If you take George Will's word for it, you might come away thinking we're 2 million more prisoners away from ending crime in America once and for all. His Sunday Washington Post column, More Prisoners, Less Crime, begins by attacking liberals for not loving incarceration enough, proceeds to deny racial disparities in our criminal justice system, and closes by suggesting that prisons might be better for society than universities. Needless to say, it was linked approvingly by the White House drug czar, John Walters.

Will would have us believe that all progress towards reducing crime rates is the exclusive result of increased incarceration, ignoring all other factors, and even mocking "liberals" who focus on addressing "flawed social conditions." Amazingly, Will manages to reach his singular conclusion without even telling us how far crime rates have actually dropped. It's a glaring and convenient omission, since any criticism of his shallow and needlessly partisan analysis is difficult without knowing what numbers he's looking at. For example, since the incarceration boom began in the 1970's, the biggest drop in crime rates occurred during the mid-90's, a period of increased economic opportunity, which took place under a democratic administration.

In his book "The Great American Crime Decline," crime expert Franklin Zimring, PhD notes:

Since a huge increase in incarceration was the major policy change in
American criminal justice in the last three decades of the twentieth
century, one would expect many observers to give this boom in
imprisonment the lion's share of the credit for declining crime in the
United States. One problem with such an assumption is that massive
doses of increased incarceration had been administered throughout the
1970s and 1980s with no consistent and visible impact on crime.

The Vera Institute reports that only 25% of the crime drop of the mid-90's was attributable to incarceration. Moreover, since the prison population grew by a staggering 638% between 1970 and 2005, any benefits actually derived through incarceration are achieved at a massive cost, both fiscally and in terms of huge numbers of individual people whose imprisonment didn’t actually reduce crime. I mean, crime didn't drop 638%, obviously.

The idea of using incarceration to incapacitate the most serious offenders is ancient and perfectly logical in and of itself. A small minority of offenders commit a large percentage of crimes, thus if we can remove the worst recidivists from society, we'll achieve substantial gains in crime control. The problem is that each successive year of heavy incarceration will impact fewer of these serious offenders, precisely because so many of them are already behind bars. These diminishing returns ensure that lock 'em up policies will become progressively less effective over time, thus incapacitation could not achieve a sustained or proportionate crime reduction even if it were the sole factor, which it is not.

Finally, much of this has limited, if any, applicability to the illicit drug market, which has thoroughly withstood the incarceration boom. Drug sales, unlike rapes and murders, never decrease when the people responsible are removed. Thus, the Drug Czar's enthusiasm for Will's conclusions may have more to do with his appreciation for any spirited defense of the prison population than an actual belief that we've made progress towards reducing the drug trade specifically. Disruptions in the drug market actually increase violence, as we're seeing in Mexico, therefore any sustained reductions in violent crime we've achieved through incarceration could be expanded dramatically by ending the drug war and regulating illicit drug sales. There is absolutely no public safety interest in incapacitating non-violent drug offenders, who will only be replaced, while the State continues to foot the bill for their imprisonment.

Fortunately, for anyone frustrated by the mindlessness of those who still defend our embarrassingly massive prison population, understand this: we literally cannot afford to keep doing this. Not because it has ravished urban communities, and thoroughly corrupted the administration of justice in America, nor because it has fostered the growth of a paramilitary police state that routinely steamrolls the due process of our laws. And not even because the people themselves have grown suspicious of our towering prison industrial complex and the tiresome rhetoric employed by its champions. We cannot afford to keep doing this because we just don’t have enough money to indefinitely continue supporting these horrible things.

Eventually, even our most vengeful and ferocious legislators and bureaucrats will have to make better decisions about who to put in our prisons. And when that day arrives, decades of so-called "tough-on-crime" talk will immediately be brushed to the fringes where it has belonged for generations.

Update: Unsurprisingly, Pete Guither is all over this at DrugWarRant.