Decarceration Has Been a Substantive and Political Disaster

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

 

New York’s governor Kathy Hochul delivered one of the most memorable lines of the midterm debates when she said she didn’t know why her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, cared so much about locking up criminals.

 

Hochul’s highhandedness encapsulated an attitude toward crime and punishment that has been shaped by the decarceration movement.

 

Progressives have accepted a wholesale critique of the criminal-justice system, a critique that is deeply flawed, not to say a complete fantasy. Its premises are false, and its effects are destructive. At the same time, it has made — for the second national election in a row — Democrats vulnerable to a Republican fusillade on crime.

 

If the 2022 midterms can drive a stake through the decarceration movement, which gained intellectual ground during the Obama years and seemed set to sweep all before it in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd, they will have done a favor to the country — and, incidentally, the Democratic Party.

 

A key erroneous contention of this critique is that the U.S. spent decades arbitrarily locking up millions of people to make itself a deeply unjust carceral state. In reality, as criminologist Barry Latzer points out in his book The Myth of Overpunishment, the U.S. experienced a massive crime wave beginning half a century ago that naturally resulted in more imprisonments. From 1960 to 1990, violent-crime arrests increased more than 400 percent and prison commitments more than 270 percent.

 

Another myth is that prisons are full of small-time or nonviolent offenders. According to Latzer, more than half of inmates in state prisons have committed violent crimes such as murder, rape, or assault. Another 16 percent have committed significant property crimes, including felony theft and burglary.

 

How about drug crimes? They account for 14 percent of imprisonments, and less than 4 percent are for possession (and those offenders may well be guilty of other crimes).

 

It’s not true that an overly punitive U.S. is always throwing away the key. In his book Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael Mangual, of the Manhattan Institute, points out that state prisoners serve a median sentence of roughly 15 months and violent offenders less than two and a half years.

 

It’s not as though, by the way, we are catching every criminal and nailing him to the wall. About half of murderers are arrested and imprisoned, Latzer writes, while only about 6 percent of other violent offenders are brought to justice.

 

A tiny percentage of the population, something like 5 percent, is responsible for about 50 percent of crime. According to Latzer, 400,000 state prisoners released in 2005 had been arrested 4.3 million times prior to their incarceration, and 83 percent of them got rearrested within nine years of being released.

 

As emphasized by the headlines from around the country about monsters with long rap sheets committing terrible crimes, we should be seeking to put such dangerous people out of commission. And we aren’t doing it with requisite seriousness.

 

Even prior to the tumult of 2020, we had combined decarceration over the prior decade (with the prison population declining by 17 percent) and de-policing (with 25 percent fewer arrests).

 

Robust policing is, of course, an indispensable part of maintaining order. Mangual writes that the simple proposition that “more policing means less crime” is “one of the most consistent and robust findings in the criminological literature.”

 

Maybe Democrats will begin to acknowledge this and sue for a formal divorce from the decarceration movement.

 

Democrats wouldn’t have to deny their true views and minimize the spike in certain categories of crime or — like Hochul — express bemused contempt for a tough-on-crime position if they simply acknowledged that we need more cops arresting more criminals, and these offenders should be put behind bars more reliably and for longer sentences.

 

If the party didn’t get this after the 2020 election, maybe there is, to paraphrase the folk expression, education in the second kick of the mule.