On Tuesday, we raised questions about the logic of Douglas Carswell in his criticism of efforts in recent years to lower the inordinately high incarceration rate in Mississippi.
We suggested he was mischaracterizing the thrust of the prison reform movement, which is focused on using alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders, particularly those whose crimes are fueled by their drug addiction.
Carswell, head of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that often has the ear of Republican lawmakers, linked the prison reform movement to what he described as a skyrocketing increase in violent crime.
To quote from his column:
“From 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741%, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.”
Sounds frightening, doesn’t it? And hard to believe. There’s a reason. The comparison is bogus. Carswell apparently failed to realize that the numbers for each year came from widely disparate pools of data.
The state Department of Public Safety began compiling these numbers in 2016, asking local law enforcement agencies to voluntarily provide their statistics on violent crime and other data. In that initial year, only four agencies, covering parts of two counties, reported. In 2022, the number reporting was some 125 agencies covering all or parts of 62 counties.
Thus, this supposedly horrific increase in violent crime over six years was no such thing. It was, instead, a severely flawed statistical analysis.
The only apples-to-apples comparison one could try to make from the two data sets would be to compare the four agencies that appear in both years. If you do that, it shows a 36% decrease in violent crime. Of course, that is too small of a statistical sample from which to draw any valid conclusions. If one were to use those numbers, however, to claim that prison reform has brought down violent crime, it would be arguably much closer to the truth than the opposite hypothesis that Carswell suggested.
The point is, balancing public safety, public cost and rehabilitation is tricky. There is a fine line between being too hard and too soft on crime, between locking every offender up and letting the incorrigible run free to repeatedly prey on society. Finding the right balance between these two extremes is what this public policy debate is all about.
As we continue to debate it, though, let’s at least be sure we are not arguing with bad numbers.
