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Fans of El Salvador President Nayib-Bukele's implementation of a mass incarceration policy focusing on the small percentage of the population that commits most of his nation's crimes called attention this morning to numbers that demonstrate a promising truth: if all Members of Knesset were imprisoned, crime would drop by just under 75%.
Shmuel Norton, director of the NGO Lock Them Up, addressed reporters outside the Knesset, and presented data from academic studies quantifying the estimated effect of imprisoning all of the parliamentary delegates. "There are six studies from the last four years," he explained. "In each of them, the researchers found that locking up the Members of Knesset will cut crime by no less than sixty-five percent, with the most likely figure closer to eighty percent. Seventy-five percent represents the median figure across the studies."
"The categories of crime that will shrink are not confined to the various types of corruption," he continued, "though of course those are will represented in the data, as you would be correct to expect. But the reduction also includes libel, slander, conspiracy, theft, extortion, and forgery, not to mention immoral activities that do not rise, technically, to the level of 'crime,' such as sexual dalliances by married lawmakers or with married paramours."
Norton added that the figures improve even more if former Members of Knesset are included in the imprisonment, and that the reduction in crime reaches 92% if local government officials are also confined.
The studies also suggested that incarcerating all lawmakers will reduce inflation, since, while in some correctional facility, they will not be able to spend public funds as profligately as is their wont, and will certainly not be able to approve the governmental spending of hundreds of billions of shekels, which accounts for the vast majority of inflation pressure on the economy.
Practical obstacles to the implementation of such a policy will likely prevent its total adoption in the near term, Norton acknowledged, but he expressed the hope that Israel could attempt at least a partial measure. He cited elements of the various studies indicating that even if only the cabinet ministers are locked up and the keys thrown away, crime will wane by forty percent.
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