Liberal Criminologists Get (Almost) Everything Wrong

That’s because they operate from a social dysfunction causes crime narrative when the reality is that criminals—in most cases—are people driven by evil intentions; crime in America is primarily a result of individual decisions not social inadequacies, and this article from City Journal examines that failed narrative.

An excerpt.

The history of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.

These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.

In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily available—and suggest the answer to the second.

Academic criminologists are mainly sociologists, trained in statistics and armed with theories. Though most don’t study crime or violence directly, they have produced useful studies about offenders and the criminal-justice system. Through their work, we know, for example, that criminal behavior is strongly intergenerational, that relatively few people account for the majority of all crimes, and that some offenders desist from crime over time but many others simply change the types of crimes they commit. We also have learned that most offenders are generalists—that is, they commit a diverse assortment of crimes—and that steps can be taken to reduce criminal events by making them more difficult to carry out. Most criminals, it turns out, are lazy.

In other ways, though, criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighborhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime. Most academics have never met with women who have been raped or children who have been molested, or seen the carnage wrought by a bullet that passed through a human skull, or spent a lot of time with police on the street. The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticized view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment.

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

A quick perusal of Presidential Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Justice, bestowed by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), shows that the winners were primarily rewarded for their left-wing advocacy. They included a judge in Massachusetts who advocated abolishing the state’s death penalty, an FBI agent who successfully sued the organization for ethnic discrimination, and a former director of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts who closed the state’s juvenile reformatories and wrote a book alleging that the system hunted down black men for sport. The society also honored Zaki Baruti, a radical black activist in St. Louis known for his hatred of police and support for leftist causes.

Recently, the ASC’s policy committee sent a mass e-mail to members, asking for help in countering a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Heather Mac Donald, a longtime City Journal contributing editor and a writer known for eviscerating liberal claims about the police and the justice system. Mac Donald argued that because of increased scrutiny and charges of racism, police had rolled back their efforts to deter crime, at least in minority communities, resulting in rising violence in many cities across the country. She called this the “Ferguson Effect,” after the town in Missouri where the (justified) police shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man, in 2014 ignited riots and gave rise to a new anti-law-enforcement push from advocates, the press, and Democratic politicians. The existence and extent of the Ferguson Effect is an empirical question that can be debated. But it is telling that the ASC had never shown any interest in rebutting the hundreds of editorials that repeated factually baseless claims about police shootings or the racism supposedly embedded in the criminal-justice

Liberal Criminal Justice Narrative Take Down

As a nice follow up to yesterday’s post, this is a great job from Claremont Magazine.

An excerpt.

If Amazon is correct, there are currently more than 150 books in print with the phrase “mass incarceration” in the title or subtitle. You need no special knowledge of crime and punishment in the United States to infer correctly that the term is not one of praise for our criminal justice system. “Mass incarceration” means not simply that many Americans are behind bars, but that too many Americans are behind bars.

Currently, about 2.2 million individuals are incarcerated in the nation’s federal prisons (190,000), state prisons (1.3 million), and local jails (725,000). These are, admittedly, depressingly high numbers—and much higher, adjusted for population, than in other Western democracies. Prisons, however, are a response not to a population problem but to a crime problem. So the question is not whether the United States has too many people in prison for a country of its size, but whether it has too many people in prison for a country with its number of crimes and convictions. (Note that of the local jail inmates, about three fifths are awaiting trial and most of the rest are serving short sentences of less than a year.)

Start with crime. According to the FBI, in 2015 law enforcement authorities reported over 15,000 homicides; 124,000 rapes; 327,000 robberies; and 764,000 aggravated assaults (that is, assaults with a deadly weapon or those causing serious bodily injury). That’s 1.2 million very serious violent crimes known to the police. Authorities also reported 1.6 million burglaries, of which more than a million were of personal residences. Residential burglary is the most serious and traumatic of the property crimes and the one that comes closest to the personal violation characteristic of violent crimes. (Victimization surveys show that the true prevalence of crime in the United States, including crimes not reported to the police, is more than twice as high as official police data.)

All of these crimes are felonies that can land one in prison. And these numbers do not include such serious offenses as kidnapping, indecent liberties with a child, other sex crimes short of rape, and drug trafficking, for which we have no national incident data. Of course, not all criminals are arrested. For some of these serious crimes arrest rates are shockingly low: just 29% for robbery and 13% for burglary. Yet, altogether, police made over 10 million arrests in 2015, 1.5 million for violent crimes (including misdemeanor assaults).

