Passage 4

Questions 16 to 20 are based on the foliowing passage.

If you are looking for an explanation of why we don’t get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes, many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. We don’t have room for any more!

The painful fact is that the more crime there is, the less we are able to punish it. We think that punishment prevents crime, but it just might be the other way around. When there is so much crime it is simply impossible to deal with it or punish it. This is the situation we find ourselves in today: the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. Some of the most exclusive prisons now require about five serious crimes before a criminal is accepted.

These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police or judges for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can’t find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can’t all be sent to prison. The public demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem.

We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth the cost to states and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters’ approval for building new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison constructions. And if it were willing to pay,

long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime.

More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $1.6 billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 per crime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.

Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a solution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.

By saying“it just might be the other way around”(para. 2), the writer means ______.