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People are
governed in their daily lives by rewards and penalties of every sort. We shop
for bargain prices; praise our children for good behavior and scold them for
bad; expect lower interest rates to stimulate home building and fear that
higher ones will depress it; and conduct ourselves in public in ways that lead
our friends and neighbors to form good opinions of us. To assert that
“deterrence doesn’t work” is tantamount to either denying the plainest facts of
everyday life or claiming that would-be criminals are utterly different from
the rest of us. – James Q. Wilson
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In loving memory of the
late Political Scientist, James Q. Wilson, we, the comrades of Unit 1012: The
VFFDP, present this article to expose how those ACLU-Marxist type of Criminologist
gets everything wrong on research on crime.
What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why
Monopolized by the Left, academic research on crime gets almost
everything wrong.
John Paul Wright Matt DeLisi
John Paul Wright Matt DeLisi
Summer 2017 Public safety
The history
of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove
out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists
demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty
and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to
fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured
into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s
and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded
to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up
the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s
criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.
These views
were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the
profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective
incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his
peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations.
Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of
his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were
almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson
attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and
public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became
a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely
responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.
In short,
while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been
wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen
to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to
act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically
reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily
available—and suggest the answer to the second.
Academic
criminologists are mainly sociologists, trained in statistics and armed with
theories. Though most don’t study crime or violence directly, they have
produced useful studies about offenders and the criminal-justice system.
Through their work, we know, for example, that criminal behavior is strongly
intergenerational, that relatively few people account for the majority of all
crimes, and that some offenders desist from crime over time but many others
simply change the types of crimes they commit. We also have learned that most
offenders are generalists—that is, they commit a diverse assortment of
crimes—and that steps can be taken to reduce criminal events by making them
more difficult to carry out. Most criminals, it turns out, are lazy.
In other
ways, though, criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations,
and neighborhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings
about the reality of crime. Most academics have never met with women who have
been raped or children who have been molested, or seen the carnage wrought by a
bullet that passed through a human skull, or spent a lot of time with police on
the street. The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities
of the world sometimes fosters a romanticized view of criminals as victims,
making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers
cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment.
Evidence of
the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of
liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in
other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as
radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual
orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of
injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice,
racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological
teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and
Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning
Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.
A quick
perusal of Presidential Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Justice,
bestowed by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), shows that the winners
were primarily rewarded for their left-wing advocacy. They included a judge in
Massachusetts who advocated abolishing the state’s death penalty, an FBI agent
who successfully sued the organization for ethnic discrimination, and a former
director of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts who closed the state’s
juvenile reformatories and wrote a book alleging that the system hunted down
black men for sport. The society also honored Zaki Baruti, a radical black
activist in St. Louis known for his hatred of police and support for leftist
causes.
Recently, the
ASC’s policy committee sent a mass e-mail to members, asking for help in
countering a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Heather Mac Donald, a
longtime City Journal contributing editor and a writer known for eviscerating
liberal claims about the police and the justice system. Mac Donald argued that
because of increased scrutiny and charges of racism, police had rolled back
their efforts to deter crime, at least in minority communities, resulting in
rising violence in many cities across the country. She called this the
“Ferguson Effect,” after the town in Missouri where the (justified) police
shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man, in 2014 ignited riots and gave rise
to a new anti-law-enforcement push from advocates, the press, and Democratic
politicians. The existence and extent of the Ferguson Effect is an empirical
question that can be debated. But it is telling that the ASC had never shown
any interest in rebutting the hundreds of editorials that repeated factually
baseless claims about police shootings or the racism supposedly embedded in the
criminal-justice system. Only Mac Donald’s work was singled out—as was
Wilson’s, years earlier.
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A government without the power
of defense! It is a solecism. - James Q. Wilson
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/902474
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Walter
Miller, one of the few mid-twentieth-century criminologists whose work was
unapologetically conservative, suggested that ideology can turn “plausibility
into ironclad certainty . . . conditional belief into ardent conviction . . .
and reasoned advocate into the implacable zealot.” When shared beliefs take
hold, as they often do in the academic bubble in which most criminologists
live, ideological assumptions about crime and criminals can “take the form of
the sacred and inviolable dogma of the one true faith, the questioning of which
is heresy, and the opposing of which is profoundly evil.”
