Courts Got Wacky, Crime Exploded

That is the gist of this excellent article from the American Greatness blog.

An excerpt.

When the great Thomas Sowell retired from writing commentary in 2016, he wrapped up his farewell column this way:

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

Sowell grew up in Harlem in the late 1930s and 1940s. I grew up in Houston in the late 1950s and 1960s. Like Sowell, I can tell of some carefree practices that would seem strange now.

Houston was a segregated city back then, but already a very large one. Yet my parents gave me the run of the town. They let me take the bus to the central library and the downtown movie palaces, and after I showed I could handle a bicycle safely in traffic, they let me ride it through all kinds of neighborhoods to distant record stores and hobby shops. It never occurred to them to be afraid of what some nogoodnik might do to me.

The only thing approaching violence I encountered was when a black kid pegged me with a BB gun from a half-block away. When the pellet bounced off my head, I just thought, “That’s pretty good shooting,” and kept on riding. Getting shot with a BB gun was no big deal; my brother had been shot in the belly, at close range, which really hurt, but the only repercussion was that we scratched the dumb redneck who shot him from our list of playmates.

What suburban family would let their boy run loose in a city the size of Houston today? This long-vanished nonchalance prevailed not only among Harlem’s poor and Houston’s middle class, but among the rich as well. Look at the older silk-stocking districts of any American city. What won’t you see surrounding them? Security gates. Rich, poor, or in-between, Americans once upon a time lived without fear of their neighbors.

Only a decade after I rambled around on a bicycle, Houston became a playground for one of the worst serial killers ever, a man who with two accomplices abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least 28 boys from 1970 until 1973.

Why are we not intent on undoing the social and legal changes that let such evil flourish?

Sowell’s column closed with these words:

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future. Goodbye and good luck to all.

For many months now, I’ve been challenging Donald Trump to make good his promise that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end.” So far, no chorus of readers, pundits, politicians and citizens has risen to press forward that cause, and the reason may be that most Americans today are too young to remember how things were before crime assumed its present dimensions. Let us therefore “learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.” Let us recall not only what we once had in the way of law and order, but how what we had was lost.

Consider just one aspect of the problem: the revolution in criminal justice imposed on us by the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

When historian Stephen Ambrose asked former President Eisenhower to name his biggest mistake, Ike “replied heatedly, ‘The appointment of that S.O.B. Earl Warren.’ Shocked, I replied, ‘General, I always thought that was your best appointment.’ ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he responded, and we did not.” Later, Ambrose read the “flattering and thoughtful references” to Warren in Eisenhower’s diary, and concluded that his anger at Warren resulted from the “criminal rights” cases of the 1960s, not the civil rights cases of the 1950s.

Eisenhower was hardly alone in his anger. The most controversial ruling of Warren’s tenure wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education, which the court decided on a unanimous vote in 1954. It wasn’t even the edicts against prayer and Bible readings in public school, although those raised quite a stink and in their own way may have contributed to the subsequent crime explosion. The Warren Court’s most controversial ruling, in fact, was Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the 5-4 decision that imposed on police a duty to inform a suspect of his rights before questioning him, and let the most red-handed culprit get away with the most heinous crimes if police didn’t follow procedure.

Bear in mind that Miranda didn’t create the right to remain silent. Decades before, the court had barred third-degree interrogation, the principal means of trampling that right, with no harmful effect on law enforcement. Miranda broke new ground, and its results were new, too. New, but not improved.

Writing for the court, Warren acknowledged, “the modern practice of in-custody interrogation is psychologically rather than physically oriented.” He took note of the methods prescribed by advanced police manuals and textbooks for getting around a suspect’s defenses. For example, interrogators would pretend to see things the suspect’s way. “The officers are instructed to minimize the moral seriousness of the offense, to cast blame on the victim or on society.”

