OUT ON A LIMB: Build More Prisons.

Many lament the number of Americans in prison. “Our nation holds the shameful distinction of being the world’s largest jailer,” said Senator Cory Booker in a representative statement last year. America may not truly lead the world in incarceration—El Salvador now beats us on a per-capita basis, and autocratic states like China and Russia are probably lying about the true size of their prison populations. But we certainly incarcerate a great number: 1.2 million as of 2022, yielding a higher rate than those in any peer countries. Estimates suggest that about one in 20 Americans will go to prison in his or her lifetime, including one in 11 men. The projected rate among black men is one in six.

That these incarceration levels are shameful even appears to be a consensus. Despite a backlash against progressive prosecutors and defunding the police, two-thirds of likely voters still believe that it’s important to reduce the incarcerated population, including a majority of Republicans. In response to political and fiscal pressures, and with crime rates well below their 1990s peak, jails and prisons are shuttering. One estimate found that 21 states closed prisons between 2000 and 2022.

This shift in both policy and opinion represents perhaps the greatest success of the “criminal-justice reform” movement, which maintains that incarceration is expensive, inhumane, and either doesn’t reduce crime or actively causes more of it. So successful have these arguments been that contemporary debate around prison policy today often centers on whether the nation should put anyone behind bars—and, if so, at what diminished margin. Should we cut prison populations by half, or only by a quarter?

These arguments are a textbook example of what Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam and I have called “starve-the-beast progressivism”—in which progressives identify problems in the criminal-justice system and then argue that they should be fixed not by improving the system but by dismantling it. This dynamic facilitates bipartisan alignment on criminal-justice reform. The Left likes cutting the criminal-justice system; the Right just likes cutting government.

It’s a safe bet that anything that Makes America Great Again™ will make Fox Butterfield quite cross — so it’s a dual win all around: “‘The Butterfield Effect’ is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as ‘More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,’ and ‘Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,’ not to mention the poetic 1997 header, ‘Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.’”