Miller’s
observations have proved prophetic. Led by the work of Jonathan Haidt, a
growing number of scholars now acknowledge that a lack of ideological diversity
in the social sciences skews research in favor of leftist claims, which become
the guiding principles of many fields, challenged only at the risk of harming
one’s career. Liberal assumptions go unchecked and tendentious claims of
evidence become fact, while countervailing evidence doesn’t get published or
faces much more rigorous scrutiny than the assertions that it challenges.
Liberal
political values can shape and distort the research that criminologists do and
the public positions that they take. Lee Ellis and Anthony Walsh surveyed
several hundred criminologists and found that self-reported ideological
perspective was strongly associated with the type of theory that the scholar
most often advocated, with liberal criminologists primarily supporting theories
that locate the causes of crime in social and economic deprivation. Coauthor
John Wright has recently collected data showing that political ideology
predicts almost perfectly the policy positions of criminologists. On issues
ranging from gun control to capital punishment to three-strikes laws, liberal
criminologists showed almost no variation in their beliefs. (Needless to say,
they dislike guns, oppose punitive sentences, and vehemently object to the
death penalty.)
<<“Liberal criminologists primarily support theories that locate the causes of crime in social and economic deprivation.”>>
Most
criminologists follow a “penal-harm” narrative, which seeks to account for all
the ways that the criminal-justice system hinders the lives of offenders and
their communities, generating and reinforcing social inequality and harming
minorities, since they are the primary targets. Purveyors of the penal-harm
narrative assert that conservative legislators demagogically used the upswing
in crime rates during the late twentieth century—including more than 20,000
murders and hundreds of thousands of rapes, robberies, and assaults per year—to
incite racial animosity and arouse support for overly punitive crime policies.
The lawmakers pushed for more police and longer and more uniform criminal sentences,
went after gangs and street crime—largely located in minority neighborhoods—and
backed increased prison capacity. The result was an era of “mass
incarceration.” Amazingly, the criminological community could not see that
decades of rising American crime rates might have had something to do with why
the public had supported the adoption of three-strikes laws, the imposition of
other mandatory-minimum sentences, the rise in incarceration rates, and the
death penalty. Instead, criminologists stick to the contention that the
anticrime efforts were all about conservatives’ eagerness to harm vulnerable
minority populations.
In 2012, the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)commissioned a scholarly review on the growth
of incarceration. Leading these efforts was Jeremy Travis, director of the
National Institute of Justice under President Bill Clinton and a senior fellow
at the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank. Travis recently stepped down as
president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has a long history in
Democratic politics. To assess the evidence on incarceration, he staffed two
committees with scholars who had, in one way or another, embraced the
penal-harm narrative long before the NAS came knocking. Bruce Western, Michael
Tonry, and Marie Gottschalk had written damning accounts of the damage
supposedly wrought by rising incarceration rates. Tonry (a past president of
the ASC) had previously equated incarceration with Guantánamo, the CIA
rendition program, and torture; Gottschalk had condemned the rise of the
“carceral state” as a method to control black populations. Their views
dominated the NAS report, which does not differ substantially from the
arguments of radical left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter.
What was
achieved by ensuring that violent offenders served 85 percent of their
sentences or that more murderers were sentenced to prison? Not much, according
to the report, other than to reward racists. Crime rates, the authors argued,
weren’t affected, but incarceration took minority men out of their
neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and
sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities. Such
claims could seem plausible only if one believes—contrary to evidence and
common sense—that career criminals contribute positively to their
neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they
did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors.
In the NAS
report and in subsequent publications, Travis stated that a “just-the-facts”
approach to policy assessment should be replaced by normative “values in the
research process.” What “values” should displace objective evaluation? The
answer: social justice. Scholars cannot claim to be dispassionate analysts when
they embrace a social-justice agenda from the outset. Agenda-based politics
will overrun their scientific objectivity.
While
promoting the report, Travis and Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera
Institute of Justice, an advocacy organization, published a New York Times op-ed
assailing American prisons and holding up the German penal system as a positive
exemplar. “To be sure, there are significant differences between the two
countries,” the authors observed. “Most notably, America’s criminal justice
system was constructed in slavery’s long shadow and is sustained today by the
persistent forces of racism.” Not only does this statement shed light on the
authors’ ideological views; it also manages to insult anyone who works in the
criminal-justice system and who values public safety and order.
