The New Mathematics of Imprisonment

Abstract

This article examines recently published claims that increased use of imprisonment will produce dramatic economic savings. Part I shows that applying the estimates generated in “Making Confinement Decisions” to trends in the United States produces anomalous results. If the study estimates were correct, criminal justice expenditures would have decreased recently and crime rates would have dropped toward zero as the U.S. prison population has doubled. Part II of the article discusses some of the factors that produced wild overestimates of the incapacitative potential of expanding imprisonment.