Less liquor, more drunkenness

A great comment from James Taranto:

From a Reuters dispatch on U.S. crime statistics:

The U.S. prison population continued to grow last year even though reports of violent crime during 2004 were at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a government report released in
September.

The other night, we realized that our degree of drunkenness was continuing to grow even though the liquor in the bottle was at the lowest level since we opened it. Life is full of paradoxes, isn't it?

It's fairly safe to assume that those people who have committed crimes in the past are more likely to commit crimes in the future than is the non-criminal population. It's common sense that increased prison population would contribute to lower crime rates.