PrepTest 157, Section 3, Question 12
Columnist: Vagrancy laws are supposed to reduce criminal(25 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the columnist's(12 more words not shown)
- Apresumes, without providing(11 more words not shown)
- Bmistakenly infers, from(21 more words not shown)
- Cfails to specify(7 more words not shown)
- Dfails to consider(13 more words not shown)
- Edoes not adequately(15 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Did people do more harmful things, or did the law start counting more things as crimes?
Imagine everyone behaves exactly as before, but an ordinary activity that was legal yesterday becomes illegal today. The number of acts classified as crimes could rise without anyone stealing more property or assaulting more people. A change in the category isn't necessarily a change in the underlying behavior.
That's what the columnist's own evidence describes: making previously innocuous occurrences illegal. “Innocuous” means harmless. The argument then treats that change as proof that laws intended to reduce criminal activity instead increase it. But relabeling conduct doesn't tell us whether the activities the laws were meant to discourage became more or less common.
What we’re looking for
The flaw question should preserve that distinction. We don't have to prove the laws effective or ineffective. We need to see why expanding what gets counted doesn't, by itself, show that the relevant behavior increased.
Working the answers
- A
The columnist calls the occurrences innocuous, which points to their being harmless, not harmful. More importantly, the argument's leap concerns a change in legal classification versus a change in behavior. It doesn't rely on most ordinary occurrences being harmful to society.
- B
The argument doesn't observe that the laws and the everyday occurrences increased together and then infer that one caused the other. It says the laws make the occurrences count as crimes. That is a different claim. This answer describes a causal inference from an association we weren't given.
- C
We can understand “innocuous everyday occurrences” as harmless ordinary events. More examples of those events wouldn't fix the reasoning: even with a perfectly clear example, newly making it illegal wouldn't establish that it happens more often. The missing distinction matters more than an additional definition.
- D
Crime might increase without these laws, but the columnist hasn't claimed the laws are the only possible cause of an increase. Pointing to another way crime could rise doesn't address the problem with this particular argument. The problem is what the new classification establishes.
- ECorrect
The argument treats reclassifying occurrences as crimes as though it establishes an increase in criminal activity. Those aren't interchangeable. More conduct can appear in the crime count because the definition expanded, even if people's behavior stayed the same. The evidence supports the change in classification; it doesn't settle the claimed change in activity.
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