Twenty-five years ago, we argued that it would be possible to reduce incarceration and use the resultant savings for investments in preschool education, which would further lower the crime rate. In this article, we revisit that line of thinking, surveying recent literature on the cost and efficacy of prisons and preschool education for crime reduction. We find that the new evidence strengthens our earlier conclusion about the feasibility of this thought experiment. The costs (in real dollars) of prison are higher than 25 years ago, and prisons are slightly less effective at reducing or preventing crime. In addition, the evidence shows broader and stronger effects of preschool on crime and in programs operating at a much larger scale than the programs we previously evaluated.
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