A Federal Sentencing Commission study rebuts progressive doctrine, showing a strong connection between lengthy sentences and lower recidivism rates.
Law enforcement and academics agree that three factors are involved in deterring crime: certainty of apprehension, swiftness of apprehension, and severity of sanctions—in other words, how likely you are to get caught, how quickly you get caught, and how long you spend in prison if you get caught. The two groups disagree, however, about which of these is most important for deterrence. Modern academics insist that length of prison sentences is not crucial, while law enforcement officials believe that the length of incarceration time actually stops people from committing crimes in the future. In a recent report, the United States Sentencing Commission put this question through a rigorous statistical testing procedure involving thousands of inmates over multiple decades and came up with a clear result: length of incarceration matters for recidivism—a lot.
