Manhattan Institute scholar Rafael Mangual joins the podcast to talk through what’s actually going on with the awful crime spikes in most of America’s cities and how soft-on-crime decarceration policies have endangered Americans. Rafael and Inez also discuss the original crime explosion in the late ’60s and how broken families and a permissive culture collide in early childhood to produce people likely to become dangerous criminals.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. My guest this week is Rafael Mangual. I’m sorry, I have a hard to pronounce name myself, so I’m kicking myself. He is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice, but what we’re talking about today is this incredible book, his first book, I believe that was released just in July of 2022, and it’s called “Criminal Injustice.” It’s a really in-depth look at not just the statistical realities of crime in the United States, but some very depressing statistical realities about the possibility of rehabilitation, the purposes of the criminal justice system, the debates over incarceration and incarceration rates.
It just has so much really important data that reflects really, the basic assumption of safety and for whom that assumption holds in this country and for whom it does not. Rafael, I wanted to start with this, we see all of these tweets and even journal articles denying that there actually is an uptick in crime, denying that what I think every person, I would think would be obvious to every person who lives in an urban environment in the United States knows, and that is that comparatively to 2018 or 2019, things have gotten more dangerous. So is there a crime wave, what’s the evidence that we have for that?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly been a massive increase in crime, particularly serious violent crime, shootings and homicides, but lots of cities in the last couple years have also seen big spikes in things like car thefts and grand larcenies and robberies and burglaries. This is just a question of statistical fact. The denial was interesting, and it often is presented in the form of like, “Yeah, well, crime may have gone up a bit recently, but we’re nowhere near as bad as things were in the early 1990s,” which is true in some respects and for some people, but certainly not in every respect and not for everyone. So the two responses that I usually have to that line of argument is that one, why on earth should we be using a period of time when crime was the worst that it’s ever been in modern history as the point of comparison?
Why not compare ourselves to when crime was at a near all time low in 2018? Then, the second question is for who is that true, right? Crime may not be as bad as it was in the 1990s in the aggregate if you aggregate the entire country, but no one lives in the entire country at the same time. You live in a particular place at a particular time, which means that some people are living in places where things are as dangerous as they’ve ever been. So I wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal a little over a year ago now, where I went through more than two dozen cities that since 2020 have either surpassed their all-time homicide highs or have come really, really close to surpassing their all-time homicide highs.
What that gets at is a really important reality that often gets alighted when we talk about crime and crime increases, and that is that crime is a very hyper concentrated phenomenon that affects very, very small slices of America in very, very big ways, and that affects a very small subset of the population living in those slices of America in a very big way. So, if you consider cities like Cincinnati or Cleveland, Louisville, Kentucky, Baltimore, these are cities that are seeing crime rates that are … or homicide rates that are literally as high as they’ve been in decades. You look at other cities like St. Louis and Chicago and you have to go back into the mid 1990s to reach the levels of homicides that people in those communities are seeing.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Now, I think it’s evolving into a different kind of denial or I guess cover story. Recently, we’ve seen especially … I mean my family comes from California and my husband’s family comes from Oakland, and I have a lot of friends living in LA and other places where crime is spiking. We’re starting to get the defense that this is just what urban living is, and if you are shocked by the fact that your car is regularly broken into and don’t want to live that way, then while you just want to move to the suburbs, there’s this pretty narrative that’s maybe somewhat helped along by Hollywood and some of the 90s revival. I saw “Taxi Driver” playing in the Paris Theater in Manhattan now. So what was it really like to live in America’s urban cores when crime was incredibly high in the 80s and 90s?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, it wasn’t that pleasant. I mean, I’m born in 1986 and I grew up in Brooklyn for the first ten and a half years of my life. My family would take the radio out of the car if we ever had to park on the street, and people would put signs in their car window, “No radio in car, please don’t break in.” I had neighbors who had their houses broken into on multiple occasions. I witnessed crimes even as a child, just in broad daylight walking to and from school. It was not a great thing, this idea that we should be nostalgic about a period of time in which we weren’t able to take public safety for granted, I think is just incredibly silly and is something that’s probably more common among people who didn’t actually experience day-to-day life.
