this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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You're vastly underestimating how much insight most children have to how the world works, in my view.
For example, I knew my father was often full of shit in my early teens.
It's really interesting. I somewhat recently read a book about raising children, where a researcher talked about studies they did with kids. Kids understand a lot, at a young age (I think they did the studies on kids around ages 3-5). Kids will humour you, instinctively pretending they believe you, because it's still helping them learn about the world. I know that kids are often smarter than adults 🙂
But it's really obvious that putting people in prison for crimes will reduce the crime rate. It's so obvious, it's almost impossible to believe it's not true. Neither kids nor adults are good at spotting counterintuitive things like that. The only reason we know it's true is because of the vast data collection done these days (Probably best not to get me started on the involuntary data collection/data sovereignty).
Not only does throwing more people in prison for longer not reduce crime, it doesn't even reduce violent crime. It literally does nothing more than cost the tax payer money, and satisfy a medieval sense of vengeance.
Is this why violent crime was down under Labour?
There is no data that shows violent crime increased because of lower incarceration rates. That's the whole point.
There are a whole host of other factors that cause increases in crime, and even if harsher punishments lowered crime slightly, the most effective measures is addressing the underlying causes of crime in the first place. Mental health, poverty and inequality all have by far the biggest impact in crime rates. Locking up more people won't change that.
Which Labour failed miserably at, by the way.
They certainly should have done more, I absolutely agree, but I do not think it's fair to lay the blame for increased crime squarely at their feet.