Scott Alexander's "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know": My Thoughts

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Scott has posted an analysis of whether prison effectively prevents crime, which he kindly gave me an opportunity to read and give comments on before posting. I think it’s great, but I also think he’s holding himself back from explicitly drawing one of the most important conclusions warranted by the data: a utilitarian, even a utilitarian who discounts the pain of prisoners in some respects, should support reducing incarceration. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to make extreme assumptions about the directionality and strength of hard-to-quantify factors. The same is true of other welfarist approaches to public policy (Rawlsian, Prioritarian, etc.)

Statistically, when it comes to the effects of prison on crime, Scott and I arrive at broadly the same conclusion- although he arrives at it much more carefully. My sense is that Roodman’s Devil’s Advocate case in his Cost-Benefit Analysis is a reasonable baseline of the informed majority opinion to start the analysis. As Scott says:

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