View this email in your browser ([link removed])

Dear Jack,

Mississippi, we are often told, has an incarceration problem. Far too many people get locked up for too long, they say.

Over the past two decades, Mississippi’s prison population has in fact fallen by a quarter, from 1,207 per 100,000 in 2002 to 916 per 100,000 by 2021. In January 2014 the prison population of our state was 21,008. By January 2022, that figure had declined to 16,931.

Those who argue Mississippi should incarcerate fewer people have been getting exactly what they asked for.

Now let’s take a look at what has happened to violent crime in our state over that time.
[link removed]

From 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741 percent, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.

Have those advocating for a lower prison population thought though the implications of their anti-prison agenda?

Anti-prison advocates like to argue that locking people up in large numbers does not work. Crime, they point out, was high even when Mississippi locked people up in greater numbers than almost anywhere else in America. The trouble is that Mississippi after these anti-incarceration reforms is a vastly more violent place that Mississippi was without them.

In 2013, the year before Mississippi enacted legislation designed to reduce the rate of incarceration, 28 people out of every 100,000 Jackson residents were murdered. By 2021, that number had nearly quadrupled to 101 homicide victims per 100,000 residents in our capital city.

“You are being oversimplistic, Carswell!”, the critics will cry. “The causes of crime are complex” I can hear them add. “How do you know reducing the prison population accounts for this extra crime? Correlation is not causation.”

Indeed it isn’t. What we do know from research cited by Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute is that the average state prisoner released has around five previous convictions. That means that we have a pretty good idea of who is committing the lion’s share of the extra crime; those that have already been convicted and released.

“But it is so expensive to lock up so many people!” the reformists insist. Borrowing conservative language, they suggest that cutting the prison population would save taxpayer dollars.

It is expensive to maintain prisons, just as it is expensive to maintain our country’s borders. But there are some things that the government needs to do even if costly.

As Shad White, our State Auditor has shown, leniency is expensive, too. According to estimates by the State Auditor, each homicide in Mississippi costs taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.2 million. On top of that, of course, come all kinds of other costs paid for by the victims of the violent crime.

“But what about the human cost of incarcerating people?’, the anti-prison advocates are quick to ask. “Locking people up harms families, and the children of inmates suffer”.

Anyone who assumes that releasing violent criminals back into the bosom of their families will automatically be good news for those families might not have met many violent criminals.

Mississippi needs policy-makers makers to make policy on the basis of how the world is, not on the basis of how they might want it to be.

Eight years ago, back when every policy-maker in Jackson seemed intent on drifting along with the anti-incarceration vibe, we were told that there were better ways to reduce crime than by filling the prisons.

Unfortunately, we have yet to find them. When you factor in for selection bias, there is remarkably little evidence that most rehabilitation programs have the efficacy that those who run them want them to have.

Anti-prison advocates are currently campaigning to have Mississippi’s Parole Board release more parole-eligible prisoners from custody.

It is true that our Parole Board currently approves a lower percentage of parole applications now than it has done for years. But that is because there has been a massive surge in the number of people automatically entitled to apply for early release to the Parole Board.

Why the increase in parole applications? Because of legislation that the anti-prison advocacy groups helped pass which automatically entitles violent offenders to appeal to the Parole Board in the first place.

The Parole Board has recently been criticized for getting some parole decisions wrong. I can’t help wondering if the Board might have done a better job if they had not been flooded by new cases at the insistence of anti-prison activists.

The tragedy of this misguided anti-prison agenda is not only that it is driving a surge in crime. It has detracted from Mississippi implementing the type of prison reform that conservatives ought to support.

More needs to be done to make our prisons more humane. The prison system ought to do a far better job of differentiating between violent criminals and the non-violent. With so many young men graduating from the prison system each year, surely we could do a better job of ensuring they emerge with a better set of life skills?

These reforms are only going to be attainable if we have a prison system that achieves its primary purpose; locking up bad people in order to prevent them from doing bad things to good people. The longer we take to learn this lesson, the longer the list of victims.

There is now overwhelming evidence that we should abandon Mississippi’s flirtation with an anti-incarceration agenda – and it is not just a question of crime.

If Mississippi wants to see the kind of economic growth that other states have experienced, we need to reduce our crime rates.

Have a wonderful – and peaceful – weekend!

Forward this email to a friend! ([link removed])

Warm regards,
Douglas Carswell
President & CEO

============================================================
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:
Mississippi Center for Public Policy
520 George St
Jackson, MS 39202-3013
USA
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can ** update your preferences ([link removed])
or ** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
.
Copyright © 2023 Mississippi Center for Public Policy, All rights reserved.