THE hard thing about criminal-justice reform is that it involves criminals, who do not always behave as they should. Yet there are also costs to ignoring reform, measured in ruined lives, body bags and dollars and cents.

That was the conundrum faced by Louisiana when a group of Republican and Democratic legislators passed reforms intended to push the state off the top spot on some less-than-desirable charts. Start with incarceration rates. Louisiana has long tried to jail its way to public safety. The state imprisons its citizens at about twice the American average, which is an achievement. America’s incarceration rate is an outlier in the rich world, being about five times higher than Britain’s (which is more punitive than many European neighbours).

All that locking up and throwing away of keys has not made Louisiana safer. The state’s murder rate is America’s highest. Nor does the state, one of the poorest in the Union, target its resources on the worst offenders. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Louisiana is more than twice as likely to imprison citizens for non-violent crimes as southern states with similar crime rates, including South Carolina and Florida. Comparatively long prison terms also fill cells.

The normally feckless state legislature last year passed a package of laws to create alternatives to the warehousing of less dangerous criminals. These bipartisan reforms were supported by Governor John Bel Edwards, a centrist Democrat, and by conservative voices including the Louisiana Family Forum and Charles and David Koch, deep-pocketed industrialists. To reformers on the right, if government messes up most things it touches, expensively, why trust it to run vast prison systems? Defenders of the reforms say they will reduce Louisiana’s prison rolls by a tenth over a decade. Savings will mostly go to programmes to prevent reoffending.

Unfortunately, reforms which free inmates create trade-offs when some misbehave. Enter Louisiana’s attorney-general, Jeff Landry, and one of its US senators, John Kennedy. Both men are probable Republican challengers to the governor when he seeks re-election in 2019. A political action committee backing Mr Landry pounced when an ex-con, Tyrone White, allegedly robbed a builder at gunpoint, days after his early release. “Lock your doors, and as Senator Kennedy has suggested, ‘You ought to own a handgun just in case’,” the Landry backers said. Then came Ricko Canaz Ball, whose fondness for robbing car mechanics earned him the sobriquet “Oil Slickster”. Police booked him for alleged burglaries after his early release. In a joint op-ed, Mr Landry and Mr Kennedy mockingly renamed last year’s reforms the “Louisiana Prisoner Release and Public Safety Be Damned Act.”

Tanner Magee, a Republican state representative who backs the reforms, is sure they will pay off but concedes: “You cannot create a system where people will not reoffend.” In Louisiana politics, alas, honesty is not always rewarded.