Warren complained that if the suspect didn’t warm to such treatment and instead insisted on his constitutional right to say nothing at all, then the manuals advised the examiner to “concede him the right to remain silent” but to “point out the incriminating significance of the suspect’s refusal to talk.” Thus by “patience and persistence,” officers managed to draw many suspects out, eliciting alibis that wouldn’t hold up, to be followed by incriminating admissions hedged by excuses and understatement, with a complete confession frequently the end result.

Retrieved April 15, 2018 from https://amgreatness.com/2018/04/14/miranda-versus-america/

 

The Difficulty of Speaking Truth

It seems like it has always been so, making this situation described by Front Page Magazine hardly surprising, though the results of it on the academy is deeply saddening.

An excerpt.

Until last week, I’d never heard of Amy Wax. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who landed in hot water after she co-authored a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed last August 9 with Larry Alexander, who teaches law at the University of San Diego. Under the headline “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” Wax and Alexander began their piece by listing some of the sociocultural pathologies currently plaguing America – low job skills, widespread opioid abuse, inner-city gang violence, one-parent homes, and high-school and college students who lack basic skills. They went on to attribute these problems to “the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

They recalled the precepts by which Americans lived in the mid twentieth century: get married before you have kids; try to avoid divorce; get educated; work hard; be patriotic, neighborly, charitable, respectful, and law-abiding. Yes, they admitted, mid-century America was hardly perfect. There was racism; there were rebels who broke the rules. But the rules themselves were good.  They resulted in “productivity, educational gains and social coherence.” Now they’re gone, replaced in many subcultures by “antisocial habits,” “rap culture,” “anti-assimilation ideas,” an obsession with group identity, and other destructive forces that do a terrible job of preparing young people for responsible adult lives.

Every word of that op-ed was sheer common sense. (As NYU professor Jonathan Haidt observed, Wax’s concerns about the black subculture were expressed in the 1960 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time “was roundly condemned as a racist” but whose analysis is now echoed by countless sociologists.) Yet the op-ed was widely seen as scurrilous. The very next day, the Daily Pennsylvanian ran an interview with Wax in which she declared that “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms” were “superior” to others. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior,’” she said. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She underscored that Western norms “aren’t just for white people” but “can help minorities get ahead.”

Again, pure fact. But her Penn Law colleagues were outraged. Five of them, writing on August 20, accused Wax of waxing nostalgic for bigotry and exclusion. Ten days later, in an open letter, thirty-three Penn Law profs condemned Wax for affirming the superiority of Western culture – although the letter presented only assertions, no arguments. (One of the signatories told Wax to her face that her words of praise for the West were “code for Nazism.”) There were demands for Wax’s firing, or at least her removal from academic committees. But she survived.

On February 16, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Wax in which she recounted the fallout from her Inquirer op-ed and proposed that academic leftists try responding to dissenting views not by hurling ad hominem abuse and making accusations of racism but by attempting “to explain, using logic, evidence, facts and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong.” (Good luck with that.) On February 20, Wax gave a riveting talk at the American Enterprise Institute in which she repeated much of the content of her Journal piece but also offered some bleak prognostications about the fate of higher education: even as the last few remaining classical liberals on the university faculties are retiring or dying off, they’re being replaced by young profs who have no regard for robust debate or free speech; meanwhile students think that “feelings are everything” and that “there’s no need to read …or…know anything” because “the whole past is tainted by sexism and patriarchy.”

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269630/whacking-wax-bruce-bawer

Mass Incarceration

The deceptive narrative is unveiled in this superb article by Heather Mac Donald (one of the best criminal justice policy leaders in the country) from City Journal.

An excerpt.

In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.

The New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the Times.

This conceit was preposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up in federal prison. But the truth didn’t matter. Obama’s prison tour came in the midst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory. Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting a daily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks and insanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as Black Lives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standing discourse from the academic Left about “mass incarceration,” policing, and race.