I mean, when I was a kid, all I wanted was this one particular bike. I wanted a Chrome GT Dyno, and my parents would not get that bike from me until we actually moved to the suburbs because they were afraid of putting me in a position where I might be victimized, where that bike might get taken out from under me. That’s no way to live, and for people who are living in really dangerous places, even now, places like the west side of Chicago, the south side of Chicago, the southwestern district of Baltimore, the north side of Philadelphia, I mean, you’re talking about places in which the public safety picture is incredibly dark. I mean, there was a study that came out in JAMA Network recently that looked at a handful of neighborhoods around the United States today.
And actually concluded that for young males living in those places, the homicide rate is higher than the death rate for American soldiers that were fighting on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of those conflicts, which should really give you a sense of just how ugly the reality can get and how quickly it can get there. I mean, just put yourself in the shoes of a mother who was sending her 18-year-old son off to the Marines in 2002 or 2003, and the fear that would’ve come with that decision, thinking like, “Okay, my son is going to go off to war.” Now, sort of imagine what it’s like if you’re living in a place every single day of your life that you can’t leave. That place is the single most dangerous place that your young son can be, where their likelihood of dying is higher than their likelihood of graduating from college.
So it’s nothing to be nostalgic about, and this idea that it’s just part and parcel of urban living couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s belied by the public safety gains that were made over the course of the 1990s and into the mid to late 2000s. I mean, in 2017, New York City had 292 murders. In 1990, we had 2,262 murders. That was an enormous amount of progress. It became a city over that period of time in which you could ride the subway at 2:00 in the morning by yourself, fall asleep and be safe. This isn’t an intellectual argument. We know that we can get to a place in which urban living is as safe as suburban living, and the idea that we should just accept some level of public safety deterioration, that’s recent, right?
I mean, this wasn’t true in 2019 in a lot of places or 2018 in a lot of places, that we should just accept that as part of urban life, I think is a defeatist attitude that does a great disservice to the people who are living in cities and to people who, like me, think that cities are incredibly important to the future of American life. I mean, cities are places where, you can have economic dynamism and you can have brilliant people come from around the world to share ideas and to interact and to engage in commerce, and that’s a big part of our country’s fabric, to sort of throw that away or sacrifice that to what, some public policy approach that makes you feel good on the inside but maybe cost us a decent amount of public safety? I mean, that just seems a little silly to me.
Inez Stepman:
I knew obviously from a common sense perspective that some intersections are more dangerous than others, but I was shocked, you lay it out sometimes block by block and what the most dangerous blocks in America look like comparatively to the problems that are faced in a more universal or public way. Can you lay out some of that data for us? Then, we can’t talk about crime without talking about race. So first of all, what are the underlying statistical offense rates of different races, particularly I think we’re going to be talking about primarily, young Black men and then, on the flip side, what are the statistics on people who are victims of this kind of violent crime?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, and the victimization point is really I think the important one, but let’s start with the geographic concentration of crime. I mean, every single year in the United States, somewhere in the range of 2% of counties are going to see about half of all the murders. Within those counties, the homicide problem, shootings, other kinds of violent crime are just incredibly, incredibly concentrated. So take New York City, for example. New York City has about 80,000 street segments and a street segment, for those of you who don’t know, just think one side of a city block, like corner to corner, both sidewalks, that’s one street segment. So there are 82,000 of those, give or take in New York City. In 2010, ’15 and ’20, the Manhattan Institute studied in a paper authored by a guy named David Weisberg, the concentration of crime at the street segment level in New York City in those years.
And what we found was that about three and a half percent of street segments were responsible for about 50% of all the violent crime in New York City. About 1% of the street segments were responsible for 25% of all the violent crime and some really high number, I think it was almost 40% of street segments didn’t see any crime in a given year. So that just gives you a sense of just how hyper-concentrated serious violence is. That’s something that’s … that’s an analysis that’s been replicated in cities across the country, indeed, and other parts of the world. I mean, places like Seattle and Chicago. I mean, you see the exact same thing. Somewhere in the range of about 5% of a city’s street segments are going to see somewhere in the range of about half of all of that city’s violent crime.
What that means is that if policing resources are responsibly deployed, officers are going to spend disproportionate amounts of time in those areas, and that’s really important to recognize because it helps contextualize some of the racial disparities that I think end up being at the root of a lot of the debates that we have about what good public safety policy looks like. As you know, we’re in a period of reform really, for the last 10, 15 years, and the reform movement has enjoyed a lot of momentum. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have been able to really lean into a racial justice narrative to kind of push their agenda forward. I think that’s a fair argument to make, but if we’re going to have the argument honestly on those terms, we have to understand what the context is and understand that data in its proper context.
Then, so when you consider, again, the fact that crime is so hyper-concentrated geographically, and you start to see that certain demographic groups are overrepresented in those pockets of concentrated violence, you start to get a sense of who the victims of these more serious crimes are and what they look like. So in New York City, again, for example, every single year for which we have data, which goes back to 2008, a minimum of 95% of all shooting victims in the city are either Black or Latino. Almost all of them are men, right? Black and Latino men do not constitute anywhere near 95% of New York City’s population. So this is a very, very stark and very, very persistent racial disparity with respect to victimization of the most serious crime, gun violence victimization.
Now, gun violence perpetration, statistics would look very, very similar. Again, you would see a massive overrepresentation of young, Black and Latino males. Well, that has to be taken into account when you’re looking at enforcement disparities because again, if police resources are responsive to the crime problem and where it concentrates, which is what you would want, if in fact, you’re prioritizing the lives of potential victims, well then, that means you’re going to have disparities in enforcement, but you cannot take those disparities to be prima facie evidence of discrimination in a case like that. So again, just kind of going back to this idea that crime isn’t as bad as the 1990s, this is another opportunity I think, to evaluate that claim. It’s not as bad as it was in the 1990s, again, generally speaking in the aggregate, but again, no one experiences crime in the aggregate.
We experience crime as individuals based on a list of risk factors. Most important of those are where we are at a given time, and if you look at just firearm homicide rates, for example and you were to track those rates between 1990 and 2021, what you would find if you broke it down by race, that White males have a firearm homicide rate that has stayed in the single digits from the early 1990s through present day and then, that line has remained relatively flat. For Hispanic men, you would see a pretty steep decline from 1990 to present day, although in recent years, an upward trend that should certainly be troubling, but by and large, Hispanic men have retained a lot of the progress that was made over the course of the 1990s and 2000s with respect to the reduction in firearm homicide.
For Black males, all of the progress that was made over the course of the 1990s has been erased. So if you were to plot that line, it would be really, really high in the early 1990s, excuse me. So you would be looking at a rate of about close to 60 per 100,000 in the early 1990s, and then, a very, very steep decline through the 1990s into the early 2000s. So, it would look like a U because by 2021, the firearm homicide rate for Black males actually reached the early 1990s peak of close to 60 per 100,000 again. Now, remember that the white male homicide rate for firearm homicide is in the single digits, and that should just give you a sense of what that disparity looks like, and just to kind of provide a more concrete example to tie this knot, is take Chicago.
So in 2019, the United States had a homicide rate collectively of about five per 100,000. Chicago that year was in excess … it was close to about 18 per 100,000. If you look at just the 10 most dangerous neighborhoods in that city, it was over 60 per 100,000. If you look at the most dangerous neighborhoods in that city, which was West Garfield Park in 2019, their homicide rate was 131 per 100,000. If you compare that to the 28 safest neighborhoods in the city of Chicago that year, their collective homicide rate was less than two per 100,000 for some of those neighborhoods or for a good chunk of those neighborhoods, the homicide rate was zero per 100,000. So we have this enormously unequal distribution of one of the most important benefits that our government can provide, and that’s public safety.
The reason that I think it’s important to really understand that is one, again, it contextualizes some of those other disparities that we see in the enforcement data, but two, it allows us to see not just who bears the cost associated with a robust enforcement program, which is really where all the focus goes in our reform debate right now, but it also allows us to see who enjoys the benefits that are associated with success on criminal justice policy. So when the criminal justice system achieves the ends that the system was erected to pursue, crime goes down, but it doesn’t go down for everyone in the same way. So if you’re a Black male, you benefited way more from the 1990s homicide decline than a White male did.
So there was actually a study done on this by a guy named Patrick Sharkey and some co-authors that actually looked at the public health benefits associated with the homicide decline between 1991 and 2014, and it added almost an entire year of life expectancies to the average Black man’s life. It only added about a 10th of a year of life expectancy to the average White man’s life. So the question then becomes, is maybe there’s something wrong with the narrative of the criminal justice system as a system that was designed and operated for the specific oppression of low income minority communities, because it looks like when the system works and when the system achieves the mission that is set out by the people at the system’s helm, it’s low income minority communities that benefit the most. And that’s something that I think has just been completely lost in our public debate.
Inez Stepman:
We talk a lot about the phrase over-incarceration, right? We are putting too many people allegedly in prison, and this is not something that only the social justice left is concerned about. This is something where libertarians have weighed in on this, even some conservative organizations, and everyone is sort of accepting this premise that we put too many people in jail, and that’s a problem. So how many people are incarcerated in the American system? How does that compare to other countries, and what is the typical profile of somebody who is incarcerated by our justice system? In other words, we’ve talked some about the racial disparities, but what’s the rap sheet? What’s the typical crime? What characterizes the population of our prisons?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, so if you’re looking at incarceration in the United States, one of the things that you often hear reformers and critics of incarceration say is that, you hear this one statistic, United States accounts for about 5% of the world’s population, but is home to about 25% of the world’s prisoners and that’s true, and it sounds awful when you hear it, it’s got this huge rhetorical force. One of the things that kind of analysis doesn’t really account for is the fact that the United States is an outlier when it comes to really serious crime. Crime that if you were caught and convicted in any country in the world would land you in prison. So it’s not necessarily the case that the United States has a just more punitive system, it just has a lot more criminals.
So that’s going to explain a lot of the disparities in terms of international comparisons under the incarceration front. So here in the US we have somewhere around 1.8 million people incarcerated. About 1.1, 1.2 million of those people are in prison, the rest are in county jails, a good chunk of those people are just there for very short periods of time awaiting trials, so people who didn’t make bail who are entering jail for one or two days until they make bail, maybe a week, or people who are just being held in pretrial detention, either as a result of not being able to make bail or as a result of being remanded and denied bail altogether. Then, you have a small portion of the jail population that’s sentenced, which is to say that these are people who are serving sentences for misdemeanors that do not exceed one year.
So, you get 30 days or 90 days say for a DUI or something like that, so those people are serving their sentences in jail. If you look at the prison population, which is really where a lot of the focus lies, and mostly because it’s the biggest population, and these are the people who are spending the most time incarcerated, you start to get a sense of why the sort of more superficial critiques of incarceration in the United States fall flat. I mean, for one thing, the vast majority of people who are incarcerated in prisons in the United States today are there for serious violent offenses. So if you’re just looking at state prisoners, which accounts for about nine out of every 10 prisoners in the US, about 60% of them are in primarily for either a violent felony or a weapons felony, which is a pretty big chunk.
So these are people who are serving time primarily for really, really serious crimes. Crimes, again, that would land you in prison almost anywhere in the world. So if you’re talking about weapons offenses, for example. In the United Kingdom, the mandatory minimum for illegal gun possession is five years of which you have to serve three and a half years. That’s an offense that’s regularly met with sentences of probation here in the United States. So again, it’s just not necessarily the case that we’re more punitive. It’s just that we have a lot more of the kind of serious crime that would land you in prison. So the majority of people in state prison here in the United States are serving time primarily for violent offenses, and even then they’re not serving that much time.
I think the median amount of time served in a state prison here in the US is about 16 months, so not a very long time. So one of the things I like to say is that prison is a relatively rare sanction that’s often short term in nature, and that is reserved for really violent, really chronic offenders who have a really high likelihood of re-offending if and when they’re released. So on the rare point, one of the reason I say it’s rare is because if you look at the trends in felony convictions and the results of those convictions, what you’ll find is that only about 40% of felony convictions at the state level result in a post-conviction term of incarceration. So that’s … meaning that about 60% of state felony convictions either result in time served in pre-trial detention or probation or diversion or suspended sentences.
So it’s not even the case that prison is the most common response to a state felony conviction. I’ve already established that the majority of these individuals are serving time primarily for violent felonies, so things like homicide specifically accounts for about 15% of the prison population, robbery, rape, sexual assault, aggravated assault, things like arson and weapons violations, which is about 5% of the prison population. If you look at things like drugs, you’re only talking about 14 to 13% of the state prison population, which isn’t nothing. It’s not a small chunk, but one of the things you have to remember is that the way that our prison statistics work is that we categorize prisoners based on the top charge.
So based on the offense that carries the most prison time. So if you are convicted of multiple offenses, say you have an illegal handgun on your waist when you’re pulled over and they find a kilo of cocaine in your trunk, well, you might get more time for the kilo of cocaine and so, the system is going to categorize you as a drug offender as opposed to a weapons offender, even though you were also convicted of the drug charge. So you kind of have to take our incarceration statistics with a little bit of a grain of salt on that account. The other thing is, is that our official conviction statistics don’t necessarily reflect the severity of the conduct that was actually engaged in by the offender, because we know about 95% of all felony cases are resolved via plea bargain, which means that those are negotiations in which prosecutors either drop charges altogether or downgrade the severity of charges in exchange for guilty pleas.
So the official records often understate the actual crimes that were committed. Even then again, the majority of people in prison are serving time primarily for serious violent felonies or weapons offenses. So that’s really important but then, you get into the chronic part. I mean, people who end up in state prison are not first time offenders, these are not sort of low risk propositions. My colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Heather Mac Donald had a great line a few years back where she said, “A multi-year prison sentence is akin to a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.” She’s exactly right about that, and the reason for that is because if you were to profile the typical person who gets released from a state prison in the United States, you’re going to see someone who has somewhere between 10 and 12 prior arrests and between five and six prior convictions.
That is not a sort of low level, low risk offender. These are people who are offending at really high rates. Rates that are much higher than their criminal histories suggest, because again, the majority of crime that gets committed doesn’t get reported, and the majority of crime that actually gets reported doesn’t result in an arrest. This often comes as a surprise to a lot of people, but for a long time, the FBI up until 2019 would track what’s called index offenses. So these are eight felony offenses that are kind of seen as indicators of broader crime chance, right? Four of the offenses are violent and four of the offenses are property. So for the four violent index felonies, which is murder, robbery, aggravated assault and rape, the clearance rate hovered at about 47 to 48% over the last decade.
If you look at the property index felony, so burglary, grand larceny, grand larceny auto and arson, the clearance rate only hovered at about 18 to 20%. So the majority of both crime categories don’t actually even result in the arrest in a given year, so when you’re talking about prisoners who have 12 prior arrests and five prior convictions, these are people who have engaged in a lot more crime than that. So again, not the most common sanction that we can give. When we do give it, it’s a relatively short term sanction. It’s really only given to people who are really, really violent and/or have very extensive criminal histories. Then, these people are also very, very likely to be rearrested if they are released.
So if you look at the recidivism statistics in the United States and you’re looking at state prisoners, which you’re going to find is that somewhere between 80 and 83% of released state prisoners will be rearrested at least once over a 10-year period after their release. On average, they’ll be rearrested about five times over that 10 year period, and a good chunk of them, more than a third, will be rearrested for a violent crime specifically. So we’re talking about … when we talk about decarceration, I think the best way to kind of assess whether in fact we have this mass incarceration problem is to sort of ask a question based on the logical corollary of how that problem is stated. If we have a mass incarceration problem, that by definition requires a mass decarceration solution, so the question becomes, can we safely decarcerate en masse?
That’s a question I’ve yet to hear a good answer to from people who are advocates of broad scale decarceration, people who want to cut the incarceration rate by 50% or 40%. The idea that we can release 40 or 50% of all people in state prison today without taking a public safety hit is I think, belied by every single piece of data that we have, especially the recidivism data. So the question becomes, who do you release without actually risking the public safety and not just the general public safety, the safety of the people who are already living in the pockets of concentrated crime that these offenders are much more likely to spend their time in? That’s something that I think has really kind of helped me see through the superficial nature of the most harsh critiques of incarceration in the US.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, there is this persistent kind of image that all these statistics that you’re citing really belie, which is we have millions of people in prison because they smoked a joint in the alleyway.
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Even when we’re talking about the First Step Act or the Trump administration that he commuted the sentence of Alice Johnson, and there was a big praise from … sort of bipartisan praise over that. I don’t disagree that a commutation of her sentence after 20 years was unreasonable, especially given that she seemed to have really changed in prison. I don’t think that case itself is unreasonable, but it does strike me that the friendliest case they could come up with to be the sort of poster child for these kinds of releases, is somebody who did something much more serious than doing drugs individually in her house, or even selling drugs in her alleyway. I mean she was running multimillion dollars’ worth of cocaine into the United States working with cartels, violent cartels.
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
This was sort of the best poster case for releasing when the sort of image that is continually put forward by these advocates is the kid who’s getting a little rambunctious and at age 19 gets caught selling weed to his friends or something like that, right?
Rafael Mangual:
Right.
Inez Stepman:
It seems like you’re saying, there just aren’t that many … there’s very few cases like that, that actually result in serious prison time.
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, I mean, there’s just a huge delta between the sort of prototypical case that gets seized on by reform advocates to make their case and the sort of typical case that you would actually see if you actually surveyed people who are incarcerated in the US today. Yeah, you’re not looking at these low level first time offenders. I mean, the narrative is that we sort of systematically deny second chances, but again, that’s completely belied by the criminal history profile of the typical person in prison in the United States today. These are not people who have been denied second chances. They’ve been given third, fourth, fifth, 10th chances, and they’ve blown them. Then, the question becomes, it’s like, what exactly are we doing by advocating for the mass release or the mass non-incarceration of individuals with this kind of criminal history?
I think the answer to that is that you’re essentially rolling the dice with the lives and the quality of life of people who are living in those pockets of concentrated crime, and that’s not good. I mean, even something like drug dealing, it’s not a harmless offense. I mean, we have the impact of overdoses, which are nearing all-time highs in this country right now. Lots of people were very, very outraged at pharmaceutical companies for their alleged role in spreading misinformation about the addictiveness of opiates like Oxycontin, and attached a lot of culpability to those companies for things like increases in opiate overdoses. Yet, that same sort of moral judgment never seems to carry over to people who are running drug distribution rings, even though they’re putting these fatal doses of fentanyl right into the hands of people who then inject them into their arms and sometimes don’t make it out the other side of that high.
