Abundance, and Public Safety
The Main Obstacle to Reducing Crime is Scarcity
I am not a big fan of non-fiction book reviews. Unlike a movie review, you can’t describe the book notionally. You can’t say, “In Abundance, I thought Ezra Klein’s Othello was mealy and shrunken but Derek Thompson’s Iago was mesmerizing and soaring.” and in doing that, tell me something meaningful about the book. So, I am not going to review Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. Instead, I want to apply their framework to a subject they do not address (crime) and see where it leads us. And I think it leads us somewhere important.
Here I will argue that the framework proposed by Klein and Thompson spotlights the central issue in making America safer and more just: crime prevention and intervention resources are too scarce. This scarcity is in line with Klein and Thompson’s big idea that there is an imbalance in the supply and demand of essential common goods that national policy exacerbates. Specifically, they argue that public policy has substantially restrained the supply of core goods for decades and has instead tried to limit demand.
Ironically, when confronted by a scarce good, like housing, both political parties have responded with policies that make that good scarcer still. In housing this includes increasing the regulatory burden on the construction of new homes and apartments, land use policies that restrict construction (both of which reduce supply), and deportation-focused immigration policies meant, at least in part, to limit demand. The net result is a set of policies that increase scarcity, regardless of which party is in leadership.
Now, of course, no one is grabbing a pitchfork and marching for more scarcity, but that is, Klein and Thompson argue, the end result of policymaking. And has been for a long time.
Their prescription for this ailment is simple. Abundance should be the key outcome for policymaking. There is a lot to unpack in that statement and that is a discussion for another day. But Klein and Thompson advocate for setting abundance as the north star and then prioritizing policies that are most likely to achieve that goal.
This is an important idea, but it’s not a novel one, and I don’t think Klein and Thompson would find that statement to be critical. What they have done is to bring together a line of thought that is particularly cogent in housing policy, but that has applications in many other policy disciplines. Here, I want to think about abundance in the context of the criminal justice system.
I would argue that one hallmark of any important idea is that it is hard to see, but that once it is presented, it is head-slappingly obvious. I find the argument that we are in a race toward ever-increasing scarcity in justice systems to be very compelling. Moreover, after reading Abundance, it was equally obvious that this was the idea I had been writing about in these pages, only I did not have the awareness to pull the strings together. So, kudos to them.
That idea is that at the root of many public safety problems lies some important scarcity.
Over the last couple of years, I wrote an article that I first published on Substack, and then at Vital City, arguing that there are scads of evidence-based ideas that could prevent crime without expanding the scale of the criminal justice system. In the Substack article, I identified more than 300 evidence-based solutions for crime in America and had to leave many good ideas out. In other words, shovel-ready, evidence-based ideas to improve public safety and justice are so abundant that a list of 300 is exclusive!
All of these ideas for reducing crime acknowledge that prevention resources in the social service system are far too scarce and that improving the supply of evidence-based prevention is critical to safer communities.
The problem is that in criminal justice, as in housing and energy, public policy perpetuates scarcity. Klein and Thompson have hundreds of examples of policy-induced scarcity in their book, so it’s a little redundant to recreate them here. But let me just give one example specific to criminal justice and public safety.
A few years ago, I testified at a public safety budget hearing for a large city. I was 26th and last on the list to testify. The first testimony was given by the police, who justified their billion-dollar budget (the police are a single line item in the budget). The following 24 organizations were community-based direct service providers testifying about their organization, each of which was also a line item in the budget. Most of these organizations were requesting thousands, not millions, in funding. Taken as a whole, their funding was paltry compared to the police. But the policy approach—treating each local provider as its own line in the budget—meant that 97% of the testimony (and 97% of the budget items) explained 2.5% of the budget, while 2.5% of the testimony (2.5% of the budget items) explained 97% of the budget! If the goal is greater scarcity of community-based resources, this is the right approach. If the goal is abundance, this makes no sense at all.
And that is just on the prevention side. There are also scads of ideas that could improve the performance of the criminal justice system. Just take policing.
There is almost universal acceptance that there is a police staffing crisis in the United States—there are tens of thousands of unfilled positions for sworn law enforcement officers.
The police who are on the job are required to spend substantial time on noncriminal activities.
In part because of this, police response times are high and police too often find themselves in dangerous situations.
Police spend too much time monitoring traffic, an activity that could be automated, improving both justice and fairness and increasing the availability of police to respond to more serious matters.
In addition, police have far too few resources for new technology, like using DNA in criminal investigations of residential burglaries, which identified serious, chronic offenders.
The list is long, and this is just a bit of it. But most of the items on the list are about scarcity.
Once you begin to look for it, it is easy to see scarcity as the defining attribute of the criminal justice system.
Why are jails and prisons so dangerous, for both officers and correctional staff (chronic understaffing and staff turnover, inadequate training, limited resources, overcrowded facilities, aging infrastructure, and flawed organizational policies)?
Why does parole have almost no effect on recidivism, except in specialized programs (high caseloads, focus on surveillance over individualized treatment, limited services)?
Why are there so few alternatives to incarceration programs, even though there is a large literature showing how well they work (too few dedicated judges and case management teams)? Or therapeutic communities in prison? Or mental health treatment? Or access to medically assisted treatment when in corrections?
Or prevention?
Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity.
Reducing scarcity then is at the heart of any meaningful efforts to improve the justice system's performance and of leveraging other social service systems to fill gaps and amplify assets to help people stay out of the system. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the 300 ideas for reducing crime without expanding the criminal justice system are all evidence-based: that means these ideas are better than what we do today. And because new crimes can be catastrophic to victims, reducing crime should be the outcome all policy revolves around.
It is worth a minute to ponder why this idea of replacing scarcity with abundance feels new, at least in the field of justice. I would argue it is because there is no specific space in the study of criminal justice to think holistically about these ideas. I have recently argued that criminology needs a new discipline to think about macro issues, including these supply-demand imbalances. One of the key issues surfaced by Klein and Thompson, in my field anyway, is that there is a paucity of scholars even thinking at this level of agglomeration. A field of macrocriminology would be the right place to identify scarcity. Since it does not exist, it should be no surprise that it has not previously been identified.
In closing, let me just ask a rhetorical question. How does promoting scarcity in social services and in the criminal justice system lead to less crime and more safety? How could it?
I’m deeply cynical about social service programs reducing crime. First need is for defining how each program purportedly achieves its goals, and then accountability based upon measurable results. Too much in social services is kumbaiyah, as in educational policies. Billions in increases, nothing in achievement.
Someone interested in this topic might take a look at the State Police. State cops are often better educated, better trained and better paid than their town and city colleagues.
But while it is true in a number of states that State Police do criminal investigations, by and large our best and our brightest officers are traffic cops.
Is this a wise use of our resources? Issuing more speeding tickets is unlikely to bring the crime rate down. But that’s what State Policemen do for a living. Go figure.