Now that discourse is going mainstream. As the press never tires of pointing out, some high-profile figures on the right are joining the chorus on the left for deincarceration and decriminalization. Newt Gingrich is pairing with left-wing activist Van Jones, and the Koch brothers have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lowered prison counts and less law enforcement. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill support reducing or eliminating mandatory sentences for federal drug-trafficking crimes, in the name of racial equity.

At the state and city levels, hardly a single criminal-justice practice exists that is not under fire for oppressing blacks. Traffic monitoring, antitheft statutes, drug patrols, public-order policing, trespass arrests, pedestrian stops, bail, warrant enforcement, fines for absconding from court, parole revocations, probation oversight, sentences for repeat felony offenders—all have been criticized as part of a de facto system for locking away black men and destroying black communities.

There may be good reasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement of criminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda have been as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users. It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and the current campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results.

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-14037.html

Fatherless Mass Shooters

This is not surprising, as noted by Crisis Magazine.

An excerpt.

A fascinating fact has emerged in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting: 26 of the 27 deadliest mass shooters in American history all happened to share one thing in common. What might that be? Your favorite liberal might pipe up with anything and everything from casting a vote for Donald Trump to NRA membership to a seat in the local megachurch. Nope.

All but one of the 27 was raised without his biological father.

The list of 27 was compiled by CNN. Suzanne Venker, a marriage-family expert, went through the family backgrounds of the 27 shooters, where she found only one “raised by his biological father since childhood.”

“Indeed, there is a direct correlation between boys who grow up with absent fathers and boys who drop out of school, who drink, who do drugs, who become delinquent and who wind up in prison,” observes Venker, adding: “And who kill their classmates.”

Again, 26 of 27. That’s 96.3 percent. That is one mighty and scary correlation.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that boys raised in fatherless families are likely to become mass shooters. (Do I really need to say that?) But it’s yet further affirmation of what we already know: boys need dads. Just as daughters need dads. Children need fathers. They also need mothers.

Retrieved March 5, 2018 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/fatherless-shooters-liberals-push-fatherless-families

 

Deincarceration Advocacy

It is a dangerous narrative, as this article from City Journal points out.

An excerpt.

Last November, a deranged 26-year-old man, Devin Patrick Kelley, opened fire on worshipers inside a church in Sutherland, Texas, killing 26. High-casualty mass shootings are tragic in human terms but anomalous statistically, at least in terms of the portion of total U.S. homicides that they represent. The vast majority of murders, which take place disproportionately in America’s low-income and minority neighborhoods, don’t get nearly the same attention. The Texas church shooting does have an important point of commonality with the majority of American murders, however: its perpetrator had a troubling criminal record. The deincarceration movement, which would return thousands of convicts to American streets, presents a threat to public safety. Repeat offenders already commit a substantial portion of the nation’s violent crime—according to one study, 53 percent of killers have at least one prior felony conviction. They will be walking the streets in greater numbers if deincarceration advocates have their way.

Consider a few examples. In October 2017, Radee Prince shot and killed three people in Maryland. Prince, it turns out, had 42 prior arrests and 15 prior felony convictions. About a month earlier, a police officer in Yonkers was shot in the face by an 18-year-old assailant not unknown to police. He had recently been sentenced to probation and classified as a “youthful offender,” despite being caught with an illegal firearm, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a machete, and brass knuckles. Earlier in 2017, Baltimore police named Cortez Wall, an 18-year-old murder suspect, “Public Enemy No. 1.” Wall had already been convicted of a gun charge, for which he was on probation. That didn’t stop a Maryland judge from releasing him on bail on a drug charge; he had allegedly murdered someone before his release, though police did not yet suspect him. Had bail been denied, Wall would have been in custody when he became the prime suspect in the deadly shooting.

Most recently, on February 13, a Chicago Police Department Commander, Paul Bauer, was shot and killed while off-duty. Bauer was responding to a radio call that he overheard regarding a suspicious-person report in a downtown Chicago office building. The alleged shooter is 44-year-old Shomari Legghette. “It should come as no surprise” that this was not Legghette’s first run-in with the law, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a press conference held the day after Bauer’s murder. Legghette has an “extensive criminal history” that includes charges for drugs, armed robbery, and gun possession. Johnson called the tragedy “a devastating reminder of repeat gun offenders who are out on the streets of Chicago and need to be held accountable.”

