@Drumcollie
Sure, in the Clinton years the [Unwelcome language removed] were being put in jail. In the Obama years home alarm systems and security cameras became more prevalent.
Have you heard the term "special pleading"? It often takes the form of someone arguing that every example is a special exception to the general rule. Basically, whenever a result doesn't fit with their worldview, they rummage around looking for any special circumstance they can attribute it to.
I see this over and over with Republicans. For example, the economic growth under Obama doesn't count because we had big deficits, the economic shrinkage under Bush doesn't count, because it was just a delayed consequence of something or other that happened in the Clinton years, the economic growth in the Clinton years doesn't count, because it was just the dotcom bubble...... and they can go right on back that way all the way to throwing out the spectacular economic growth of the FDR years because there was a war. Nothing fits their worldview, thus all real-world results must be invalidated based on a collection of random justifications.
That's what this sounds like to me. You want to attribute the improvement of the Clinton years to rising incarceration rates. But burglary rose in the Bush years, despite incarceration rates rising. And burglary fell in the Obama years nearly as much as the Clinton years, despite incarceration rates falling. But you have some special pleading for that, too -- it was the increase of home alarm systems and security cameras.
Did you stop and ask yourself whether home alarm system use had been rising faster in the Obama years than before that? That's the first thing one would want to know to decide whether the Obama-era improvement was attributable to those systems, right? So, did you look into it? Of course not. You liked the sound of your argument, and so whether it was true or not simply didn't matter. Yet, there's reason to think it isn't true:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525904/us-home-security-solutions-sales/
As you can see, revenues from home security systems rose by about 3.7% annually over the last five years. Adjust for inflation, and it's about 2.2%. That's not bad, since it outpaces population growth, but it's not exactly setting the world on fire.
By comparison, in earlier eras, annual growth was as much as 30%:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.561.1157&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Or check out the early 90s, when ADT's customer base for home security rose at a 34% annualized rate:
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/15/ADT-Security-Systems-Inc.html
In the mid-1990s, it was rising 10% per year:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/25/realestate/home-security-systems.html
In other words, the expansion of home security systems in the Obama years was well below the historical pace, and yet burglaries declined by over a third in just eight years. Why?
