Graeme Wood, my favorite writer, has a brilliant article on alternatives to incarceration in the latest issue of The Atlantic. And in the article, my favorite writer references my favorite economist, Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

A few key points to keep in mind:

According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently incarcerated—enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983, the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion. In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year.

This is despite the fact that crime rates have fallen. And while you’d think that incarceration would reduce crime by isolating potential offenders from the general population, it might actually exacerbate the crime problem overall:

Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory.

And as Graeme suggests, the deterrent of mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws has proven much weaker than expected. Part of the reason could be peer effects: the costs of incarceration are concentrated in a relative handful of poor U.S. neighborhoods, and incarceration has been destigmatized as incarceration rates have climbed.

The alternative is clear:

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.

Graeme suggests that the potential dangers are manageable, and that they are dwarfed by the potential gains:

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

If we’re serious about cutting public spending, this is the kind of win-win we need to embrace. The problem is that very few elected officials are serious about cutting public spending. Rather, they are concerned about getting reelected:

WHATEVER ITS MERITS, the idea of increasing the number of free-range felons such as Mick is unlikely to make for good politics. Willie Horton still haunts the dreams of every aspiring politician. Even Steven Alm says it was largely his reputation as a former prosecutor and “hanging judge” that enabled him to institute HOPE, since no one could plausibly accuse him of being soft on crime. “I’m convinced this is one of those Nixon-in-China things,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been a career prosecutor, there’s no way the law-enforcement people would have gotten on board.”

This is why the anti-crime right can and should take the lead. Here’s a simple strategy: let’s aggressively cut the costs of incarceration and use the proceeds to fund a police surge or tax cuts. William Stuntz made the most comprehensive, convincing case for a police surge in the Weekly Standard last year:

Conservatives are skeptics of governments that seek to fine-tune individual incentives. For the past generation, state legislators and members of Congress have acted as though, if only the right criminal prohibitions and sentencing rules are enacted, behavior will change in just the ways lawmakers wish. Like other regulated actors, criminals stubbornly resist such direction. Conservatives believe in the power of culture. Policing surges free residents to take control of their neighborhoods and build the street cultures the locals want. Those local cultures do more to control crime than any government-tailored incentives. Last but not least, conservatives believe in the traditions that capture the wisdom of the past. Before the last half-century and outside the South–at the times and places where criminal justice worked best–the normal ratio of police officers to prisoners was two to one. Today, in most of the country, the ratio is one to two.
Again, we live in strange times. Over the next couple of years, money will be spent in fantastic sums, and much of it will leave nothing good in its wake. All the more reason to invest in a service that makes life better for those whose lives most need help. That is the liberal thing to do–and also the conservative thing to do. More important, it is the right thing to do.

Can’t think of a good counterargument, hard as I try. While it’s true that violent crime levels have fallen from their peak, the economic gains to even steeper declines would be considerable. Alex Tabarrok gave us a sense of the trade-off in 2006:

More generally, when one combines estimates of police effectiveness that come from myself and Klick, Steve Levitt, Bill Evans and Emily Owens and others with data on the costs of hiring police, it’s clear that police are a bargain. We could double the number of police in the United States and the costs of crime would fall by substantially more than the cost of police. (Reallocating police and prison space from drug users to violent criminals would also help.) [Emphasis added.]

In my view, we can’t afford not to embrace this approach.