Where to look for Crime-Fighting Ideas
A blindered approach to crime and justice is blocking the search for better solutions
“There’s a segment of our population whose lives are basically written off and everyone knows this and accepts it as the price of doing business.” – Bruce Springsteen
When is a System Actually a System?
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a lot of Americans took a long, cold look at our justice system, and did not like what they saw[1]. Polemics rained down, some from unusual places.
The American criminal justice system is “rotten to the core” one commentary exclaimed. It is a “raging dumpster fire of injustice” that has become antithetical “to our core constitutional values.” It suffers from three “pathologies… that completely undermine its moral and political legitimacy” which are: “(1) unconstitutional overcriminalization; (2) point‐and‐convict adjudication; and (3) near‐zero accountability for police and prosecutors.”
Which wild-eyed liberal author penned this anti-establishment screed? Why it was … The Cato Institute, whose vision “is to create free, open, and civil societies founded on libertarian principles.” It’s an organization that fights the forces of antidisestablishmentarianism[2]. And one that is not a bastion of wild-eyed liberalism.
Politics aside, the point of the matter is that the blemishes of the American criminal justice system are not hard to see, assuming one were to look. But even though we are looking, we tend to do so in a blindered way. Like a spooked thoroughbred at The Classic, we cannot see the grandstand and the track and the other racers all at once, we can only focus on one bit of dirt at a time, one injustice at a time.
As a result, and critically, we have bought in to the idea that the American Criminal Justice System is not a system at all, but rather a distributed set of independent actors engaging in law-related activities. We cannot fight the system because there is no system, not really, just battles in a war with no front lines.
Poppycock.
While the schadenfreude of pointing out other brainwashed people is titillating, I fear we have all been pushed into thinking that to look at the criminal justice system is not to see it at all.
There’s subtle brainwashing in that line of thinking. It’s a little like recycling.
We have all been trained that recycling is good for the earth, that only bad people don’t recycle, that if you throw away a plastic water bottle you have committed at least a venal sin, and please teach your children before it’s too late. And the bottlers and plastics manufacturers laugh and tut-tut that we are all in this together, but only individuals can take action. And so we painfully and inefficiently and individually focus on guilt-ridden recycling one bottle at a time and together we recycle maybe 8% of the world’s plastic and now there are plastic particles in all our blood and it is not getting better. And we never think to say, “HEY. You guys make all this crap—why don’t YOU clean it up?”
So, the metaphor is that we have been trained to think that American criminal justice is perhaps not a system at all when it really is. Go to any of the more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies and you will see the same patterns of patrol, the same kinds of people being arrested and taken to the same kinds of jails where they receive the same plea offers such that there are almost no jury trials anywhere. Upon conviction, they go to the same kinds of correctional institutions and receive the same kinds of community supervision. There are variations at the margin but not at the mean. Not really.
So, when you look really hard at the criminal justice system you will see that 1) it is a system and 2) that it badly needs some new ideas. In fact, it needs many, many, new ideas.
New Ideas
Let me offer one idea here, and then offer a roadmap to a few more at the end of the newsletter.
One new idea is that the criminal justice system is remarkably hard to change because the thing that it seeks to change—crime—is much more responsive to changes in the world around it than it is to the few levers available to the justice system. Those few levers can be pushed up or down within some range of crime levels, but they do little to change the range. In summary, then, the new idea is that the criminal justice system has little to do with changing crime rates.
Now, you might argue that this is hardly a new idea. And it hardly is. But there is also hardly any consensus supporting it. I have argued in this very newsletter that the crime decline of the 1990s had little to do with the criminal justice system and policing. I have also argued that the violence spike that began in 2020 has little to do with the criminal justice system and policing.
Mass incarceration has undoubtedly had some effect on total crime in the US, but to argue that it explains more than a fraction of the reduction is making a claim that goes well beyond the data. The studies showing the strongest support for incarceration as a means to explain the crime decline find it explains up to one-quarter of the decline. Many studies find small or no effect. But, of course, something has to explain the massive decline in crime and violence in the 1990s.
Let me say a little more about that last point because it also goes to the idea that the criminal justice system is in fact a system.
In January 2021 I wrote here that the explosion in gun homicide in 2020 would persist in 2021 and that those high rates would only slowly recede in 2022. And, that homicide rates would remain above 2019 levels through 2023, and probably beyond. This was an easy prediction as it was based on the idea that several factors related to COVID that are outside the criminal justice system would continue to affect the level of violence.
One important consequence of the COVID pandemic that likely has had a substantial effect on violence in 2021 and 2022 is that public sector employment within local governments was decimated by COVID and it is the local public sector—directly and through contracts with community-based organizations—that funds our human service infrastructure. And it is through that social service infrastructure—not through policing and prisons and community supervision—that society prevents violence. And here we are, rushing toward the end of 2022, with full employment as a society but still having recovered only a fraction of lost public sector jobs. Gun violence appears to be perhaps down a little from its peak, but still well above 2019 rates.