Yet proponents of deincarceration want to make it easier for hardened criminals to sidestep prison and roam the streets. The ACLU, an outspoken supporter of bail reform, cheered the fact that, in New Jersey, judges required defendants to post bail in just three of 3,382 cases processed in January 2017. In an article for Time, two scholars at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice criticized harsh sentences, not just for “nonviolent” drug offenders but also for those committing more serious offenses, calling mass incarceration “the greatest moral and racial injustice of our time.” Citing a report showing that “longer sentences do not reduce recidivism more than shorter sentences,” the authors called for the immediate release of nearly 40 percent of America’s prison population.

Do crime statistics support the claim that such a high percentage of America’s prison population wouldn’t pose a danger to the public—particularly in high-crime neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, which have driven a national increase in violent crime rates? To answer this question, I consulted Chicago Police Department records of the last 200 people arrested for actual or attempted first-degree murder, as of November 21, 2017. That someone has been arrested does not mean that he is guilty, of course, though arrests suggest probable cause. I found that an outsize number of the most serious violent crimes were allegedly committed by individuals who used to be, and perhaps should have remained, behind bars. Of the 200 individuals arrested for murder in the period examined, the vast majority were people of color, particularly black males, with previous arrests. The CPD had arrested two-thirds (133) at least once before; the average number of prior CPD arrests was more than two, and some individuals had as many as 20 “priors.” Seventy-four (37 percent) of the 200 had at least one prior CPD arrest for a violent or weapon-related offense.

These numbers don’t include arrests made by agencies other than the CPD—such as police departments in other states and in neighboring counties—or federal or juvenile arrests. Indeed, for ten of the 200 individuals arrested in the examined time frame, the first listed arrest is for violation of parole conditions, or for possession of a weapon as a felon—meaning that those individuals had been convicted of felonies not listed by the CPD, likely because the offenses occurred in another jurisdiction or before the individuals were legal adults.

According to a recent University of Chicago study, of those arrested for a homicide or shooting in Chicago in 2015 and 2016, “around 90 percent had at least one prior arrest, approximately 50 percent had a prior arrest for a violent crime specifically, and almost 40 percent had a prior gun arrest.” On average, someone arrested for a homicide or shooting had “nearly 12 prior arrests, with almost 45 percent having had more than 10 prior arrests, and almost 20 percent having had more than 20 prior arrests.”

The CPD’s 2011 report on murders in Chicago found that over 87 percent of suspects arrested for murder that year had prior arrest histories. That proportion remains consistent, going back at least 20 years. And the trend isn’t limited to Chicago. In a study of the 75 most populous American counties, conducted from 1990 to 2002, the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that “more than half of murderers (53%) had a [felony] conviction record.”

These numbers belie the notion that the criminal-justice system in cities like Chicago is systematically denying people of color second chances—a potent talking point for deincarceration advocates. Fifteen percent of the 200 suspects whose records I examined had at least five prior arrests before they were arrested for murder. Further, these numbers seriously—if not wholly—undermine the claim that the public does not benefit from the incapacitation of violent or chronic criminals.

Retrieved February 21, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/second-third-and-fourth-chances-at-what-price-15657.html

Dissembling About Crime

Which liberals have been doing for some time, as this article from City Journal explains.

An excerpt.

New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik purports to care about black lives—except when doing so would violate liberal nostrums. In an essay on the nation’s 20-year crime drop, inspired by New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s new book, Uneasy Peace, Gopnik declares that the “urban crime wave is over.” Anyone who has recently raised an alarum about crime—that would be Donald Trump, of course—is appealing to “preexisting bigotry.” Trump campaigned “against crime and carnage where it scarcely exists,” Gopnik writes, in order to exploit the “fetishistic role” of crime in the racist American imagination.

