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Crime And Incarceration

285 Words2 Pages

This study looks at the relationship between incarceration rates and crime, and its effect on public policy making. The most favorable view among criminologists is that increased incarceration reduces crime rates since it takes criminals off the streets and it serves as a deterrent to incentivize people from breaking the law. With the prison population growing in the U.S. over the last 30 years, crime has also fallen, but some of the researchers in this study like Spelman believe these numbers are misleading and the reason for majority of the reduction in crime rates may be due to other outside factors. However, this study ignores the possibility that crime elasticity as independent of observed prison population and crime growth rates, this

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