excellent review which actually was quite dense and told me exactly the amount I wanted to know. conclusion: police are more cost effective than prisons anyway

Three ways prison might help:

• deterrence
• incapacitation
• aftereffects

Three strikes rule decreases 3rd offenses by 17%, but mostly just for drug crimes

Increased drunk driving penalties helped for a bit but eventually (~3 years) reverted

Deterrence Consistent conclusion: 1 year extra sentence = 1% less likely to commit the crime And the effect is also mostly from more minor crimes Also this was for years tacked on to a nontrivial sentence, not the first year or something Longer sentences not worth it for deterrence reasons **However, certainty of punishment did matter a lot, even though severity didn't really

about 8% of Americans have at least one felony

WTF?

Real N-strikes laws, applied at scale, actually would help, but would also require unreasonable amounts of incarceration The Netherlands did a 10 strikes law and it decreased theft by 25% California is probably already past the point of diminishing returns here

NYC is just doing a bad job and not giving mega repeat shoplifters even a month of jail time. That would help a lot