LSAT 157 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q12

LR Question 12 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Columnist: Vagrancy laws are supposed to reduce criminal…

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning

CONCLUSION: Vagrancy laws increase crime while purporting to reduce it.

REASONING: Vagrancy laws are meant to reduce crime, but make many innocuous everyday activities illegal.

ANALYSIS: The author clearly opposes the vagrancy laws in question. The author says that there are innocuous activities occurring everyday that would be reclassified as crime under these laws. They then say that this means the laws will result in an increase in crime.

But is this true? More things will be considered crimes, but those things aren’t going to happen more often than before. In fact, they might become less frequent when they’ve been reclassified, because people will want to avoid criminal penalty. The author is equating “more things are criminal” with “more crimes being committed”. This is their error.

___________

1. The author is not presuming this. In describing them as “innocuous”, it would seem that the author doesn’t consider them as harmful as do the people making the vagrancy laws.
2. We don’t actually have a claim that vagrancy laws cause an increase in the innocuous activities. The author can’t be inferring anything based on a claim that doesn’t exist!
3. The author doesn’t need to specify what “innocuous everyday activities” are. The exact activity is irrelevant.
4. It’s true that crime could increase without the vagrancy laws, but that isn’t a flaw in the argument. The author is arguing a specific effect of the laws, not that the effect is solely produced by those laws.
5. CORRECT. The author notes that innocuous activities will be reclassified as crimes, and uses that to say crimes will go up. These two are not the same. More things will be classified as criminal, but crime rates won’t necessarily increase.

Recap: The question begins with “Columnist: Vagrancy laws are supposed to reduce criminal”. It is a Flawed Reasoning question. Learn more about LSAT Flaw questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.