[Disclaimer: The views expressed in opinion pieces on the PrescotteNews website are solely those of the authors. These opinions do not necessarily represent those of the staff of Prescott eNews or its publisher.]<\/p>\n
Raphael A. Mangual,\u00a0Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts the Most<\/a><\/em>, Center Street, 2022, 256 pages, $29.00 hardcover<\/strong><\/p>\n First-time author Rafael A. Mangual is a son of Dominican and Puerto Rican parents. Trained as a lawyer, he now is a public policy analyst with the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to its flagship publication\u00a0City Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n Mr. Mangual lived to the age of nine in a sketchy Brooklyn neighborhood, at which point his NYPD-detective father decided to move the family to an overwhelmingly white Long Island suburb. The boy did not like the change at first, and was teased for looking different from other kids. Gradually, however, he came to realize that, unlike in his old neighborhood, there was almost no risk of having his bicycle stolen from under him: \u201cI grew to understand and appreciate the decision my parents made to move my sister and me out to what they felt would be a safer, more nurturing environment.\u201d Now a father of two, he recently made a similar move for his own children.<\/p>\n Mr. Mangual was inspired to write\u00a0Criminal (In)Justice<\/em>\u00a0by the madness that gripped America in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s death. Affluent liberals cavalierly pressed for policies whose negative consequences will be borne by poor people in neighborhoods they never visit. Politicians rushed to pass ill-considered police oversight and reform laws on the assumption that sensational stories of police shootings were reliable evidence of a need for thoroughgoing changes. As the author writes: \u201cThe road to productive reform begins not with a rush forward, but with a step back \u2014 one that allows us to soberly consider the complicated realities that our passions may be obscuring.\u201d<\/p>\n We have been here before<\/strong><\/p>\n Older Americans may get a sense of\u00a0d<\/em>\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>\u00a0from today\u2019s debates. The 1960s and 70s saw rising crime, accompanied by much uninformed talk about the need to combat its \u201croot causes,\u201d alleged to be poverty and deprivation. Such talk did not go unanswered: Criminologists did empirical studies of correlations between crime and various forms of adversity. The result was extensive documentation of a relative\u00a0lack<\/em>\u00a0of correlation. It became known as \u201ccrime\/adversity mismatch,\u201d and can be read about in studies such as Barry Latzer\u2019s\u00a0The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2016). Between 1950 and 1970, for example, the material welfare of black Americans improved greatly, but their crime rates rose.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, scholars such as James Q. Wilson (an important influence on Mr. Mangual) were building a powerful case for combatting crime directly, i.e., without fussing over alleged \u201croot causes.\u201d One idea Wilson advocated in the early 1980s has become known as \u201cbroken windows theory.\u201d At that time, many police departments did not bother enforcing laws against lesser public order offences (such as leaving broken windows unrepaired) on the plausible grounds that resources were already being stretched trying to stop serious crimes. Wilson and others proposed that combatting lesser offenses would reduce serious crime as well.<\/p>\n Within a few years, NYPD Chief Bill Bratton made broken windows theory the basis for a reform of New York policing. He also started active \u201cstop and frisk\u201d in the most dangerous neighborhoods with the idea of combating crime\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0it happened. His reforms coincided with a nationwide trend toward less lenient treatment of criminals, including mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws. The result was a historic drop in crime during the 1990s that continued into this century \u2014 and was very noticeable in New York City.<\/p>\n The very success of these reforms helped inspire a countermovement to undo them. America\u2019s incarceration rate had become the highest in the world, and critics cited falling crime rates themselves as evidence that this level of incarceration was unnecessary. Getting tough on crime had also meant getting tough on black and Hispanic men, so complaints of racial bias came early and loud. Others argued that most prisoners were nonviolent drug offenders who should not be jailed, or that jailing fathers tore families torn apart and hurt children.<\/p>\n Groups representing an anti-fascist ideology, including a defund the police group, build a revolutionary workers state and a group against the Proud Boys, marched from Central Park South towards Madison Square Park. (Credit Image: \u00a9 John Lamparski\/SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire)<\/em><\/p>\n The tone of these arguments was often much less polite than my summary. As Mr. Mangual puts it, Americans have seen \u201celected officials, media figures, and activists viciously demonize the institutions that played central roles in the public safety gains.\u201d Much of the reformers\u2019 anger was due to sensational media reports about black criminals either shot by police or who died in police custody: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Grey, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and George Floyd.<\/p>\n The decarceration movement took hold even before the hysteria that followed Floyd\u2019s death: Between 2009 and 2019, America\u2019s imprisonment rate declined by 17 percent. Not coincidentally, crime began climbing. Crime historian Eric Monkkonen has speculated that cycles of higher and lower crime rates may be natural: \u201c[R]ising violence provokes a multitude of control efforts, [but when] the murder rate ebbs, control efforts get relaxed, thus creating the multiple conditions causing the next upswing.\u201d<\/p>\n Answering the critics<\/strong><\/p>\n Antipolice zealots are not the only people who notice that America has the highest incarceration rates in the world. However, the West European nations to which America is often compared have incarceration rates so low that we would have to release 70 percent of inmates to reach parity. Brazil is a country with more crime than America, but it also has lower levels of incarceration. This is easily explained by Brazil\u2019s relative poverty; it does not have the same resources for law enforcement we do. America has a high incarceration rate because we have both relatively high crime and the money to deal with it.