Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Beetle Traps and Jail Cells

8/10/2020

4 Comments

 
Our neighbor’s Japanese beetle trap is brimming with dead and dying beetles. Maybe I should get one, too. It’s intuitively obvious: More trapped beetles mean a healthier garden, right?

Not so fast. The scent in the trap lures beetles from more than half a mile away. Some wind up in the trap. Others, attracted by the scent, nibble the roses. Unless the trap is placed exactly so and cleaned out frequently, more beetles infest the garden than ever.

I thought of the beetle trap on hearing a recent agency chief praised for overseeing a record number of arrests. I lack the expertise or data to know, in his case, whether more arrests improved or worsened public safety. "Intuitively obvious" doesn’t mean accurate. This I do know: To assess the well-being of a garden or a nation, how many beetles have been trapped—or individuals arrested, or guilty verdicts rendered, or jail cells filled—is the wrong question to ask.
4 Comments
Beth
8/10/2020 01:43:17 pm

I'm supposed to be doing work right now, but couldn't resist this.

Really liked it -- wise and raises important ideas.

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Sarah Cook link
8/11/2020 07:16:58 am

Thank you, Beth! I'm grateful to you for taking a break from work long enough to read this. How many things do we measure by counting rather than results - maybe, even, the work accomplished by the number of uninterrupted hours put in?

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Rebecca link
8/10/2020 10:18:52 pm

Sounds like we need to redefine the problem, in order to find the actual solution. It's not that we need more people behind bars, it's that we need economic justice.

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Sarah Cook link
8/11/2020 07:11:49 am

Agreed! As I wrote in an earlier post, we do also need public safety - but law enforcement is a means, not an end. Unless mass arrests and mass incarceration make the public safer, the intuitively obvious solution may be wrong. Would economic justice increase safety? Let's try it and find out!

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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