Because most of those people are not repeat violent criminals? We only need to incarcerate repeat violent offenders to reduce crime noticeably. This is not controversial. The data is linked-to above.
Is it really true that in places with longer jail sentences (specifically, tile spent in prison) and/or higher prison populations as a share of general population that there is less crime?
America has the most people in prison (both absolute and per capita) and also some of the highest crime rates, so it seems the correlation is the opposite.
Just to throw my two cents in. We could look at Singapore which does have harsher sentencing and low crime rates. However, there is a bit of caveat. Singapore has its red light districts where law enforcement sorta turns a blind eye. Its more of a, "so long as you keep your bullshit there, be classy about it and don't let it spill out, we will just conveniently ignore it."
I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"
The overly charitable comment is exactly how I meant it. Let me phrase it a bit differently, if this study would be let’s say from Finland … it would have been the most straightforward comment to make. But it’s the US so it’s not.
You don’t need to delete your comment. It’s not a big deal. We all have different days.
Unusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.
That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely