Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Charles Van Lehman. He's a fellow at MI and a contributing editor of City Journal. His work

focuses on various issues, policing, public safety, drug abuse, and his writing has appeared in

numerous publications, not only City Journal, but the

Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, National Review, and other outlets. Today,

Charles is here to discuss his terrific feature story from our autumn issue called Build More

Prisons. So, Charles, thanks for joining us. Absolutely. Happy to be back on.

This is not an article that may win you many friends, but you propose a simple, but, you know,

indeed controversial anti-crime idea, which is, yes, to build more prisons. And that couldn't contrast

more starkly with the perspective of what's broadly

known as the criminal justice reform movement, which argues that the U.S. has a huge problem with

excessive incarceration. As you write, two-thirds of those who identified as likely voters in the

last election, including a majority of Republicans, still believe that

we should be working to reduce the number of people behind bars in the country. So to start off,

why do you think that this belief is so prevalent and why do you think it's wrong?

Charitably, I think America does incarcerate a lot of people in international

context. We incarcerate in more than most pure, i.e. OECB countries. It seems like the Salvadorian

Stefanoli beat us on a per capita basis. The Russians and the Chinese probably lie about how many

they actually incarcerate when you count incarceration extensively. But we put a lot of people in

prison. And, you know, I think if it were the case that prison was not an efficacious or

proportionate strategy to the scale of our crime problem, then it would be quite reasonable to say

...