“Because there you go to jail”

The Approved Progressive Narrative tells us that criminal penalties have no deterrent effect. After all, people are just driftwood on the ocean, carried wherever the current takes them, so it is unfair and ineffective to punish people whose currents have taken them to commit crimes against other people.

Every once in a while, though, a common-sense contradiction of the Approved Narrative slips through the censorship net, even on media dedicated to promoting it.

Here is a transcript from CNN This Morning on February 2. John Miller, CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst, was reporting on the illegal aliens who attacked NYPD police officers and were promptly released. He noted that although most migrants are hard working, there is a criminal element among them.

These individuals, I went over their rap sheets yesterday, multiple charges, grand larceny, robbery, attempted robbery, grand larceny, grand larceny.

This particular crew operated on mopeds and scooters. They were doing organized retail theft. They were doing snatches on the street, iPhones, iPads, clothing, so on and so forth. One of them that they are still seeking has ten charges on one day because he’s part of a pattern that’s been going on.

And I’m looking at the dates that their arrest started, which is probably close to when they got here. They’ve only been here a couple of months. So, what the detectives are telling me is they have crews here that operate in New York, do all their stealing, then go to Florida to spend the money and then come back. And I’m like, well, why don’t they just stay and steal in Florida? And they said, because there, you go to jail.

This is anecdotal evidence, to be sure. Yet it confirms what common sense has always told us. Incentives matter. If you raise the cost of doing any voluntary act, fewer people will do it. People who claim to the contrary have a heavy burden of proof, and they have not come close to meeting it. We at CJLF exposed a related myth in this article, the claim that shortening sentences for serious crimes actually reduces recidivism to such a large extent as to outweigh the loss of incapacitation. Not true. So-called “progressive” policies on crime really do increase crime.

It has been a while since we updated a review of the research on deterrence, but basic human nature does not change. And every once in a while common sense pokes through, even in unlikely places.