The new organization Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration recently sent 130 police chiefs, prosecutors and sheriffs from around the country to an event in Washington, D.C., to call for less incarceration. The group says it aims to stop locking up people for low-level crimes like illegal drug use. There is growing opposition to imprisoning such people, but as I’ve written previously, those types of offenders are rarely ever sentenced to jail or prison for merely those offenses. Instead, they have merely pled down to a lower level offense in order to get a lighter sentence. They usually have long rap sheets, but due to strict confidentiality laws, even the judge is restricted from seeing that background information.

I was a prosecutor and handled 10 to 15 case files every week for several years. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of files on “low-level” offenders, and I’ve also observed their attitudes and appearances in court. Only the worst of the worst typically end up incarcerated; everyone else skates. So if there is a successful move to release significantly more “low-level” offenders, it will likely be hardened criminals finding their way back onto America’s streets. That doesn’t just sound like a recipe for more crime. Three quarters of prisoners commit another crime within five years of being released.

“What we’re doing today is speaking the truth,” Ben David, a North Carolina district attorney, told the audience at the D.C. event. “We can reduce crime, and we can reduce incarceration.” Unfortunately, he’s not speaking the truth. He’s not telling you about the protected rap sheets of these prisoners, or the crimes of robbery and violent assault many of them escaped serving even more time for in plea-bargain deals designed to lighten the load of an overburdened criminal court system. But he knows the general public will never see their criminal histories — it’s actually a crime to release them — so he can sound like a goodhearted person agreeing with the criminal defense advocates. The harsh reality is that releasing more such criminals is likely to have the same effect that a similar strategy had in California last year: driving up the rate of crime.