Considering a large experiment has just occurred with progressive prosecutors no longer putting criminals in jail, and the SF prosecutor was recalled and a tough-on-crime mayor was elected in NYC, I think the results are that “throwing criminals in jail” works better than not.

As an NYC resident I can assure you in at least one of those examples you are vastly, vastly oversimplifying matters.

Both examples are silly and bad. Alameda County (Oakland) elected a tough on crime DA at about the same time as SF’s “reform” one and their crime rate increased more than SFs in that period.. there are no easy answers in policing or discipline.

Yes the “crime rate” when no one goes through the hassle to report petty crimes because it’s a pain in the ass and they won’t solve it anyway. The stats are a joke and everyone knows it.

Yeah except for this conversation, we're clearly talking about violent crime which increased in Oakland at a rate far greater than it did in SF.. and I can't imagine your contention that the people of San Francisco are less likely to report violent crime compared to people living 10 miles away..

To be fair, theres no way to reliably control for the affect of the da without a parallel universe with a weak on crime oakland da. Especially when certain violent crimes like murder are so rare in the population to begin with where a single multiple shooting event could skew things significantly year over year.

Yep. No argument there. Which definitely cuts both ways though. The 'weak on crime' DA in SF was lambasted and ultimately recalled for a crime spike that was smaller in magnitude than the crime spike in much of the country in areas with all manner of DAs and Policing policies.

If you want to treat crime through a disease model, then you should quarantine the infected and prevent transmissions, eg by them victimizing more people.

Somehow, that part of medicine never makes it into these “alternatives” — which makes claims of “systems thinking” or “crime as disease” sound like shallow pretenses for performative virtue rather than legitimate considered policy.

At no point did I say I wanted to treat crime through a disease model so your "shallow pretense" dismissal feels out of place.

All I'm saying is that it's pretty obvious jailing criminals is incredibly expensive and not particularly effective at reducing future crime.