What, then, of convictions for serious crimes? The most recent data from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) show more than 1.1 million felony convictions in state courts each year (2006) and 72,000 felony convictions in federal courts (2014). For the convictions in state courts, over 200,000 were for a violent crime; 100,000 for burglary; and over 200,000 for drug trafficking. Many will be surprised to learn that only two fifths of those convicted of felonies in state courts are actually sentenced to prison. Of the rest, about half receive no incarceration (mainly probation) and half are sentenced to a short term in a local jail. Indeed, at any one time there are more than twice as many convicted offenders on probation or parole—that is, not incarcerated—as there are in the nation’s prisons or jails.

With offenders each year committing well over a million very serious violent crimes and another 1.6 million burglaries, with police each year arresting 1.5 million violent offenders, and with courts each year convicting more than a million persons for a felony, it is perhaps not so surprising that state and federal prisons hold one and a half million inmates. If we have a “mass incarceration” problem it appears to be because we have a “mass crime” problem, despite the downward trend of the past two decades.

Are one and a half million felons in state and federal prisons too many? Are our prisons filled with low-level offenders, especially small-time drug users, who could be released with no harm to the public? And what of the violent offenders, burglars, and drug traffickers, who together constitute fully three fourths of all state prisoners? Would the nation be better served if hundreds of thousands of these offenders were released into our communities or never sent to prison in the first place?

It is a great virtue of John Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform that it thoroughly refutes the myth, which he calls the “Standard Story,” that the “war on drugs” was responsible for “mass incarceration”—a thesis made famous by Michelle Alexander in her bestseller The New Jim Crow (2010). Reporting data from BJS, Pfaff shows that only 16% of state prisoners are serving time for a drug offense as their most serious conviction, and only 3.5% for drug possession. And he notes that even the relatively few serving time for simple possession may have committed a more serious drug offense but were allowed to plea to the lesser crime. He cites studies showing that about a quarter of drug offenders in prison had previously been convicted of a violent crime, that a fifth had used a gun in a previous crime, and that only about 1% of all state prisoners were “nonviolent, first- or second-time drug offenders.” He even titles one section of his chapter on the war on drugs “The Myth of the Low-Level, Nonviolent Drug Offender.”

A professor at Fordham Law School with a Ph.D. in economics, Pfaff goes on to challenge Alexander’s further claim that the war on drugs (which Alexander attributes to anti-black bias) explains the disproportion of blacks in America’s prisons. He shows to the contrary that whereas blacks in 2013 were 38% of all state prisoners serving time for a drug offense, they were 37% of the much larger number of those serving time for non-drug crimes. Remove all drug offenders from prison and the racial disproportion of state prison inmates would remain essentially unchanged.

How, then, to achieve the kind of massive reductions in incarceration that Pfaff believes are necessary to reduce the “hard-to-estimate ‘collateral’ costs” of mass incarceration, such as the income inmates lose while behind bars, the emotional costs on inmates’ families, the reinforcing of racial biases and inequalities, and the increased future health costs that former inmates face? No real progress will be made until we confront, as he titles his seventh chapter, “The Third Rail: Violent Offenses.” Most simply, we must send fewer violent offenders to prison and shorten the time behind bars of those we do send. States and counties must “rethink how they punish people convicted of violent crimes, where ‘rethink’ means ‘think about how to punish less….

If we learned anything from the past half century, it is that punishment works. Reduce the likelihood that criminals will go to prison or spend much time there, and you will get more crime. Increase the costs that criminals will pay for their deviant behavior, and crime will go down. Some of this is deterrence; some is incapacitation; and some results from the ways in which criminal laws reinforce moral norms. Of course, recognizing the value of prisons and punishment is not inconsistent with doing everything we can to keep young people from launching criminal careers in the first place, or with providing adequate funding within our prisons and jails for educational, vocational, mental health, and substance abuse programs.

