The NYT Fancy Dance on Crime in the Midterms
The Democrats would prefer that the public focus on such things as climate change, January 6 and “defending democracy” as the major issues in the forthcoming election. (N.B. Defending democratic resolution of the abortion debate is decidedly not one of those things as to which the supposed concern about democracy is to apply, that issue being suitable for resolution, we are told, solely by the non-elected judiciary). As is now well-established, however, the two biggest issues in voters’ minds are runaway inflation (and the recession it’s about to produce), together with the big increase in crime, murder in particular.
Understanding this, the New York Times has now taken to reassuring us that it’s all in our head, and even if it isn’t, we’re just not broad-minded enough. Hence today’s NYT piece, wonderfully titled, “The midterm election debates on crime have overlooked a success of criminal justice reform efforts.”
The piece is a NYT classic.
The Republicans’ approach in Pennsylvania reflects their party’s embrace of crime as a top issue in many midterm elections. Republicans have demanded solutions to crime increases, and they have criticized Democrats for supporting major changes to criminal justice policy in recent years, claiming that they fueled swelling crime rates….As is typical in political campaigns, nuance is getting lost.
Whenever you see the word “nuance” in a NYT piece, you know it’s time to watch your wallet, since that word is Times-speak for “a discussion so slippery it would embarrass a criminal defense lawyer.”
The problem for the Times is that, in an article published in its own pages a little more than a month ago, it spilled the beans, noting, “the murder rate is still 30 percent above its 2019 level,” i.e., the level the year before Joe Biden was elected. How a 30 percent increase in murder over the last two years is to be palmed off as “a success of criminal justice reform efforts” — or as a success in any sane sense at all — might be seen as a mystery, but that’s only before we get to the “nuance.”
It doesn’t take long.
[M]any Democrats, wary of being labeled weak on the issue, have remained quiet or criticized even successful changes to the legal system.
And there have been achievements. Understanding them can give you a fuller grasp of crime in the U.S. right now than you might hear in debates or television ads in the run-up to next week’s elections.
I want to explain one such shift that has gotten little attention: Slowly, the American criminal justice system has become more equitable. The racial gap among inmates in state prisons has fallen 40 percent since 2000, fueled by a large decrease in Black imprisonment rates, according to a new report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank.
Gads, where to start?
The first thing to notice is that “successful change” is defined, not by reference to reducing crime, which any normal person would think is the main goal of the criminal justice system, but by reference to reducing incarceration and, in particular, the “racial gap among inmates.” But incarceration, by keeping criminals out of civil society, is one of main tools we have to reduce crime, as we used to know. And if common sense weren’t enough to convince you, the statistics might: In the 20 years from 1991 to 2011, crime, and murder in particular, fell by almost half — this at the same time the prison population was (as liberals constantly complained) increasing substantially.
This is not that hard to understand; indeed, even a NYT writer could get it if he wanted to. When a violent criminal is behind bars, he’s not planting a revolver on your forehead to relieve you of your wallet or car, or sticking an icepick in the clerk’s ear at the 7-11 to relieve her of the contents of the safe. The Left can wail “correlation is not causation” all it wants, but when the correlation is this strong for this long — an entire generation — it most certainly is causation. What’s lacking is not cause-and-effect but the willingness to see cause-and-effect — either that, or the determination to kick up enough dust so that the causal relationship gets buried in “nuance.”
Second, what are we to make of the assertion that “the criminal justice system has become more equitable”? “Equitable” is a wonderfully slippery word having no very well settled meaning (which is, of course, why the Left loves to use it). But let’s say, trying to play it straight, that “equitable” means “fair all things considered.”
Question: How exactly is it fair to black people, all things considered, that so many fewer are in prison while so many more are in the morgue? When criminals are not incarcerated, they don’t disappear. They do something, and generally what they do is return to crime, as we have known since forever. The recidivism rate is sky-high. Let me quote the pro-defense “Prison Legal News” (emphasis added):
Two reports on long-term recidivism among prisoners released from state and federal prisons showed very high arrest rates. The rate for state prisoners was 83% over a nine-year study period, while it was 39.8% for nonviolent and about 64% for violent federal prisoners over an eight-year period.
Got that? About two-thirds of violent prisoners get back in business once they return to civil society. All the nuance the NYT can dredge up cannot conceal the fact that the heart of “criminal justice reform” — shorter sentences and early release — is certain to produce, and has produced, more crime and more crime victims. And that is what’s being touted as success.
Oh, and one last fact for now, specifically, the fact conspicuous by its absence in the Times piece: the gross racial disparity in crime victimization, and particularly violent crime victimization. When crime goes up, blacks are hurt more than others, because blacks are disproportionately victims of crime.
The Heritage Foundation studied this and released its report this last April. It found:
We parsed the FBI’s crime data from 2011 to 2020 (the most recent data available) and found that African Americans bear an increasingly large share of the harm from crime. African American offenders, meanwhile, are committing an increasingly large share of violent crimes….
When we look at homicide specifically, we see similar trends. The percentage of total victims who were black rose 2.9% to 54.4% in 2020. For white victims, the percentage fell 3.5% to 43.3% over the same period….
The most significant changes, therefore, were that black people represent an increasing share of violent crime victims, and white people a smaller share. It’s true that we’re dealing in relatively small percentages (less than 5%), but when you consider that the number of violent crimes has more than doubled, you realize that these increases are significant.
The true size of the problem is made starker when we consider that African Americans make up only 14.2% of the total population….Thus, these small percentages represent an enormous problem that, for black people, is getting worse, both in relative and absolute terms.
I do not agree in the slightest with the NYT’s obsessive interest with the racial makeup of the prison population, because — as I can tell you from my 25 years’ experience as a federal prosecutor — what gets you sent to prison is your behavior not your color. But even if I’m wrong about that, and even if one is to judge “success” by the NYT’s own perverted standards, the data tell only one story: Criminal justice “reform” is not only not a success, but a lethal failure. And the electorate next Tuesday, black, brown and white, is well advised to hold the Democrats accountable for their eager if mindless advocacy for it.