Q13 - Reformer: A survey of police department keeps track

[mshinners]

Question Type:
ID the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
The crime rate has stayed about the same despite a higher number of people in prison and more money spent on prisons. Therefore, incarcerating people doesn't help reduce crime.

Answer Anticipation:
There's an issue with the comparison here. In order to determine the impact of a course of action, the outcome needs to be compared to what would have happened without that action, not to what the starting point was.

As an analogous example, if I'm hungry in the morning, and then I eat breakfast, but the next day I'm just as hungry as I was the day before, I can't conclude that eating breakfast the day before did nothing. I have to compare my hunger today to what it would have been had I not had breakfast the day before.

Same here. The relevant comparison is the crime with the increased incarceration rate to what crime would have been without that increase. Since the argument doesn't make that comparison, I should look for an answer pointing this out.

Correct answer:
(B)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Wrong flaw (Whole to part). The survey data is aggregated, so this flaw isn't happening here. This answer would apply if the argument stated that a nationwide survey showed an increase in crime and concluded that, therefore, crime in all areas increased.

(B) Bingo. The conclusion for this argument is that the course of action (increased imprisonment rates and expenditures) had no impact on crime rates. If holding crime steady is a better outcome than the increase in crime that would have happened without these increases, then the argument falls apart.

(C) Wrong flaw, though tempting! However, the information given is a rate, not a number (the data shows crime per 100,000). The number of people doesn't affect a rate - 1/100,000 is the same rate whether the population is 1 or 10 million.

(D) Out of scope. The argument is concerned with whether a specific measure is effective. The effectiveness of other measures is not relevant. This answer would be in play if the answer compared these measures to other potential measures.

(E) Too specific. The argument doesn't require these numbers to be proportional, just related.

Takeaway/Pattern:
When an outcome of an action is compared to the starting point, the argument is flawed. The outcome needs to be compared to the outcome if the action hadn't been taken.

#officialexplanation

[michellerozenblyum]

Hey,

Can someone please explain by B is the right answer?

[gabcap1]

A tad late but I'll still take a stab!

The reformer's conclusion is that "putting more people in prison cannot help to reduce crime." Why? Because the number of crimes per 100,000 people has not been reduced significantly in the past 20 years, even though the prison population and spending on prisons have increased significantly.

(A): I eliminated it because it did not discuss imprisonment, but reporting measures. This might tell us something about the reported crime rate, but we care about the impact of imprisonment on reducing the crime rate, not on reporting measures misrepresenting it.
(C): Also eliminated this AC because it did not discuss imprisonment. (If you assumed that crime increases with population and the rate has been held constant then perhaps something is working, but this would be more relevant for a weaken question.)
(D): We don't care about alternative measures' effectiveness. We care about the ineffectiveness of the measure at hand.
(E): I don't see a place where the argument assumes that prisoners must be proportional to the number of crimes committed. Also, crimes committed is not the same as the crime rate (absolute vs. # per 100,000 people)

That leaves (B), which is saying that the reformer didn't consider that, perhaps without prisons, things would be even worse (!) than they are now. If we could go back in time and say no to prisons, maybe the crime rate would not have plateaued but, presumably, increased precipitously.

[maryadkins]

Thanks for this breakdown! Well done!

[ganbayou]

I eliminated B because of the word *would*. why *would is not allowed in Q12 , but it is allowed here?

[ganbayou]

One more question...
What talked in C is true, right? the author does overlook that possibility, but it's not related to the conclusion, so C is wrong, right?

THank you.

[maryadkins]

The possibility that the population has increased doesn't bear on the question, and the question does not address it. This is because the crime rate is the number of crimes PER 100,000 people. And the entire question that follows is about the percentage of the population that is in prison—so again, the overall size is accounted for.

[seychelles1718]

is there a shift between the "crime rate" in the premise and "crime" in the conclusion?
Even if the RATE stays the same, the NUMBER of crimes can still be reduced.
e.g. rate = # of crimes/ population
rate1 : 100/500
rate2: 50/250

rate stays the same, but the number of crimes reduced from 100 to 50.

Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

There would be a definite shift, if we're to interpret "crime" as "NUMBER of crimes".

But that's a little fuzzy. They would have to explicitly indicate the conclusion is talking about the quantity of crimes, if they were testing that distinction.

I think in the real world we say "reduce crime" to mean "reduce the quantity of crimes" (number) as well as to mean "reduce the likelihood of crime" (rate)