
“If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care and overall health care, employment, etc. It’s to support communities, not throw them away.”
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Data, which tends to be in conflict with Ocasio-Cortez’s general worldview, reveals that the drastic reduction in violent crime rates in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s was largely a result of increased incarceration rates. An analysis from the Journal of Quantitative Criminology estimates that “21 crimes [are] averted per additional prisoner.” This may seem obvious because it is: more criminals in prison means less criminals able to commit crimes.
“The average number of prior convictions for inmates released from state prison in 2005 was five, the average number of prior arrests was over 10, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The JFA Institute has estimated that in only 3 percent of violent victimizations and property crime does the offender end up in prison,” a New York Times article reported.
Shocking as it may seem, there is very little data on a relationship between violent crime and building hospitals or paying organizers. However, mental health care and employment have been shown to have little to no effect on violent crime. A Harvard meta-analysis found that in order to prevent one homicide, 35,000 schizophrenia patients would need to be detained. Another study explains that “for those with mental illness without substance use, the relationship with violence was modest at best.” Additionally, according to a University of Chicago analysis, “A 1% change in the unemployment rate is typically found to increase property crime by 1– 2% contemporaneously but often has no systematic impact on violent crime rates.”
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The New York Times article concluded, “The nation’s 20-year crime drop was achieved through a combination of proactive policing and increased incarceration. Ideally there would be alternatives to prison that produced the same public safety gains, but so far, alternatives that can be implemented reliably at large scale have not been found.”
Rep. @AOC: "If we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them … It's to support communities, not throw them away." pic.twitter.com/vj4BnNKEVV
— The Recount (@therecount) June 3, 2021
