This program is made possible by the members and donors to the show. If you'd like to support the work we're doing, please visit the Contribute tab at BestOfAleft.com.

Now, welcome to the award-winning BestOfAleft podcast with clips today from the David Pakman show, The Young Turks, D-Code DC, The Melissa Harris Perry Show, and Arts and Ideas from the BBC.

There is a really great article on courts about the impact of mass incarceration on crime. And remember that the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, rivaled by the likes of countries such as North Korea.

So there's this idea that if you take past and would be future criminals off of the street, you increase safety, you decrease crime.

Pretty logical, right? Turns out it's not really that logical and the argument is actually twofold. So let's take a look at each piece in turn.

Argument one for incarceration is you reduce crime by taking criminals off of the street so that they don't then go out and commit more crimes. And the second part of the argument is by incarcerating a lot of people for a long time, you discourage would be criminals from committing crime.

Sort of like I guess the deterrent effect, Lewis, that we hear about sometimes with talks about the death penalty.

Yes, which of course we know is not a deterrent. And as it turns out, neither of these arguments are true when it comes to the impact of mass incarceration on crime reduction.

There's a very good new paper from the University of Michigan economics professor Michael Mueller Smith. And it measures how much does putting criminals in prison reduce crime?

He looked at records from Harris County, Texas from the period ranging from 1980 to 2009. And he observed that in Harris County, people charged with similar crimes received very different sentences depending on which judge randomly was assigned their case.

Mueller Smith then tracked what happened to each of these prisoners. And he estimated that each year in prison actually increased the odds that a prisoner would reoffend by 5.6% per quarter spent in prison, a quarter of course three months.

Even people who went to prison for lesser crimes ended up committing more serious offenses subsequently the more time they spent in prison.

So any benefit was the conclusive conclusion from Mueller Smith. Any benefit from taking criminals out of the general population was more than offset by the increase in crime from turning small offenders into career criminals.

Now there's another completely common sense element to this thing, which is the longer you're in prison, the more difficult it is to find so-called honest work when you leave prison because it's more difficult to adjust, you'll be more behind socially, technologically.

And thus it is just more likely Lewis that the longer you're in prison, the fewer options you'll have other than turning to crime often more serious crimes than the ones that got you in prison to begin with.

Yeah, and I mean because of the situation in this country, I think we should have more social programs to help with that. But David, the answer is simple. If you're going to send someone to prison, it's all life sentences from here on out.

Exactly. The way to prevent this is just by giving everybody a life sentence no matter what it is. So forget about 20 years from marijuana possession. Let's up that even more. Prison destroys your earnings potential.

Being a convicted felon disqualifies you from many jobs, from living in certain places, voting, and Mueller Smith estimates that each year in prison reduces the odds of post-release employment by 24% and of course increases the odds that you will live on public assistance.

Talk about fiscal conservatism. It is expensive to have prisoners in prison, but it's also expensive after they get out because it increases the odds that those prisoners will end up receiving welfare benefits of various kinds.

There is nothing fiscally conservative about this mass incarceration policy of the U.S. and there is really no good crime reduction argument to be made either.

I remember us talking about the cost of incarcerating someone for a year and I believe it was up to around the price of a year at an Ivy League school, was it not?

It was similar in many cases. Let's talk a little bit about the other argument, which is that these prison, this incarceration policy, functions as a sort of deterrent.

...