Let’s look at what Gopnik calls crime that “scarcely exists.” In 2016, candidate Trump spoke repeatedly about the rising bloodshed in inner cities. That year was the second in a two-year, 20-percent increase in the nation’s homicide rate, the largest in nearly half a century. Violent crime overall rose nearly 7 percent in 2015 and 2016—the largest consecutive one-year increases in a quarter-century. Up until 2015, crime had been steadily dropping across the country, thanks to the spread of data-driven, proactive policing and the use of determinate sentencing to lock away violent criminals. But as 2014 drew to a close, that 20-year crime drop stalled and then reversed itself.

The victims of the 2015 and 2016 homicide increase were overwhelmingly black. In 2014, there were 6,095 black homicide victims, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. In 2015, there were 7,039 black homicide victims; in 2016, there were 7,881 black homicide victims. Those 7,881 dead black bodies in 2016 comprised more than half the total homicide victims that year, though blacks are only 13 percent of the population. An additional 2,731 blacks were killed over the course of 2015 and 2016 compared with 2014. To Gopnik, that loss of an additional 2,731 black lives is not worth paying attention to—it “scarcely exists.”

Trump regularly referred to Chicago’s crime increase during the presidential campaign. In 2016, 4,300 people were shot in Chicago—one person every two hours. The victims were overwhelmingly black. Two dozen children under the age of 12 were shot in Chicago in 2016, among them a three-year-old boy mowed down on Father’s Day 2016 who is now paralyzed for life, and a ten-year-old boy shot in August whose pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen were torn apart. Those child victims were also overwhelmingly black. Trump called those Chicago shootings and others like them in Baltimore and St. Louis “carnage.” What does Gopnik call them? A mere “bump or burp in the numbers.” If 4,300 white people had been shot in any city of the country, there would be a revolution. But because the victims were black, it would be dog-whistle racism to call attention to them. Racism once consisted of ignoring black-on-black violence as a fact of nature that was beneath concern. It is a bizarre twist in contemporary liberalism that drawing attention to the black victims of street crime is now the racist position. This deflection has come about in order to avoid acknowledging that the perpetrators of this crime are black, too. So it is better to look away entirely.

Retrieved February 15, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/looking-away-urban-crime-15722.html

Liberal & Conservative Discussion on Crime

As usual, the conservative wins again, as this article in Claremont Magazine reports.

An excerpt from conservative Joseph—after the introductory paragraph—being the more accurate.

In the Summer 2017 CRB, Joseph M. Bessette reviewed Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, by John Pfaff. We’re glad they have agreed to persue questions about the effectiveness of U.S. incarceration policy in reducing crime. John Pfaff is a Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. Joseph Bessette, a long-time CRB contributor, is the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College.

Joesph: Let me begin by returning the compliment to John Pfaff for his reasoned response to my somewhat critical review of his work Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. He makes a variety of interesting points, drawing on issues debated within the criminal justice literature. Unfortunately, he attributes to me positions regarding clearance rates and recidivism that I did not take in my review and he then devotes much of his response to attempting to refute these positions. More significantly, he avoids the central element of my critique by failing to detail the kinds of large-scale reductions in punishment that he calls for in his book for both nonviolent and violent offenders.

Pfaff describes my position as follows: “Summarizing quickly, Bessette’s pragmatic argument for prisons rests on a few, straight-forward points: (1) we have a lot of crime, violent crime in particular; (2) our clearance rates—the rates at which people are arrested for crimes—are low, requiring us to be harsh to those we do punish; and (3) the recidivism rates of those we release from prison are high, demonstrating the need to keep them locked up for longer periods.” While Pfaff is correct on point (1), I did not take the positions he attributes to me in points (2) and (3).