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I mean that the function of
the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way
that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the
venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution. - James
Q. Wilson
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/713067]
|
Social-justice
themes suffuse the NAS report. Consider the authors’ argument that, while crime
has gone up and down at different periods, the incarceration rate has never
increased so dramatically as it has in recent years. This is true only in a
limited sense. Crime rates didn’t vacillate yearly, as the report claims. From
1928 until about 1960, the rates rose slowly each year. Then, during the 1960s,
crime rates exploded, launching a three-decade climb that would culminate in
remarkable levels of violence. Yet incarceration rates remained flat prior to
the 1960s and began to climb only thereafter. By the report’s own numbers,
prior to 1980, only 40 percent of individuals arrested for murder were
sentenced to prison (and murderers served only an average of five years). Less
than 10 percent of those arrested for sexual assault in 1981 were sentenced to
prison, and they spent an average of only 3.4 years behind bars. After
sentencing reforms, 92 percent of convicted murderers were imprisoned for an
average of 17 years, and 30 percent of those arrested for sexual assault were
sent to prison for 6.6 years. Somehow, the NAS report authors see incarcerating
only 40 percent of murderers as just, and sending more murderers and rapists to
prison as unjust.
And what
about the crime reductions associated with locking up more serious offenders or
keeping them behind bars longer? This perennially important policy question was
apparently too difficult to answer. After presenting a litany of complex
statistical issues that complicate these types of analyses, the authors stated
that “we cannot arrive at a precise estimate, or even a modest range of
estimates, of the magnitude of the effect of incarceration on crime rates.”
Gauging the
impact of any policy is challenging, but it seems untenable that the authors
couldn’t craft a range of estimates based on various modeling assumptions.
Several studies exist that have done just that, including William Spellman’s
award-winning work, and most show modest crime reductions connected with
incarceration. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Thomas Marvell and
Carlisle Moody found that each additional prisoner contributes to reductions
ranging from 15 to 30 serious “index” crimes—which include murder, rape,
aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary, motor-vehicle theft, larceny, and
arson. Unfortunately, criminologists either lack the tools and abilities to
assess the amount of crime prevented through incarceration, or, more likely,
they lacked the will to do so.
To understand
why many criminologists refuse to acknowledge criminal behavior as a potent
predictor of life outcomes—including premature mortality, health disparities,
arrest and incarceration, and even being shot by the police—one must understand
that most liberal criminologists feel strangely protective about criminals.
Criminologists who work collaboratively with the police have done important
work in understanding how best to respond to crime and how to prevent it. Their
research, which often includes complex spatial analyses of crime patterns and
which targets specific, high-rate offenders for arrest and prosecution, has
been rigorously evaluated and confirmed. Yet liberal-minded criminologists
dismiss these scholars as “administrative criminologists”—meaning that they
help the state impose unfair social and economic arrangements.
Liberal
criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders
typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come
from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning
generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending
in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives
are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex.
They produce many children with different women and rarely have the means—or
inclination—to support them. Active offenders exploit others for their own
benefit, including women, children, churches, and the social-welfare system.
They commit many crimes before getting arrested, and they move in and out of
the criminal-justice system for decades. Many also report enjoying acts of
violence; the social-media accounts of martyred gangsters shot by police often
illuminate this subculture. Perhaps not surprisingly, they see the police as
another competing tribe that has to be manipulated, controlled, and sometimes
confronted. In sum, the lives of persistent criminal offenders are often
shockingly pathological. The nature of this world is hard to grasp without
witnessing it firsthand.
Unfortunately,
criminology has had a long history of suppressing evidence for expressly
political reasons. For most of its history, the discipline has overtly censored
research, for instance, on biological, genetic, and neurological factors that
scientists have shown to be associated with antisocial traits and behavioral
problems. Even today, despite lots of hard scientific evidence—such as that 50
percent of the variance in antisocial behavior is attributable to genetic
factors, or neuroimaging studies that show systemic structural and functional
brain differences between offenders and non-offenders—those who pursue this
line of research get branded as racists or even eugenicists. We have personally
experienced hostile receptions when presenting our work in these areas at
professional conferences and have been excoriated in the anonymous-review
process when attempting to publish our papers. The disciplinary animus toward
the study of biological factors extends to other individual factors, including
intelligence and personality, and to a range of traits, such as callous and
unemotional behavior, psychopathy, and self-control.
