MOBILE, Alabama — Poverty and inequity are not the “root causes of crime,” but leniency against crime is a major cause of communities falling into conditions of poverty and pervasive cultural blight.
Essentially, that’s the message provided, with stunningly copious statistical evidence, by the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual, who spoke on Dec. 13 at the Mobile chapter of the Federalist Society. Author of the book Criminal (In)Justice, Mangual is the son of a New York City police detective who saw firsthand how a tough-and-smart approach to criminal justice took that city from 2,245 murders in 1990 to just 292 in 2017.
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Alas, the national war on police in the wake of the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd, combined with a rash of “Soros prosecutors” and woke-progressive mayors and judges, along with indiscriminate “sentencing reforms” and massive “decarceration” (releasing criminals), has led nationwide to a massive spike in violent crime in the past few years.
“We have lowered the ‘transaction cost’ of committing crimes,” Mangual said, “while we have raised the transaction cost of deterring crime.” As simple logic would predict, the result indeed has been that crime has significantly rebounded. In 2020, the United States suffered a 30% rise in murders, the nation’s largest one-year murder-rate hike in history. New York City’s murders jumped nearly 47% that year. That number rose again, albeit by a smaller amount, in 2021.
Mangual said one big problem with decarceration is that most incarcerated people these days are violent recidivists. Only 14% of state convicts are in prison for mere drug offenses, and even some of those actually committed more serious crimes but pleaded down to lesser drug offenses. The median prisoner today has been indicted for between 10 and 12 prior crimes and convicted of five or six. Those released re-offend within 10 years at a rate of 83%. Even ex-convicts older than 65 have a recidivism rate above 40%.
By refusing to prosecute criminals, or by refusing to keep them imprisoned as long as they should be, cities and states across the country essentially are allowing tens of thousands of innocent civilians to be victimized by serious crime when otherwise they would not be. This reality, Mangual said, is why the major benefit of strict penalties for serious crimes is less the deterrent effect of the punishment than the incapacitation effect. Someone behind bars can’t rob a home or mug a pedestrian. Mangual said studies show that the deterrent effect is real, as well, but that the bigger benefit comes from the simple fact of removing the criminal from circulation.
And where neighborhoods are safer, people are less afraid to leave their houses, mingle with their neighbors, invest in their homes and communities without fear their investments will be ruined by crime, and do a host of other activities that build civil society.
Mangual didn’t say this next part, but it follows logically from his message. Namely, the smartest of the “criminal justice reformers” always have been those who insisted both that no leniency whatsoever should apply to more serious offenders and that the answer for low-level offenders is not to refuse to arrest or prosecute them but instead to offer constructive alternatives to incarceration once they are convicted. There is no inconsistency between being tough on crime and being smart and humane in dealing with petty offenders who can be rehabilitated.
Meanwhile, being “tough on crime” is beneficence toward minorities and the poor, for it is they, Mangual reminds us, who disproportionately are victimized by crime. In the end, the most humane policies are those that protect the innocent.
