A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “incarceration”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott analyzes research on whether longer prison sentences reduce crime, examining studies on deterrence, incapacitation, and aftereffects, to conclude that while prison does decrease crime through incapacitation, it's less cost-effective than other methods like policing.
Scott Alexander announces that the adversarial collaboration contest will proceed, lists the registered teams, and introduces a new rule for proposing topics.
Scott Alexander questions the plausibility of multifactorial explanations for trends, using the US crime rate decline as an example, and seeks literature on comparing single-factor vs multi-factor explanations.