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Notes -
I think that was viable in large part because of the lower rate of serious criminality. (Particularly in white neighborhoods before desegregation.) If crime is less of a problem, if fewer people are escalating from minor offenses to murder, then you don't need to be as harsh to keep it down. It's like a thermostat, if the furnace is running more (harsher policing and sentencing), the insulation is better (older population), and yet the temperature inside (murder rate) is the same or colder then it's probably colder outside. An alternative explanation would be that the furnace doesn't work, but based on stuff like the success of 90s tough-on-crime efforts and the surge from the Ferguson/Floyd Effect it seems like policing has the expected effect, it just has more to handle. Similarly in other countries harsher policing seems effective but the countries that need to resort to it are the ones that had crime problems to begin with. Of course none of this means that "less religiosity" or the like is one of the reasons why, I just think the tradeoffs here are underappreciated. There's a tendency for people to either believe harsh policing and sentencing is intrinsically good/free (Why should we worry about the welfare of criminal scum?), or to believe that it's evil/useless (Don't you know Sweden has 18% of the U.S. incarceration rate and yet it has only 20% of the U.S. murder rate? Why can't we just use their system?). I think the better way to think about it is that it's a necessary but serious cost and the preferable situation is to avoid paying it by having less criminality to begin with.
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