It seems there was an eleven hour prison riot in California that led to hundreds of injuries. This sort of thing is why courts are ordering California to start releasing prisoners in order to curtail severe overcrowding. Unfortunately, when you do this you’re going to wind up with more crime.
The good news is that there are things one can do to reduce crime other than lock more and more and more people up. Smart things. Things that are detailed in Mark Kleiman’s excellent forthcoming book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. I’ll be saying more about this book when you can really read it in stores. But the key overall analytic point is that the extent of the punishing going on in the United States is a sign of how poor a job we do at controlling crime. If we were better at supervising people and credibly communicating to them excellent odds that they’d be caught and punished—even if the punishments were not so severe—then we’d have many fewer people committing crimes and thus less punishing going on.
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