A 2017 study by the highly regarded Vera Institute and supported by the National Institute of Corrections, finds that incarceration, in short, has no benefits.
It DOES NOT make neighborhoods safer, it is NOT a deterrent for crime, and it only causes long term, intergenerational harm.
“Despite its widespread use, research shows that the effect of incarceration as a deterrent to crime is minimal at best, and has been diminishing for several years. Indeed, increased rates of incarceration have no demonstrated effect on violent crime and in some instances may increase crime. There are more effective ways to respond to crime—evidenced by the 19 states that recently reduced both their incarceration and crime rates. This brief summarizes the weak relationship between incarceration and crime reduction, and highlights proven strategies for improving public safety that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration.”
This is not a radical claim. It is a data-backed one.
The research shows that locking more people up does not reduce violence, and in some contexts, it actually destabilizes communities by severing social ties, increasing economic strain, and deepening cycles of trauma that fuel future harm.
If you take nothing else from this study, take this:
“Increased incarceration has a marginal-to-zero impact on crime. In some cases, increased incarceration can even lead to an increase in crime.”
That finding alone should force a reckoning.
Because if incarceration doesn’t deter crime, doesn’t improve safety, and actively harms families and communities, then we have to ask a harder question: why does the system keep doubling down on it?
The answer isn’t evidence.
It isn’t public safety.
It’s politics.
Policymakers and practitioners—judges, prosecutors, legislators—continue to make decisions that fail their communities by refusing to address the actual drivers of harm: poverty, lack of educational opportunity, untreated addiction, unresolved trauma, housing instability, and economic exclusion.
Instead, incarceration becomes a stand-in for solutions we refuse to invest in.
The only real gains being made are performative ones, political theater for reelection campaigns, while families absorb the collateral consequences: lost income, housing instability, fractured relationships, and generational damage that no sentence can undo.
My analysis is blunt: this refusal to change is self-centered and lazy. It reflects a willful disregard for decades of data, a failure to engage with evidence-based policy, and a deeply troubling lack of critical thinking among those entrusted with enormous power over people’s lives.
We know what works.
We know incarceration doesn’t.
Continuing to rely on it anyway isn’t just ineffective; it’s a deliberate choice. Read the study here.
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