<\/p>\n It is not true that most prisoners in the US are nonviolent drug users: most are violent offenders who have already had repeated second chances. Just 14.1 percent of prisoners are in for drug offences, mainly trafficking. Fewer than 4 percent of inmates are in for simple possession and that charge often understates the crime. Ninety-five percent of state-level criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain, meaning that more serious charges are dropped in exchange for a plea to lesser charges. Some prisoners go to jail for drug offenses the way Al Capone did for tax evasion: not because it was his most serious crime, but because it was the charge that would stick. Moreover, since criminals are not specialists, the nature of their most recent offence is not always a good clue to what crime they will commit next.<\/p>\n One of the odder arguments for reform is that incarceration \u201ctears families apart.\u201d Fatherlessness is certainly a problem in America, but it is overwhelmingly caused by divorce or illegitimacy, not incarceration. Moreover, men incarcerated in America typically belong to that minority whose children are better off\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0being in close contact with them.<\/p>\n The most common attributes of criminal offenders include a grandiose sense of entitlement and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). A sense of entitlement means an \u201cunreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations,\u201d and often comes with \u201ca highly antagonistic approach toward interpersonal dealings.\u201d It is among the best predictors of many forms of aggression. ASPD can be defined as \u201cdeceitfulness, impulsivity, reckless disregard for others, high levels of irritability and aggressiveness, and remorselessness in the wake of misbehavior.\u201d Two to four percent of men have this disorder. Among inmates, it is 40\u201370 percent.<\/p>\n Mr. Mangual cites studies to show that the \u201cquality of a father\u2019s involvement matters more than his mere presence,\u201d and that children who live with fathers who \u201cengage in very high levels of antisocial behavior\u201d will go on to behave \u201csignificantly worse\u201d than \u201ctheir peers whose fathers also engage in high levels of antisocial behavior but do not reside with their children.\u201d Bad parents can leave children \u201ctraumatized, empty, and incapable of forming meaningful personal relationships,\u201d which makes them more likely to become criminals.<\/p>\n Mr. Mangual\u2019s discussion reminded me of the furor during Donald Trump\u2019s presidency over separating illegal aliens from their children at the Mexican border. Why do some people seem to care about family breakup only when it is because parents broke the law?<\/p>\n Criticism of racial disparities in incarceration is, of course, a staple of calls for reform. A well-known example is Michelle Alexander\u2019s\u00a0The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness<\/em>\u00a0(2010). Such disparities are easily explained by racial differences in criminal behavior, and these arguments usually ignore racial differences in\u00a0victimization<\/em>.<\/p>\n Serious violent crime in America is heavily concentrated, geographically and demographically. Criminologist David Weisburd has even tried to formulate a \u201claw of crime concentration:\u201d Somewhere around 4 percent of a city\u2019s blocks will usually see 50 percent of its total crime. Most of the people living in these neighborhoods are not themselves violent criminals; they are just too poor to move away. These are the people most vulnerable to the effects of violent crime and about as disproportionately black and brown as the criminals themselves. They are the ones who pay for the reckless decarceration promoted by limousine liberals.<\/p>\n Limitations of post-Floyd police reforms<\/strong><\/p>\n In April 2021, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported that \u201cover 30 states have passed more than 140 new police oversight and reform laws\u201d after George Floyd\u2019s death. Mr. Mangual believes that most reforms have been ill-considered, for two reasons: 1) legislators have overestimated the problem of excessive police force, and 2) have assumed that ready-made solutions are available for real problems.<\/p>\n Between 2015 and 2020, police in the US shot and killed an average of 993 people a year. This must be understood in a context in which nearly 700,000 full-time police officers interact with over 61 million persons and make over 10,000,000 arrests every year. Moreover, 93 percent of fatal shootings involve armed suspects. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), claims of excessive force occur at a rate of only about one per every 200 full-time officers per year, and BJS found that civilian complaint review boards uphold just 6 percent of claims of excessive force. In short, the author writes, \u201cthere is much less room for improvement than one might guess after consuming the mainstream media narrative about policing in America,\u201d and we must remain \u201csober and realistic about how much we can expect to reduce an already exceedingly rare occurrence.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Mangual lists five common proposals for police reform: 1) defunding, 2) demilitarizing, 3) abolishing qualified immunity for officers, 4) diverting some police calls to mental health professionals, and 5) training officers in de-escalation techniques.<\/p>\n 1) The most foolish reform proposal is surely defunding. As Mr. Mangual notes, the inverse correlation between policing and crime is about the most robust finding in all of criminology and cutting back on police \u201cwill result in the deaths of a hell of a lot more people than police kill.\u201d Those who profess concern over black lives may wish to note that black homicide victim numbers go down at about twice the rate of whites as police forces are strengthened.<\/p>\n 2) The seeming militarization of American police forces has disturbed many Americans: Officer Friendly has given way to faceless men in black tactical gear. This is mainly due to the increased prevalence of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams and to the introduction, since 1990, of the so-called 1033 program under which state and local law enforcement can acquire surplus military equipment.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prescottenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/CriminalInjustice-430x600-1.jpg\")
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