One has to admire the clear-eyed approach of the authors of these two new books: we have too many people in prison; most inmates are violent offenders; therefore no serious decarceration will be achieved without reducing punishment for violent crime. Though the “experts” will continue to push in this direction, sober public opinion will resist, and rightly so. The crime drop of the past two decades happened for a reason, and the recent increase in violent crime throughout the United States reminds us of the stakes. Americans expect their government to protect them from those who murder, rape, rob, and assault. It is, after all, why we have government. Sending fewer serious violent offenders to prison or reducing their sentences breaks faith with the American people and puts us all at greater risk of a tragic encounter with the lawless.

Prison Reduces Crime

An excellent article from Crime & Consequences Blog about the proof.

An excerpt.

No one doubts that the increased use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws has contributed, likely significantly, to the big increase in the prison population from 1990-2010 (it has dropped since then).

The next question crucial to our sentencing debate, then, is how much has increased incarceration contributed to the astonishing drop in crime over those 20 years (and astonishing is the right word, see this table showing that crime rates fell by nearly half).

Obviously, if increased incarceration accounts for only a small part of the falloff in crime, then the case for easing off on the use of prison becomes stronger. Conversely, if more prison has been a big driver of plummeting crime, the country justifiably will be more hesitant to go back to the softer policies that brought us the crime explosion in the quarter century before 1990.

This central question has been studied.  How much does increased incarceration contribute to the drop in crime?  What do the data say?

It tuns out we have plenty of data and they say pretty much the same thing.

The most systematic study is here, in which Prof. Steve Levitt of Chicago finds, in a 2004 research paper, that increased incarceration accounted for 25% or perhaps more of the large decrease in crime in the Nineties, and noting that the “evidence linking increased punishment to lower crime rates is very strong.”

Prof. William Spelman at Texas found the amount to be between 27% and 34%, see here.

Eminent UCLA criminologist Prof. James Q. Wilson took a look at the Levitt and Spelman conclusions and agreed with them in a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal.

Finally, a well-regarded expert favorable to  sentencing reform, John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, acknowledged in his 2014 debate with Judge Michael Mukasey and me that increased incarceration may account for between 25% and 35% of the reduction in crime in the relevant period. See John’s balanced presentation between 7:30 – 8:10 of the tape of his remarks.

So the consensus of neutral scholarship is that increased use of incarceration resulted in roughly 28% of the crime decrease that started at the dawn of the Nineties.and went on for the next 20 years (or more).

Policing Matters

An important column in City Journal about just how important policing is, to all communities.

An excerpt.

Whatever FBI director James Comey’s alleged failings in regard to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and Russian election interference, his precipitous sacking is a loss for America’s police officers and public order.

The man whom President Donald Trump now calls a “showboater” and “grandstander” gave candidate Trump the most powerful message of his campaign: policing matters. Months before Trump decried the media’s “false narrative” about policing, Comey had warned that the “chill wind” blowing through American law enforcement was resulting in a rising homicide toll among black people. Comey was virtually the only official within the Obama administration to acknowledge publicly the disastrous impact that the Black Lives Matter movement was having on public safety; Obama contemptuously rebuked him for doing so.

Comey delivered one of the most eloquent defenses of proactive policing ever penned in a speech at the University of Chicago law school in October 2015. The speech punctured the lies about the criminal-justice system being spread by the criminology profession, activists, and the media. Comey described working as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia, during the height of the 1990s drug wars. Drug violence affected black neighborhoods exclusively, Comey observed; white people could simply drive around the problem. But for blacks living under the thrall of open-air dealing, “violence was everywhere,” Comey said. A resident of such a neighborhood would have responded with a “tired laugh” to the Left’s favorite conceit of the “nonviolent drug dealer,” Comey noted.

Back in the 1990s, activists were already criticizing police officers and prosecutors for locking up black men instead of whites. Comey refused to take the racial bait. Law enforcement targeted neighborhoods where people were dying, he said; race had nothing to do with it.

No one has better refuted the “mass incarceration” idea popularized by Michelle Alexander’s factitious book, The New Jim Crow. There was nothing “mass” about incarceration: “Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer, and each felon with a gun had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury, his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other post-sentencing review,” Comey observed. If these individualized cases resulted in large numbers of black men being sent to jail, that was because “there were a very large number of young men of color involved in criminal activity in America’s cities.” In other words, America doesn’t have an incarceration problem, it has a crime problem.

When FBI SWAT teams and their law-enforcement partners arrested 70 black drug traffickers in northwest Arkansas in August 2015, they were “met by applause, hugs, and offers of food from the good people of that besieged community’’—all black themselves, Comey said. He might have added that no Black Lives Matter activists had bothered to help rid the community of its predators.

The press ignored the speech’s unflinching honesty about the vast racial disparities in criminal offending and victimization and its account of how policing and incarceration had revitalized neighborhoods. But the media did rouse themselves to notice Comey’s observations about rising street crime in black areas. The last two decades’ progress against crime was at risk, Comey observed, because officers were reluctant to get out of their cars and do the proactive work that prevents drive-by shootings. They were answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that deters bad guys with guns, he said. Such discretionary police work was precisely what the Left incessantly criticized as racial oppression. Comey recounted a conversation with officers in a big-city precinct who described being surrounded and taunted the moment that they got out of their cars. Because of officers’ growing hesitation about engaging with potential suspects, cities across the country were seeing an explosion in senseless violence, Comey posited.

Comey’s Chicago speech was a direct rejection of the Obama administration’s line that the criminal-justice system is racist. Acknowledgment of rising crime rates challenged Obama’s warm embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. Nothing other than proactive policing had changed in criminogenic environments that could explain the increase in crime—economic conditions, demographics, and poverty rates were all stable. And so within days of Comey’s speech, Obama himself went to Chicago and issued a scathing put-down. Obama accused Comey of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and using “anecdotal evidence to . . . feed political agendas.” Even though violent crime was rising in American cities both large and small, Obama dismissed the homicide numbers as an insignificant aberration. The press echoed Obama’s contempt. The New York Times called his speech “incendiary” and said that it “plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public.”  There was “no data suggesting” that depolicing was contributing to an increase in crime, the Times said.

Changing the Narrative

Changing it from seeing police as the problem to seeing them as the solution to the problem is crucial, as this article from City Journal explains.

An excerpt.

Donald Trump vigorously defended law enforcement during his presidential campaign. He pledged to restore order to the nation’s cities—where violent crime is surging—and to reinvigorate the rule of law. His appointment of conservative Republican senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general was a strong signal that Trump’s words were more than campaign rhetoric. Now that the Trump administration and the Sessions-led Justice Department are up and running, where should they focus their efforts?

The most immediate goal of the Trump administration should be to change the elite-driven narrative about the criminal-justice system. That narrative, which holds that policing is lethally racist, has dominated public discourse since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In response, officers are backing off of proactive policing, and violent crime is rising fast: 2015 saw the largest one-year spike in homicides nationwide in nearly 50 years. That violent-crime increase has continued unabated through 2016 and into the early months of 2017. A Trump administration official—perhaps Attorney General Sessions, or the president himself—should publicly address the question of what we expect from police officers: Do we want them to be proactive and to try to stop crime before it happens? Or do we want them to be purely reactive, responding to crime only after someone has been victimized? The administration should explain that data-driven, proactive policing made possible the country’s 20-year, 50 percent violent-crime decline that began in the mid-1990s.

In February, Sessions made a good start in turning around the false narrative about policing, addressing the National Association of Attorneys General. Sessions warned that the nation’s violent-crime decline is now at risk, while acknowledging that the crime increase is not happening in every neighborhood. Yet we are diminished as a nation, he said, when citizens “fear for their life when they leave their home.” (To be blunt, the violent-crime increase has hit almost exclusively in black neighborhoods. Nine hundred additional black males were murdered in 2015 compared with 2014, bringing total black homicide deaths that year to more than 7,000. It is a marker of the perversity of elite rhetoric about race that both Trump and Sessions have been fiercely attacked as racist for pledging to save black lives.)

Sessions noted that officers have become reluctant to get out of their cars to conduct discretionary stops and other “up-close” preventive policing. The administration should go further: it should convey the charged, hostile atmosphere in which officers in many urban areas now operate, thanks to the hatred spread by the Black Lives Matter movement. Gun murders of officers increased more than 50 percent in 2016, led by the targeted assassinations of cops.

A frontal assault on the dominant narrative about a racist criminal-justice system will require laying out the stark racial disparities in criminal offending and victimization. The public has been kept in the dark for decades about how vast those disparities are: blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, for example, and die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Lifting that veil of ignorance is necessary to explain why officers operate more actively in minority neighborhoods—in order to save lives. The public must also understand that it is law-abiding members of high-crime communities themselves who beg the police to maintain order, and that such public-order policing was central to the now-jeopardized 20-year crime decline.

The federal government will be vigilant against abusive policing, the administration should say, but it will not deem police departments and police officers biased for proactively fighting crime.

The federal government’s practice of slapping years-long consent decrees on police departments calls out for reform. There is zero chance that civil rights attorneys in the federal government know more than police departments do about how to fight crime constitutionally and successfully. Yet the Obama administration opened 25 “pattern-or-practice” civil rights investigations, based on the false notions that police bias is widespread and that federal lawyers are qualified to recommend effective police practices. The Department of Justice is currently enforcing 14 consent decrees with local departments, which grew out of such investigations. At a minimum, the Trump administration should publish data on how much the Obama-era investigations and consent decrees have cost those departments.

Object Lesson

An excellent one from New York, regarding liberal failures dealing with criminals, as it spins back to dysfunctionality, essentially dismantling Broken Windows Policing—the most innovative and effective policing strategy first developed in New York City—from City Journal.

An excerpt.

The last time Official New York decided that criminals mattered more than civic tranquility, John Vliet Lindsay was mayor and decades of chaos lay ahead. Then came law-and-order types like Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and Mike Bloomberg; crackdowns ensued, and peace largely returned to the streets.

Now the pendulum is swinging back to dysfunction. And it public policy in New York increasingly seems driven by the same kind of “turn’em-loose” ethic that animated Lindsay’s administration decades ago.

In Albany, Governor Andrew Cuomo was a motivating force behind the now largely successful effort to exempt 16- and 17-year-olds from felony statutes—the “Raise the Age” movement—with scant regard for the consequences of doing so. Plus, the governor is clamoring to close the Rikers Island jail complex—but without offering a realistic public-safety alternative. While Cuomo is far from alone in endorsing these positions, he brings the prestige of New York’s highest political office to the effort.

At City Hall, Mayor Bill de Blasio has allowed himself to be dragooned into the Close Rikers movement—he initially recognized its practical pitfalls, then moved to capture the spotlight in his characteristically flexible manner. He was also a Raise the Age cheerleader, has demonstrably reduced civility and safety standards in the public schools, flooded the streets with often-aggressive vagrants, signed federal consent decrees that rendered Rikers less safe, and made it far more difficult than it needs to be to protect New York from Islamist terrorism.

And to plop a cherry on all this, eight members of New York’s congressional delegation have joined a who’s who of city political leaders urging parole for Judith Clark, an unrepentant former terrorist now serving time for the murders of two upstate cops and a security guard. (Cuomo started that ball rolling by granting Clark clemency for the murders in January.)

New York’s political leaders also favor sanctuary status for New York—a blatant thumb to the nose for the rule of law and a potential boon to violent illegal aliens statewide. Just last week, a Staten Island judge ruled that the city can indeed destroy all the background documentation for holders of the IDNYC municipal identification card—to make sure that law enforcement can never check up on their immigration status.

While individual motives differ here, one common thread binds the various disciples of dysfunction: by and large, they can insulate themselves from the consequences of the policy changes they’re prescribing. The same can’t be said of the less well-placed, or of New York itself.

For example, former state chief judge Jonathan Lippmann—a boyhood friend and political protégé of the disgraced former speaker of the state assembly Sheldon Silver—chaired the commission that recently urged the shutdown of Rikers Island. Among Lippman’s often-outlandish recommendations was the decriminalization of prostitution as a means of reducing the jail population—a typical call to treat symptoms rather than address antisocial behavior directly. While Lippman may have advanced the idea in good faith, it also came with no apparent awareness of what it might mean for tourism hubs like Times Square, or for marginal outer-borough neighborhoods already struggling with urban pathologies.

This is no small matter. For one thing, tourism is the second-most fruitful segment of the municipal economy; one endangers that industry at the city’s peril. For another, law enforcement has turned a blind eye to street-level prostitution before—in the days when New York was called “Fun City,” even though it was anything but: it was an era obsessed with individual rights, never individual responsibilities, and the imbalance put law-abiding New Yorkers at a too-often-deadly disadvantage.

