The key to public safety is preventing crime. An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. Because every time we incarcerate someone, there is a cost. There are the obvious financial costs for building and maintaining secure institutions, but there are also human costs - think of the lost potential, the disruption of family and community. Incarceration is an important part of our justice system.
Violent criminals have to be kept off our streets.
Enforcement of the law is crucial. But the goal cannot be to simply build more prisons and fill them up. That's no guarantee of safety. We can see that by looking south of the border, where the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world - with 1.6 million Americans behind bars. But it hasn't made the United States a safer place to live.