I was reading through an interesting story on the CBC yesterday. It was this one: ”Texas conservatives reject Harper’s Crime Plan.” There were several things about this story that were fascinating. One being that the Texas “tough on crime” Republicans were suggesting that Harper not go the route of building more prisions because it really didn’t work out well in practice and they are moving away from feeding that system. Interesting.
But what was even more interesting to me was this quote:
Rep. Jerry Madden, a conservative Republican who heads the Texas House Committee on Corrections, “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ‘em, I guarantee you they will come. They’ll be filled, OK? Because people will send them there.
“But, if you don’t build ‘em, they will come up with very creative things to do that keep the community safe and yet still do the incarceration necessary.”
What I love about this quote is that you can essentially replace “prisons” with “roads” and you get another truth about why building more roads does not ease congestion in the long term. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive but is true. Makes me wonder if Bull Durham had it right and “If you build it, they will come” is a universal principle? Which could mean that if you want to see less of a something — traffic, crime — reduce that infrastructure and your problem will disapate. i know that’s a simplistic argument that wouldn’t hold for all situations, and you need to have a certain amount of that infrastructure, but it’s interesting to think about.