Implications
The role of public sector unemployment on crime is important because it is just one of many plausible alternative hypotheses explaining the spike in violence. Thus, it represents an opportunity that has so far gone almost completely unexplored. Which is the idea that if society focuses on reducing crime—and in doing so acknowledges that the criminal justice system as it exists today has little impact on changing crime rates—then suddenly there are all kinds of crime-reducing mechanisms to test.
In an earlier newsletter, I wrote about more than two dozen credible, research-based explanations of the crime decline in the 1990s. Many of these explanations are well known to the public, particularly the link between lead exposure and criminality and the link between the legalization of abortion and the crime decline. So, lead, abortion, and mass incarceration, depending on your politics, can all be seized upon to explain the crime decline.
But the thing is that 1) together these theories probably explain only a relatively small proportion of the crime decline and 2) none are replicable today. So, if there is some future crime decline, perhaps similar to what is happening today, solutions certainly aren’t going to be driven by any of those three mechanisms. So where do we look for other ideas?
Understanding Disruptive Innovation in a Crime and Justice Setting
As it happens, early in the crime decline—in 1995—the Harvard Business Review coined the phrase ‘disruptive innovation’ which described how new businesses could displace old businesses. Now, almost thirty years later, we have been so thoroughly and so innovatively disrupted that the words ring hollow. But a quick peek at first principles provides some that may be of use to our justice system.
The idea of disruptive innovation was simple. A company comes along and dominates some industry, usually by more efficiently creating a mass market product (think Starbucks). But, as the company evolves, it starts looking for higher-margin products (think Quad Venti White Mocha Frappuccino) and moves away from its roots of low-margin products for mass consumption.
And here my friends is the opportunity for some savvy entrepreneurs to innovate and disrupt. If someone can invent a cheaper product or process that beats Starbucks at the low-margin, high-volume part of the business, voila! Disruption.
So, what is the analogy to public safety? First principles. The low-margin, high-volume input of the criminal justice is… everything that happens before someone comes into contact with the criminal justice system. This is otherwise known as prevention. Or at least what is called prevention outside of policing (note: prevention and deterrence are routinely confounded in criminal justice, so here’s my cheat sheet: deterrence is what you use when prevention has totally failed, rehabilitation is what you use when prevention has partially failed). Loads more on this here.
In earlier versions of this article, I wrote a long (but terrifically interesting!) digression about the scientific method and Henri Poincare. But my New Year’s resolution was to digress less[3], so in that spirit, let me just give you some skip all that and go right to the maybe helpful ideas.
(Important note: I am happily giving away these ideas for free, and I hope someone takes them up. That is also a convenient segue to my noting that this newsletter is free and will likely remain free. The only remuneration I request is that if you find it interesting pass it along to someone else. Cheers.)
Below, I have reproduced a graphic from the New York Times on the effects of social programs on child poverty. Now, we know that child poverty is a huge driver of crime. We also know that there are many mechanisms by which child poverty leads to crime. There are in fact so many that it seems a little futile to name them all. So, let me just describe one pathway.
Moms in poverty tend to have worse pre-natal access to health care, and as a result, are more likely to have low birth weight babies. Low birth weight babies, combined with more limited access to high-quality postnatal health care for poor moms, leads to more asthma, and more untreated asthma. Untreated asthma leads to lower attachment to schools, power educational attainment, truancy, and dropout. All of those outcomes are associated with a greater risk of delinquency. And, of course, juvenile delinquency is associated with adult criminality.
Now, at some point or another, you probably anticipated that I was going to go down a different path. Yes! That’s the point, that there are *so many* pathways from child poverty to delinquency.
This brings us back to the New York Times graphic, showing the effect of ten different child poverty reduction programs. While we may know how much each program reduced child poverty, we do not know what the effect was on disrupting a pathway that culminates in adult criminality. We should know this!
In this list, each intervention has its own trade-offs in costs and benefits, and each has a different effect size. Somewhere on this list, there might be some relatively low-cost, high-benefit child poverty reduction program that is unexpectedly and especially effective at preventing future criminality.
So, that’s the idea. Which of these programs contributed the most to reducing crime?
The bigger idea is that once we start looking at policy from this angle, there are just a huge number of possible solutions to test. We should test them.
Another way to say all this is that we should stop writing off whole segments of our population.
Musical Interlude
Hey, if you hung in this far, I’ve got a treat. Forty years ago, Tom Petty was wrapping Long After Dark with the legendary producer Jimmy Iovine, and this song hit the cutting room floor. And was never seen again. It was never released, and doesn’t seem to exist on Apple or iTunes or Spotify, just here. But it’s an absolute classic.
Happy melody, desperate lyrics. C’est comme ca.
Godspeed TP.
This is Turning Point:
[1] One indicator that people did not like what they saw is the movement to rename the criminal justice system as the criminal legal system, on the grounds that the system is unjust. For now, I’m going to keep referring to it as the criminal justice system on the grounds that removing justice from the name let’s the system off the hook to be just.
[2] Merriam-Webster notes they were only able to find three instances of the usage of antidisestablishmentarianism in the last 100 years, and thus removed the word from the dictionary.
[3] “Incessant digressions…were a perpetual flight from death, as—day by day, hour by hour—we neurotically try to evade the specter of our mortality”—Karen Armstrong.