Brandon Johnson is an Idiot; Incarceration Works

This is just another patently absurd dogma you have to believe to be a progressive in good standing: taking criminals off the street and putting them in jail does not reduce crime. (Reduce crime outside of prisons, that is. I'm sure it does increase crime inside prisons.)

   Until the left starts taking facts seriously, there's just no hope of them coming to their senses. I mean...coming to your senses basically is taking facts seriously...

   I'm starting to think that the left and right aren't really two symmetrical factions. Rather, we have the reality/normal faction and the utopian/loony faction. One group generally takes reality as it is, and adopts principles and formulates policies in response to reality. The other faction is in the grip of loony theories, utopian pipe dreams, and normative preferences that are more-or-less adopted and formulated independently of reality. Consequently, of course, these principles and policies are often utterly idiotic and catastrophically dangerous. And, of course, to maintain commitment to these nutty principles, the adherents must commonly deny that reality is as it is.

   So, e.g., in the case of incarceration, most lefties aren't willing to say "Yeah, I just think that incarceration is wrong. I think we should let murderers roam free. It's better to have more innocent people murdered than to imprison the criminals." That's a hard core position held by some on the extreme left...but less-radical lefties find it easier to just delude themselves about the facts: "Incarceration is bad...and it doesn't work anyway..." And, given leftist control of media, universities, and the bureaucracy, it's easy to keep that idea circulating in the propagandosphere.

   Anyway, AJW is on the case: