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Notes -
bailey: "common criminals get released without bail and then have their charges quietly dropped"
motte: "the incarceration rate has gone down in recent years"
In fairness your original comment was rather ambiguous, but had you just claimed the latter I wouldn't have taken any issue.
The flow of new criminals into incarceration has slowed dramatically despite skyrocketing crime rates due to criminals now being released without bail even after multiple offenses
If crime was plummeting you could claim that the burden of proof was on me to prove the incarceration drop wasn't simply due to everyone becoming more law-abiding. But the "crime isn't going up, you're just imagining things" tactic failed back in 2021, and everyone responsible already swept it under the rug.
Actually, that's something I'd love to ask our local forum historians about, because I distinctly remember those claims being made even after the 2020 murder rate stats came out.
Your original claim remains pointlessly ambiguous because you can argue you're technically correct whether the drop in incarceration was either -100% or -1%. If you're describing what happens to the "common criminal", what's your definition of that class? What portion of criminals? How common is this experience? How many people need to be released without bail for this to be considered "common"? How many charges need to be quietly dropped for this to be "common"? It's such a vague claim to make.
If treatment of criminal suspects had remained the same, we'd expect to see a significant increase in incarceration during a crime wave (particularly pretrial detention, given the crimes are more recent and due to backlog in the court system)
That we have instead seen a massive decrease suggests that policies towards criminals have changed significantly. Do you dispute that? Do you have an alternative theory for the massive drop in incarceration?
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