Lars Trautman and Brett Tolman have this interesting new Washington Examiner commentary headlined, "No, criminal justice reform isn’t causing the current crime wave." Here are excerpts (with links from the original):
Conservative criminal justice reformers have faced occasional skepticism over our tried-and-true criminal justice solutions, but never something quite so outlandish as a recent suggestion, by an avowed conservative, no less, that conservative reformers somehow bear blame for rising violent crime in liberal bastions such as New York City and Portland.
Sean Kennedy, in his recent Washington Examiner article , attacks our organization, Right on Crime, using just such an argument. Kennedy actually acknowledges our record of helping Texas and other conservative states simultaneously reduce their crime rates, prison populations, and criminal justice spending. But he then claims, without evidence and employing a classic logical fallacy , that this activity then caused subsequent increases in crime in Texas. Note that he makes this claim even though crime spiked at exactly the same time he refers to in many states where none of our reforms were enacted....
But those of us who have served in law enforcement, as prosecutors or in corrections, have learned that if you invest properly in police, evidence-based programming, and prison alternatives, you can consequently achieve reductions in crime, recidivism, and ultimately prison construction costs. Further, the evidence is clear that it is the certainty and not the severity of punishment that deters potential criminals. A few more years on a potential sentence doesn’t change many minds about crime — it’s the long odds of getting away with it entirely.
Too often, people do get away with murder and a host of other crimes. Homicide clearance rates nationally hover around 50%. Whether a killer meets justice is a coin flip . If you’re worried about public safety, it’s more productive to spend your time improving clearance rates, not bemoaning the elimination of ineffective mandatory minimums for nonviolent offenses.
This is why we are so adamant about reducing our overreliance on prison beds and other costly, unproductive interventions so that we can redirect this money and focus toward law enforcement and other strategies that actively improve our crime prevention and investigative capabilities. Practically speaking, this means more funding for police departments, especially homicide and other specialized units focusing on serious and violent crime — a commonsense solution backed by research. It also means helping shift to others, such as social workers and truant officers, at least a few of the dozen different jobs we currently expect law enforcement to complete, so that police can concentrate on actual police work.
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