The Reform Movement Has Gone Astray: In Defense of Traditional Criminal Justice
Activists, academics, and so-called experts have laid siege to the criminal justice system for decades. Despite the remarkable decrease in crime nationwide following the adoption of aggressive policing and prison policies in the 1990s, many researchers tell state lawmakers that their efforts failed to impact crime and led to wasteful and immoral “mass incarceration.”
These researchers are lying.
The basic assumptions of the contemporary criminal justice policy debate are that police officers play a marginal role in preventing or deterring crime; that prisons are filled with non-violent people who can be released without negatively impacting public safety; that prisons and longer sentences fail to prevent crime; and that property crimes and disorder, especially committed by homeless people, are simply an economic ill and not within the proper purview of the criminal justice system. From these assumptions flow most of the top reform priorities: fewer police, more social workers, looser drug laws, shorter sentences, less enforcement against thieves and homeless offenders, and so on.
The problem for reformers is that these assumptions are flawed, and the survival of these particular policy priorities requires considerable obfuscation of criminal justice data and the use of rhetorical gymnastics. The result has been a policy discussion focused on counter-productive proposals that weaken the criminal justice system’s impact on crime rather than optimizing its effectiveness alongside traditional modes of enforcement.
This report aims to rebut the major arguments of mainstream criminal justice reformers and defend traditional approaches to criminal justice policy.
Police Do Matter—And We Need More of Them
Most criminal justice reformers have abandoned their foolish position on “defunding” the police, but many maintain that policymakers should still rely less on policing. This is a position guided more by ideology than by scientific evidence. Police are the single most important factor in preventing crime and keeping society safe.
Some of the strongest evidence for the outsize role of police on public safety comes from an unexpected source: Europe. The U.S. and its global peers, who are found in the European Union, each spend roughly 1.2 percent of their respective GDPs on public safety, yet the U.S. is much more violent. Americans are more than seven times as likely to be murdered than Europeans. More than 60 percent of American inmates are there due to violent offenses, compared with roughly 40 percent of European inmates. Given these higher violence levels, America’s public safety resources are spread far thinner than those of the European Union, undermining our ability to fight crime effectively.
So, what is Europe’s secret to lower violence? Police.
Europe spends five times as much of its GDP on policing as on prisons. America, in the meantime, spends a mere 1.5 times as much on policing as on prisons. As a result, Europe has more than twice the total number of police officers as the U.S., despite only having 35 percent more residents.
Other metrics show in stark terms how under-policed America is when compared with its European peers. America has roughly 198 officers per 100,000 residents—down 18 percent since the late 1990s—whereas Europe has 333 officers for every 100,000 residents. Comparing officer levels with violent-crime levels reveals an even more concerning statistic: Europe has 396 police officers per homicide; America has only 32.5.
These data plainly show that America has far fewer officers to handle far more violent crimes than other developed nations.
America also has far fewer officers than it did in the past. Between the late 1990s and 2016, the number of police officers per capita nationally dropped by more than 10 percent. Contrary to the popular progressive narrative, there is little evidence to suggest that America is overpoliced. In fact, the United States is woefully under-policed, and we have the crime rates to show for it.
Criminologists have long known that investments in police are an effective way to cut crime—and far more efficient than prisons, which are necessary but blunt (and costly) tools for fighting crime.
- A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that increasing the number of officers in the 1990s reduced crime by an estimated five percent to 10 percent.
- University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt estimated that one dollar spent on police is 20 percent more effective at reducing crime than a dollar spent on prisons. In another study, he found that expanding police departments reduced violent crime by 12 percent and reduced property crime by eight percent.
- Berkeley law professor Frank Zimring concluded that increasing the number of police officers per committed homicide contributed significantly to New York City’s 80 percent drop in crime in a two-decade period. Notably, Zimring finds that much of New York’s police-driven reduction in crime came without substantial increases in prison populations.
Prisons Are Not Full of Non-Violent Drug Offenders
Incarcerations due to drug-related crimes account for only a small portion of America’s prison population.
Of the approximately 145,000 people in federal prisons and 1,040,000 people in state prisons, fewer than 3.5 percent are incarcerated for a conviction related to drug possession. Even when one expands the scope beyond mere possession to all other types of drug offenses (many of which are associated with violent cartels and gangs), the proportion rises only to 18 percent.
The hard truth for criminal justice reformers is that violent offenses are far more prevalent among America’s prisoners. At the state level—where nine in 10 prisoners are incarcerated—almost 60 percent of inmates committed violent crimes. Roughly 143,000 people are imprisoned for convictions related to sexual assault and 155,000 for homicide, compared with 146,000 for all drug crimes combined. The numbers prove the idea that America’s “mass” incarceration is a result of drug crimes is absurd.