The move toward greater empathy for the criminal class makes a kind of perverse sense. Individual victims tend to be out of sight, out of mind, and debilitated neighborhoods have no standing in court. But perpetrators are utterly visible, standing front and center before a judge, often with sad stories, and they command attention. It’s understandably human to want to rehabilitate—and so it’s natural that the maladaptive wheel gets the grease, consequences be damned.

Stopping Broken Windows Policing

It is the agenda behind the proposal to close Rikers Island, the largest correctional institution in America, according to this article from City Journal, one of the best conservative magazines out there.

An excerpt.

New York City’s plan to shut down Rikers Island is a bait-and-switch scheme. The report of Judge Jonathan Lippmann’s blue-ribbon Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, tasked with figuring out what to do with the nation’s largest jail complex, concludes that the city should close Rikers and replace it with smaller, borough-based modern jails. Before that can happen, however, the report says, the city must first reduce its jail population from its present level of about 10,000 to around 5,000.

Politically and logistically implausible, the Lippmann Report’s recommendations are a ruse. The real purpose of the proposal isn’t to close Rikers: it’s to let 5,000 people out of jail by pursuing a decriminalization agenda that would end Broken Windows policing as we know it and allow miscreants to commit quality-of-life offenses with impunity.

Anchoring the commission’s report is a set of unstated premises which, if put into practice, would radically change the way New York City is policed, beginning with a focus on the negative effects of incarceration on arrestees. “Spending time in jail is bad for you on a host of levels,” the report says, as though the downsides of going to jail were an inadvertent mistake of the judicial system. It’s the same kind of thinking that inspired the proposal of a notorious 2014 city council resolution (not passed) calling on the NYPD to stop arresting subway fare-beaters because “in addition to being very disruptive, an arrest can cause significant stress” to turnstile jumpers. The problem with crime, from this perspective, is the adverse consequences that getting caught has on the criminal.

One way to reduce such stress, then, is to stop viewing certain behavior as criminal. Thus, the commission recommends “reclassifying four charges as civil, and not criminal, matters: theft of services (using public transportation without paying the fare), low-level possession of marijuana in public view, prostitution, and possession of ‘gravity knives.’” By raising the bar of what constitutes crime, we would lower the crime rate and thus have fewer people to punish.

The commission also suggests that the city “look to eliminate sentences of 30 days or fewer” in favor of vaguely defined “community-based alternatives.” The notion that jail should rehabilitate as well as punish is commendable, but the Lippmann Report refuses to acknowledge that the unpleasantness of jail is meant also to deter crime—the threat of a five-day jail sentence for petty theft sounds pointless to liberal advocates, but not to a potential thief, for whom it can be a real restraint. For radical sociologists, however, punishment begets crime; as they see it, the best way to deter deviance is to eliminate its penalty.

The Lippmann Report traffics in pernicious myths about the role of racism in criminal justice, noting that, “Blacks and Latinos comprise slightly more than half of our City’s overall population but are nearly 90 percent of our jail population.” As a result of this imbalance, according to the commission, the system must make “special efforts to address the overrepresentation of Black/African-Americans and Latinos” in the city’s jails.

Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in the city’s jail population because they commit a disproportionate amount of the city’s crime. This tendency is borne out not just in arrest statistics, but in the descriptive reports of victims who register complaints with the police: in fact, the overlap in racial composition between “proactive arrests” and “victim driven arrests” for misdemeanors is almost exact. The data is uncontroversial and available on the NYPD website. It’s not surprising to hear advocates and liberal politicians suggest continuously that nonwhites are the victims of a racist police state, but a commission that praises its own “evidence-based” approach to criminal justice should be more rigorous in its analysis.

The Lippmann Commission’s report goes to a final extreme when it attempts to classify violent criminals themselves as a marginalized group. “Certain populations remained underserved,” the report reads, “including women; young people; people who are LGBTQ; people with mental illnesses; people who suffer from an addiction and are convicted of property crimes; and people charged with serious or violent offenses.” Women, youth, gay or trans people, and the mentally ill are demographic categories, individual members of which may or may not have been done wrong by society: in any case, they are who they are. But in what sense can convicted thieves or people charged with “serious or violent offenses” be considered a group that suffers discrimination, with a presumably actionable demand for restitution? The commission’s report expands the universe of official victims to include those who victimize others.

 

Bad Idea

The action and the thought behind this proposal, floated by a New York Times editorial is a really bad idea, as is any reduction of sentence for criminals involved—even as a driver—in murdering police officers.