Let’s start with his second point on “clearance rates.” Clearance rates refer to the percentage of crimes that result in an arrest or are “cleared” in some other way, such the death of the offender in a gunfight with the police. If the police have “solved” the crime—even if they arrested someone who is later acquitted—the crime is considered “cleared” in the FBI statistics. Here is what I said about arrest rates, or clearance rates, in my review: “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.” That’s it. But for this brief mention, my entire argument focused not on those who get away with their crimes, but on those whom the police arrest and courts convict. Indeed, my very next sentence was “Yet, altogether, police made over 10 million arrests in 2015, 1.5 million for violent crimes (including misdemeanor assaults).”

Nowhere in the review did I argue that low clearance rates call for “harsh” punishment. (Indeed, I did not advocate “harsh” punishment on any grounds.) I do not believe that the burglars we catch should be punished more harshly because so many others get away with the same crime. (Note that although no one is arrested in 87% of the burglaries in the United States, it does not follow that 87% of burglars are never arrested for burglary. Burglary is a classic recidivist crime, and the more burglaries a criminal commits the more likely he is eventually to be arrested.) The burglars we do arrest and convict should be punished as much as they deserve for the crime(s) for which they were convicted adjusted by considerations of prior record.

It is, rather, the pure deterrence theorist who might argue that low clearance rates should be counteracted by longer sentences. After all, a rational burglar will compare the likely take from a burglary against the average “cost” he might pay for his crime, such as days incarcerated in jail or prison. Pfaff’s book dismisses the deterrent effect of longer sentences, but surely at some point sentence length matters if criminal punishment is to deter at all. If, say, a state reduced the maximum sentence for burglary from several years in state prison to a few weekends in local jail, is it plausible that burglaries would not increase? Prosecutors like Mike Hestrin in California’s Riverside County have been arguing that this is precisely the effect that new laws in California have had in sending convicted offenders, who used to go to state prison for at least a year, to local jails instead, where overcrowding results in just weeks or even days behind bars. He tells the story of “a known thief who had been stealing from the merchant’s store was caught stealing again and working a calculator on his phone. The arresting officers found out the thief had been adding up what he was stealing to make sure he was not taking more than $900 in merchandise so, if caught, he would only be charged with a misdemeanor, no matter how [many] times he was caught.” The result: a few days in jail and virtual impunity to steal again. As we will see, Pfaff’s proposal to bring U.S. incarceration rates more in line with those in Europe will effectively sweep all non-violent offenders from our prisons and jails, as well as many violent offenders.

What, then, of Pfaff’s third point on recidivism? Once again, my discussion was very brief and did not draw the conclusion that high recidivism rates “demonstrat[e] . . . the need to keep [prisoners] locked up for longer periods.” I introduced recidivism rates to raise a caution about a key argument in Pfaff’s book: “For almost all people who commit violent crimes, . . . violence is not a defining trait but a transitory state that they age out of. They are not violent people; they are simply going through a violent phase.” Now, since the context of the discussion is all about incarceration, Pfaff seems here clearly to be discussing violent offenders in prison – that is, the one-half of all state prisoners who were convicted of murder, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault. Unfortunately, Pfaff does not tell us what he means by “defining trait,” what period of time constitutes a “transitory state” (5 years, 10, 15, 20?), nor at what age “almost all people who commit violent crimes” cease to become dangerous. It is no surprise to anyone that criminals with a history of violence are less dangerous in their 60s and 70s than they were in their 20s. But this is not Pfaff’s point; for he gives us some indication of when the aging effect kicks in: “someone who acts violently when he’s eighteen years old may very well be substantially calmer by the time he’s thirty-five.”

Using this as a guide, I presented in my review the best recidivism data we have for inmates released from state prisons. And what I reported was that “fully 69% of those at least 40 years old at the time of release were arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within five years—not much lower than the 77% for all offenders. The aging effect, apparently, does not turn most hardened criminals into law-abiding citizens, though it may slow them down a bit.” In his response to my review Pfaff rightly notes that I overlooked a table early in the detailed recidivism report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) (tracking state inmates released in 2005) that presents age-related data on rearrests for a violent crime. I thank Pfaff for correcting my oversight since the data I did not report strengthen my case. Here are the 3-year arrest rates for a violent crime by age of the inmate when released:…

Retrieved February 7, 2018 from https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/crb-digital-discussion/

 

California Crime Rates Rising

And it has a definite cause, as this post from the Crime & Consequences blog notes.

