There is this mythology
among too many “law and order” conservatives that coming down hard on just
about any level of possibly criminal activity will make us safer. That
certainly is the assumption behind the Trump administration’s perspective on
crime in America. Does anyone genuinely believe that making undocumented
residents in the inner city afraid to talk to police or turn in offenders for
fear of deportation make the relevant cities safer? Further, by now, anyone
with the slightest willingness to look at statistics can tell you, our war on
drugs has been a rather total failure.
Those old three-strikes
laws and ever-lengthening prisons sentences (the longest on earth) didn’t make
us safer as the total costs of incarceration soared well-past merely unaffordable.
Fiscal conservatives, even the Koch brothers, are increasingly moving towards
advocating more realistic, shorter sentences and trying to shunt offenders
(particularly those charged with drug possession crimes) into alternative
programs. Add a criminal conviction to a person’s record, and their ability to
make a living plunges, their likelihood to resort to criminal sources of income
rises and the spending time in the best crime schools in the world (our
prison/jail system) become our reward for that mistaken effort. We simply
created more criminals at great and permanent social cost.
But as part of Donald
Trump’s overall effort to move the United States back to an earlier era, “Mr.
Trump has shifted the focus from civil rights to law and order, from reducing
incarceration to increasing sentences, from goading the police to improve to
protecting them from harm. Last week, he swore in a new attorney general, Jeff
Sessions, who has said that the government has grown ‘soft on crime,’ and
helped block a bipartisan bill to reduce sentences. Mr. Sessions said that a
recent uptick in crime in some major cities is a ‘dangerous, permanent trend,’
a view that is not supported by federal crime data, which shows crime remains
near historical lows.
“The president signed
executive orders that repeatedly connected public safety to immigration
violations, vowing to fight international crime cartels; to set up a task force
to ‘comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent
crime’; and to focus on preventing violence to peace officers.” New York Times,
February 13th. Some might think that law enforcement officers are
overwhelmingly supportive of this change, but think again.
“[P]rominent police
chiefs and prosecutors who fear that the new administration is out of step with
evidence that public safety depends on building trust, increasing mental health
and drug addiction treatment, and using alternatives to prosecution and
incarceration.
“We need not use arrest,
conviction and prison as the default response for every broken law,” Ronal W.
Serpas, a former police chief in Nashville and New Orleans, and David O. Brown,
a former Dallas chief, wrote in a report [FIGHTING CRIME AND STRENGTHENING
CRIMINAL JUSTICE: An Agenda for the New Administration] released [in the first
week of February] by a leading law enforcement group. ‘For many nonviolent and
first-time offenders, prison is not only unnecessary from a public safety
standpoint, it also endangers our communities.”
“The organization, the
Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, is made up of more
than 175 police officials and prosecutors, including Charlie Beck, Los
Angeles’s police chief; Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Manhattan’s district attorney; and
William J. Bratton, the former police chief in New York and Los Angeles. Other
leading law enforcement groups have also called for an increase in mental
health and drug treatment, a focus on the small number of violent offenders who
commit the most crimes, training officers on the appropriate use of force, and
retooling practices to reflect a growing body of evidence that common
practices, such as jailing people before trial on minor offenses, can actually
lead to an increase in crime.” NY Times. Depends on whether you prefer catchy
slogans that, on any closer analysis, clearly do not work, or implementing
governmental policies that actually cost less and make us safer.
I’m
Peter Dekom, and I wonder how our political decisions would improve if we
actually applied common sense based on hard, empirical facts.
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