This Is What It Will Take to End Mass Incarceration

[Igel]

3. The story the metastory in the OP refers to had a few problems.

It focused on percentages and referred to a greater percentage as "more".

If you have a 15% incarceration rate for a population of 25k and a 8% incarceration rate for a population of 1.5 million, 15% is hardly "more" or "in greater numbers." Journalism =/= math.

The mass incarceration stats that get everybody's attention are cited because of racial disparities. The original story didn't bother pointing out any. In the South, you'd expect them. It's a bit unclear if you would in the north. Again, we're left with accepting the conclusions we reach based on our biases as fact. This is a sucky position for the reporter to put the reader in.

The story raised questions. It proposed solutions based upon those questions. What was missing was the middle step, coming up with the answers. It alluded to some possible answers, but said nothing that was a necessary inference or anything that had a prediction that could be tested against the data. Social-change fluff piece, made important only by a will to believe.