Cali must free 58,000 inmates

2 thoughts on “Cali must free 58,000 inmates”

1. read Levitt’s piece about this. Its very interesting. He found that releasing criminals increases crime rates, but that doing so might be less costly to society than keeping them in.

   freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/the-great-california-prison-experiment/

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2. I like Levitt (and I wish he liked my book more). But I also find him a bit out of touch with regards to crime reduction.

   His quantitative economist approach often doesn’t pass the sniff test. I don’t care what the correlations say, police tactics matter. He disagrees. He’s wrong.

   I don’t think legalized abortion is a major cause of the crime drop (though he’s backed off on this point somewhat).

   Team him up with a guy who does good ethnographic work, and Levitt is better. But on his own, he’s a bit a loose cannon.

   But I do like his point that like it or not, we’ve got a good experiment on our hands. Let’s learn from it.

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