San Francisco is arresting more people than it has in years. On paper, that sounds like progress — a city finally getting serious about public safety after years of being told enforcement doesn't matter. But here's the uncomfortable punchline: huge numbers of those same people are back in jail within a year.

We're not talking about a handful of edge cases. Hundreds of people — overwhelmingly drug users — are cycling through the system on repeat. Booked, processed, released, re-arrested. Lather, rinse, repeat. One man recently described the experience as being "tired of living like this," caught in an endless loop between jail and addiction with no meaningful off-ramp in sight.

Let's be clear about what this means for taxpayers. It costs San Francisco roughly $250 per day to house a single person in county jail. Multiply that by hundreds of repeat bookings and you're burning through millions of dollars annually — not to reduce crime, not to rehabilitate anyone, but to maintain a grotesquely expensive merry-go-round. If a private company operated with this kind of return on investment, it would be bankrupt by Tuesday.

The law-and-order crowd and the harm-reduction crowd are both going to claim vindication here, and they're both partially wrong. More arrests without functional treatment infrastructure is just expensive theater. But years of pretending addiction is a lifestyle choice that requires zero intervention clearly didn't work either.

What would actually move the needle? Mandatory, structured treatment tied to diversion programs — the kind that gives people a real shot at breaking the cycle while holding them accountable. Not optional. Not aspirational. Mandatory. Several other cities have piloted these models with measurable drops in recidivism.

Instead, San Francisco seems committed to the worst of both worlds: spending like progressives on a system that produces outcomes no conservative would tolerate. We're paying premium prices for a revolving door, and the only people benefiting are the bureaucrats who get to report rising arrest numbers as proof that something is happening.

Something is happening. It's just not working.