When it comes
to disciplinary biases, however, none is so strong or as corrupting as liberal
views on race. Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents
the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the
United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American
males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater
than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at
levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between
ten to one and 15 to one. Even in forms of crime that are allegedly the
province of white males—such as serial murder—blacks are overrepresented as
offenders by a factor of two. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly
intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks. In
more than 90 percent of cases, the killer of a black victim is a black
perpetrator.
Criminologists
talk about the race-crime connection behind closed doors, and often in highly
guarded language; the topic is a lightning rod for accusations of racial
hostility that can be professionally damaging. They avoid discussing even
explicitly racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults,
“polar bear hunting,” and the “knockout game.” What criminologists won’t say in
public is that black offending differences have existed since data have been
collected and that these differences are behind the racial disparities in
arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. They also won’t tell you that, despite
claims of widespread racial discrimination in the justice system, legal
variables—namely, the number of prior arrests and the seriousness of the crime
for which the offender has currently been arrested—account for all but a small
fraction of the variance in system outcomes. Nor will they tell you the truth
about politically correct remedies, such as diversifying police forces, hiring
black police chiefs, or training officers in the alleged effects of implicit
bias: that these measures won’t reduce racial disparities in crime.
<<“Fifty years of research on the topic have failed to find the smoking gun linking justice-system disparities to racism.">>
In the
aftermath of the Department of Justice reports on Ferguson and Baltimore, it
may sound odd to hear that the system does a good job of processing individuals
with comparable criminal backgrounds similarly, regardless of race. But 50
years of research on the topic have failed to find the smoking gun linking
justice-system disparities to racism. Claims to the contrary often manipulate
data or ignore them altogether. In the case of the DOJ reports, and in the eyes
of many criminologists, racism has to be the cause of these disparities because
recognizing the truth about the huge racial imbalance in crime is politically
intolerable.
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Police ought to protect communities as well as
individuals.... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering
health rather than simply treating illness, so the police — and the rest of us
— ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without
broken windows. - James Q. Wilson
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://libquotes.com/james-q-wilson/quote/lbv0d0l]
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The values
that characterize an academic community can’t help but affect, to some degree,
the work of that community—in the case of academic criminology, cutting off
research or leading to distorted conclusions. But when entering the realm of
public policy, these biases can translate into disastrous consequences for real
people. Public safety may be compromised, and valuable and limited resources
may be squandered. Under the best circumstances, criminal-justice policy
confronts a complex and imperfect reality of criminals and their victims; the
stakes are too high to accept research tainted by political bias. The hands-off
policing now advocated by many liberals doesn’t work, and it endangers the
lives of police and citizens at the same time that it erodes the legitimacy of
law and order.
Reliable
evidence tells us that the most effective strategies to reduce crime involve
police focusing on crime hot spots, targeting active offenders for arrest, and
helping to solve local problems surrounding disorder and incivility. Putting
predatory, recidivistic offenders in jail or in prison remains the best way to
protect the public—especially those who live in high-crime neighborhoods.
Lower-level offenders can often be supervised in the community, and many
benefit from programs that seek to modify drug and alcohol addictions that
contribute to their criminal behavior. Despite our best efforts, though, most
will re-offend and reenter the system at some point.
The current
national conversation about criminal-justice reform is well-intentioned, but we
run the risk of succumbing to passionate rhetoric and to being misled by
promises built on flimsy evidence. Gains made in reducing crime have been
hard-won, but faulty reform can easily erode them. Its costs will be measured
in lost lives and suffering. The reality of crime does not easily lend itself
to analysis by spreadsheet; nor is it a matter of arcane theory or
philosophical principles to those who’ve been victimized. Reform efforts must
recognize these stubborn facts. We encourage policymakers to listen to what
criminologists have to say—but we also encourage them to pay attention to what
they don’t say, which is often more important.
John Paul
Wright is Professor
at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.
Matt DeLisi is Coordinator of Criminal Justice Studies,
Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center
for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.
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