America’s incarceration “problem” relates directly to its violent crime problem. The nation’s incarceration rate—roughly 639 per 100,000 people—is four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia. Without context, that statistic is alarming, but when we consider that America’s homicide rate is 7.5 times higher than those same peer nations, our incarceration rate seems more justified.
Even the claim that people imprisoned for “nonviolent” crimes are distinct from the rest of the criminal population is suspect. A 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that people released from prison for drug crimes were actually more likely to be re-arrested for a violent offense than people released for homicide or sexual assault.
Conversations about how to change the criminal justice system must be based in reality. As a starting place, advocates need to stop deluding themselves and the public that “mass decarceration” would result in anything other than a bloodbath.
Short Sentences Do Not “Work Better”
The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, claims that “prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime.” On its face, this point suggests that people who serve prison sentences, and especially those who serve long sentences, are not less likely to commit crimes in the future. Yet, another arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, disagrees. In an analysis of prisoners released from 34 states in 2012 who were rearrested within five years, the Bureau found that people who served longer sentences for the same types of crimes were rearrested at lower rates than those who served shorter sentences. In fact, the difference was greater than eight percentage points, representing tens of thousands of fewer crimes committed.
Advocates for shorter sentences side-step outright lying to the public by focusing on defeating traditional theories of criminal justice like “deterrence,” which posits that steeper punishments prevent crimes in the community by raising the rational cost of committing a crime for a potential offender. Yet, proving that sentence length is an ineffective means of general deterrence says nothing about whether longer prison sentences reduce the chances of an offender committing a new crime after release or about whether incapacitating known offenders for longer periods of time prevents crime.
The empirical reality is that people who serve longer sentences in every single category of crime—violent, property, public order, and even drug—reoffend at considerably lower rates than those with shorter sentences. For violent offenders, the differential between reoffense rates is staggering: shorter-sentence offenders are 28 percent more likely to be rearrested than those who served longer sentences.
People who end up in prison tend to be chronic offenders. A very large study of 34 states by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 43 percent of people released from state prison had 10 or more arrests prior to prison; 88.4 percent had at least three prior arrests. Incapacitating chronic offenders is extremely effective in preventing crime, preventing an estimated 9.4 felony offenses per high-volume offender in prison.
Homelessness Is a Public Safety Crisis—Not a Housing Crisis
As the number of people living on the streets of America’s cities has grown, public safety has suffered for both homeless people and communities more broadly. Activists claim that homelessness is primarily driven by housing affordability, but the evidence suggests otherwise–it is a symptom of a larger public safety issue.
In many states across the U.S., the growth of street homelessness—the people living in tents and camps on the street—has coincided with a sprawling behavioral health crisis. States have seen significant growth in severe mental illness, chronic substance abuse, and chronic homelessness among its street homeless. Nationally, the number of unsheltered homeless people with severe mental illness has increased 29 percent, and substance abuse has increased 59 percent over the last five years alone. In some states, like Indiana and Nebraska, the likelihood of a homeless person with severe mental illness or substance abuse living without shelter has doubled since 2018.
The result is a dangerous environment for homeless people and the community alike. In some jurisdictions, homeless individuals are involved in as many as one in four homicides and 15 percent of other violent crimes as victims, perpetrators, or both. One study found that homeless individuals were 514 times as likely to commit a crime than the average citizen, and nearly all homeless offenders are repeat offenders. Roughly half of people in shelters have been to prison, with one in five having left within the last three years. It’s harder to estimate the proportion of the unsheltered homeless population that has been incarcerated, but most experts agree that it is even higher.
Offenders leaving prison are ten times more likely to be homeless than members of the general public, and they have the highest risk of becoming homeless soon after release. Within the first two years of release, approximately 11.4 percent of those exiting prison use a homeless shelter, with the greatest portion experiencing homelessness within their first 30 days on the outside.
Conclusion
Criminal justice reform was a meaningful discussion when it focused on improving the effectiveness of institutions, prioritizing and improving rehabilitative interventions, and optimizing which populations were targeted for particular interventions. Today, the criminal justice reform movement is an unrecognizable derivative of those noble pursuits. The abandonment of traditional criminal justice by reformers has left the public and policymakers alike skeptical of the utility of the supposed contributions of criminal justice reform, but more importantly, it has left many parts of our country less safe. Instead, those committed to improving the criminal justice system should look at ways to foster innovation in policing and security that can prevent crime or bring it to an end swiftly when it occurs. We should seek ways to make the courts more efficient and better able to respond to a variety of criminal motivations, including making prison operations and rehabilitation more dignified and effective so these systems better support people to break the cycles of crime and incarceration. We must seek to advance the criminal justice system rather than to dismantle it entirely.