Logical Reasoning

PT141 · S2 · Q13 Reformer: A survey of police

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Reformer: A survey of police departments keeps track of the national crime rate, which is the annual number of crimes per 100,000 people.

Conclusion

Putting more people in prison can't help to reduce crime.

Evidence

In a recent survey of the last 20 years, the crime rate has held steady, while the % of the population in prison has gone up a ton and spending on prisons has gone up a ton.

Evaluate

When we're dealing with anti-causal conclusions like this one, we're trying to figure out how we can accept the evidence but argue that there IS a causal influence.

Given That spending on prison went up, % of people in prison went up, but crime rate stayed same, How Can We Argue That putting more people in prison can help to reduce crime?

I don't have any great ideas with this one. We might say that the crime reduction effects of the past 20 years of hyper-jailing can't be seen yet, but they'll be seen in the next 20 years (maybe we got a bunch of criminals off the street that would have been adding to the crime rate had they still been out).

Or maybe we could do the typical Anti-Causal objection which is that it would have been even worse without our actions of putting people in jail.

i.e., maybe there were economic factors over the past 20 years that should have made the crime rate increase, so the fact that it didn't shows that putting people in jail may have reduced crime.

Goal

Look for some sort of objection that allows for the possibility that even if this evidence is true, putting more people in prison might be able to help reduce crime.

13.

A flaw in the reformer's argument is that it

  1. infers without justification that because

    Bad Conclusion/Premise Match

    If an answer says infers that because X, Y then X should match the Premise and Y should match the Conclusion. Did our evidence say that the national crime rate has increased? Nope. We can stop reading there. The conclusion half of this answer is also wrong, but we don't need to ever even reach that half.

    2% picked this

  2. Correct

    ignores the possibility that the

    Why this is right

    This makes the ol' Anti-Causal objection of "it would have been even worse without X". When Obama became President in the midst of the Great Recession, unemployment had been growing for months. The government issue a big ol' stimulus plan, and the unemployment continued to grow for months. Some people would say, "Look the stimulus did nothing", and others would retort, "What do you mean, do you know how bad things would have been if we hadn't injected $800 billion into the economy". When we see an answer choice saying ignores the possibility that X we can ask ourselves, "If X were true, would it hurt the argument?" In this case, heck yeah! If we say to the author, "If it hadn't been for putting more people in prison, the crime rate would have gone way up", then we've basically shown that "putting more people in prison did help to reduce crime".

    Skill tested: Flaw · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    57% picked this

  3. overlooks the possibility that the

    Irrelevant

    When they tell us that we're dealing with an average or a per capita, then absolute totals don't matter. The crime rate is the number of crimes per 100,000 people. If the crime rate is 1000 crimes per 100,000 people, then it's a 1% crime rate. If the population increases to 800,000 people, then an identical crime crate would involve 8,000 crimes. When the author says "can't help to reduce crime", it's implied by context that she means the aforementioned crime rate, not any absolute number of crimes. If she did mean "number of crimes", then this answer would still fail, since a much larger population will result in a much higher number of crimes than before. How would that help us argue that putting people in prisons has reduced crime?

    24% picked this

  4. presumes, without providing warrant, that

    Out of Scope: alternative measures

    In order to successfully prove that "this key does not fit this lock" you don't have to first prove that you know a different key that does fit the lock. Maybe there are no available keys that fit the lock. Your conclusion about "this key" can be correct either way. Similarly, our author is just trying to establish that "putting people in jail" doesn't work to reduce crime. He's not obligated to prove that there are other methods that do work.

    4% picked this

  5. takes for granted that the

    Too Strong: must be proportional

    Any time we see takes for granted that X we can ask ourselves, "Did this author need to assume that X?" Our author wasn't ever assuming the incredibly extreme idea that number of prisoners must be proportional to number of crimes committed.

    13% picked this

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