An excerpt.

After crunching the numbers on yesterday’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, I found pretty much the same thing I have been finding for the last several years. In California, where “let ’em all loose” mania is more severe than in the country as a whole, crime trends are less favorable than in the country as a whole. This should not surprise anyone.

For cities over 100,000 population which reported for both first half 2016 and first half 2017, California cities had a 0.41% increase in violent crimes while U.S. cities outside California had a 1.16% drop. In property crimes, California cities had a 1.07% increase while non-California cities had a 1.09% drop.

Retrieved January 26, 2018 from http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2018/01/california-cities-doing-worse-.html

 

Broken Windows Policing Broken in New York

And the results are tragic, as this article from City Journal reports.

An excerpt.

The New York Times, along with anti-cop activists and the academic Left, opposes public-order enforcement as racially oppressive. With New York mayor Bill de Blasio likely to win a second term tomorrow, it now appears that his administration is following suit. There’s only one problem, as a Times article today unwittingly reveals: cutting back on such enforcement, also known as Broken Windows policing, violates the wishes of the very minority residents whom the Times purports to champion.

Two Times reporters travelled to majority-minority areas of the city to observe the New York Police Department’s new philosophy in action. A detective in Washington Heights, a heavily Dominican neighborhood of Manhattan, is letting some crimes go unpunished as a way to gain trust, report J. David Goodman and Al Baker. The detective had recently let a marijuana dealer go. “He’s up there selling weed and stuff, a bunch of small stuff,” the detective said. “And we’re worried about violent stuff.” Later, the dealer helped with some information on gangs, thus allegedly vindicating the no-enforcement policy.

This distinction between ignorable criminal “small stuff” and attention-worthy “violent stuff” is precisely what the Broken Windows philosophy rejects. Until recently, the NYPD firmly rejected that distinction as well.  A community characterized by street disorder is a magnet for violent street predation, since criminals rightly perceive that social controls there have broken down. Moreover, violent criminals do not scrupulously obey public-order laws; enforcing those misdemeanor laws gets them off the streets.

But even if there were no connection between the “small stuff” and the “violent stuff,” maintaining public order in high-crime communities is a moral imperative, because that is what the law-abiding residents there demand. (Enforcement need not always entail arrest; officers have the discretion to issue a warning instead.) The Times reporters attended a community meeting in the North Bronx, but it didn’t go according to the expected political narrative. A man complained about drug use on a playground. A woman reported drug dealing at a Chinese business: “they put their drugs right there in the Chinese place. I’m not trying to get my name involved,” she said.

Note: it is not just drug dealing that the community perceives as a scourge but also drug use—exactly what Times editors, readers, and other right-thinking people believe should be ignored or decriminalized. At a police-community meeting in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, officers had to explain why they could not easily stop “people from smoking marijuana in privately owned buildings,” in the Times’ words.  Someone had obviously made the same complaint that I have heard over and over at such gatherings: “I smell weed in my hallway, why can’t you do something about it?”

Black support for drug enforcement and other quality-of-life concerns has a long (and suppressed) history. In the 1950s, working- and middle-class blacks viewed drug addiction as a crime problem rather than as a public-health concern, writes Michael Javen Fortner in his groundbreaking book, Black Silent Majority. While the New York Times talked about the “victims” of the drug scourge, the Amsterdam News portrayed drug users themselves as the scourge. In 1959, Harlem’s New York Age called for “no leniency for the criminals, the recidivists, the junkies, dope pushers, muggers, prostitutes, or pimps. Clear out this scum—and put them away as long as the law will allow,” Fortner reports [emphasis added].

Retrieved November 7 2017 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/broken-narrative-15550.html

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