The purpose of a system is doing what it does.

If reactionaries cared about reducing crime and the negative social impact of crime they would advocate for doing what has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to do that: Ending poverty, providing quality healthcare, including mental health, making sure that a peaceful and dignified existence is available to all.

But they don't do that, they scoff at the thought of doing something to improve the lives of poor and racialised people. Quite to the contrary they enthusiastically support policies that creates poverty, desperation and by extension criminality.

Reactionaries doesn't want to reduce crime. All their actions are inconsistent with a desire to alleviate crime.

And why would they want to reduce crime in the first place? Most crime, especially violent crime, happens to the poor and racialised people that reactionaries considers to be less than dirt.

So, of reactionaries doesn't want to reduce crime, what do they want to do? Again, let us look at their actions. There was never a police budget increase, an increase in sentencing, a hardening of prison conditions that reactionaries didn't like. They cheer and class their little hands every time the police state fair more power, every time someone they consider their inferior gets crushed by the jackboots of the carceral state. Stories of abuse, violence and cruelty committed by the bourgeois state doesn't move them or soften their hearts, it might even give them a high of schadenfreude and an occasion to gloat and feel superior.

In my view, everything reactionaries do and say tells me that the thing they really want to do about crime is to punish it. The punishment in itself is a social good to the traditional mind. Punishing criminals reinforces and propagandise for the social hierarchies that reactionaries hold so dear, it keeps the out-group down and allows the in-group to feel superior to the criminals.

This is why the liberal approach to talking about political responses to crime with reactionaries is completely inefficient. "Did you know, that if you run the numbers it turns out that..." Yes! Reactionaries do know that. They're not idiots. They do know that the police state creates nothing but misery and does little to reduce crime. They know that and they like it.

I think the correct way to address bozos who claims to believe that throwing more people in more atrocious jails for longer time is going to do anything good is not to start arguing over statistics and minutia. Instead call them out, make them explain why they want more cringe and suffering.