An excerpt.

Early next week, the New York State Board of Parole will hear the petition of Judith Clark, who has spent 35 years in prison for her role in the 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car in Rockland County that resulted in the murder of two police officers and a guard.

Ms. Clark was sentenced to a minimum of 75 years, the harshest punishment available, even though, as a getaway driver, she was not at the scene of the crime. Now 67, she was certain to die in prison — until Gov. Andrew Cuomo in December commuted her sentence to 35 years, making her eligible for parole immediately.

Mr. Cuomo met privately with Ms. Clark before making what he knew would be a very controversial decision, particularly among police unions and other law enforcement groups. In the end, he was impressed with her unconditional remorse, her acceptance of responsibility for the crime, the wide range of supporters urging her release, and the positive work she has done while behind bars, like establishing educational programs for fellow inmates.

“We call it the correction system,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I think the situation is corrected as it is ever going to be, unless you can bring a person back to life.”

In addition to Ms. Clark’s sentence, Mr. Cuomo commuted the lengthy terms of four other people convicted of murder or manslaughter. These grants serve as an important reminder that while the fact of a crime never changes, the person who commits it can….

If the Parole Board decides to grant Ms. Clark’s request for release, she may live the rest of her life in freedom. While there is sure to be resistance from the victims’ families, it is the right thing to do.

 

Criminal Justice Legal Foundation Newsletter

The new edition is online and it is an important read as one of the few conservative organizations working to retain traditional, conservative principles within criminals justice.

This issue has a superb article on page three entitled: Protecting the Narrative While Innocents Die.

A must read.

 

Drug Injections Normalized

Following the needle exchange program, this newest effort by those who see criminal behavior, including drug use, as a result of social forces; we now have the supervised needle injection effort where drug users can get their drugs injected with sterile equipment, at government cost.

Normalizing criminal behavior normalizes criminals, the furthest point away from criminal reformation a society can assume.

This tragic effort is reported by an article from Governing.

An excerpt.

In 2015, Mike Pence was in a tight spot. As the governor of Indiana, he was staring down a public health crisis when hundreds of people were contracting HIV by using dirty needles to inject opioids. Pence knew he needed to do something quick to quell the outbreak but was fundamentally opposed to the solution that health experts were suggesting: a needle exchange program where drug addicts can trade in their used, dirty syringes for new, sterile ones.

Some worry that such programs encourage illegal drug use. But research generally shows that needle exchanges reduce the likelihood that diseases like HIV will spread. So Pence relented to the health experts, and the outbreak was quickly contained.

Pence’s dilemma was high-profile but not unique. Many state and local lawmakers have faced moral quandaries as the country struggles with historic numbers of opioid abuse and overdoses. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed reservations about needle exchanges, yet their presence is growing in areas hardest-hit by the epidemic.

But if many politicians are reluctant to embrace needle exchanges, then they’ll likely have a hard time with the latest frontier in the fight against opioid abuse: supervised injection facilities.

At these facilities, medical professionals provide addicts with sterile injection equipment so they can safely use illegal drugs they obtained from outside. They can also wait out the high and get information about and referrals to treatment.

There’s only one supervised injection facility in North America. It’s in Vancouver, Canada, and has been credited with preventing nearly 5,000 overdoses since it opened in 2003. Now two U.S. cities may open clinics of their own.

“It just shows how desperate we’ve gotten with this epidemic that this is something we’re looking into,” says Jay Butler, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Just across the Canadian border, Seattle and King County officials gave the green light for what will be the nation’s first supervised injection facilities.

“This isn’t about enabling drug use,” says Jeff Duchin, health officer of public health for the Seattle and King County Department of Health. “These are sick people, and they’re in danger of dying alone and outside. We want people to be able to be kept alive until they’re ready for treatment.”

Seattle is in the midst of securing funding and finding two sites, which is why there’s no date for when the facilities will open. They need to be somewhere with easy access for the most vulnerable populations and large enough to offer wraparound services like HIV testing and treatment.

San Francisco is also exploring the option. London Breed, president of the city’s Board of Supervisors, plans to introduce legislation that would create a task force to study the implications of a supervised injection facility.

“I can’t say safe injection is the answer. It may not be,” she said in a statement. “But I know we can’t be quiet anymore. We can’t hope the trouble away. We have to research.”