So these aren’t necessarily low-level offenders, and the other thing I would just remind people is that even if you’re talking about drug offenders, which is the group that gets the most attention in these reform debates, you’re talking about people for whom there’s a lot of overlap with respect to other serious kinds of crime. The idea that criminals just specialize in these very discrete offense categories isn’t quite right. So, if you look at drug offenders, for example, in state prisons, and you look at the recidivism data, what you’ll find is that about 75% of people who are incarcerated primarily for a drug offense will be rearrested for at least one non-drug crime, right? About a third of them will be rearrested for a violent crime specifically.
There’s not actually a huge delta between the share of drug offenders who get rearrested for violence and the share of violent offenders who get rearrested for violence. You see this in different statistics throughout the country. So in Baltimore, for example, in 2017, the police identified, I think close to 118 or 120 homicide suspects. Seven in 10 had at least one prior drug offense in their criminal histories, and I think that if you were to take a random sample of a 100 homicide offenders from every major city in the country, you’d find that that’s about representative. A good chunk of these people are also engaged in the drug trade. One of the other reasons I bring that up is because I think one of the misunderstandings about drug enforcement in the US is that people view it as something that was motivated primarily by efforts to reduce drug consumption and drug dealing.
And that’s, I think true a little bit, but I think people miss the degree to which drug enforcement was motivated and seen by enforcement officials as a way to pre-textually attack violent crime because of the overlap, because police officials knew that a lot of the individuals engaged in the drug trade were also engaged in more serious kinds of violent street crime that they could go after them for drug offenses in order to gain public safety benefits by taking these individuals off the street for those drug offenses. So if you look at some of the really successful gang suite prosecutions that have been done in cities like New York and Chicago over the years, the RICO cases, a lot of the predicate offenses for those cases involve drugs.
Yet, you’ll see that a lot of the individuals swept up in those cases also have violent histories or were tied to other kinds of violent crime like conspiracy to commit murder. So, drug enforcement is … it’s important to just not take for granted the idea that just because someone’s in prison for drugs that you can consider them a, “nonviolent drug offender.” These categories are not static. People who are in for non-violent drug offenses today may commit a very violent offense tomorrow and have often committed very violent offenses in the past. So, it’s really important to sort of understand that because I think, it helps you get a better sense of that history of drug enforcement and its importance.
I mean, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is a really good example of this. This is the piece of federal legislation that established the 100 to one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. People often point to that as sort of prima facie example of racism built into the drug enforcement regime here in the United States, because crack cocaine was so much more prominent in Black communities as compared to powder cocaine, which was much more prominent in White communities. You sort of dig into the history and you start to see that the reason that disparity existed wasn’t out of some conspiracy to harm Black Americans, but was out of a recognition that there was a lot of violence that attended the crack cocaine trade that you didn’t see in the more suburban areas.
So that is what really explained the disparity, which by the way, enjoyed a lot of support in the Black community at that time, and people don’t really know this, but if you go back into the legislative history of that bill, what you’ll find is that it was co-sponsored, not just voted for, but co-sponsored by 16 of the 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time. It passed the Senate by a vote of 97 to three. So this was not something that you could write off as just a blatant attempt at racism, but rather a recognition that there was a significant overlap between people who were engaged in the drug trade and people who were engaged in more serious kinds of violent crime.
And I think we have to take that understanding with us into how we understand statistics with respect to that kind of enforcement today.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, so you’re really making the case that it’s more like getting Al Capone for tax evasion than anything else.
Rafael Mangual:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, on paper, he’s a white collar criminal, right?
Inez Stepman:
So I guess I want to … to drill down, because you have a chapter on root causes and the entire debate because the picture that you’re painting is, of America as a violent country, yes, super concentrated and unevenly distributed, but with a high level of violence that other countries simply don’t deal with. Then, the question becomes why? Why is it that America has this correspondingly or unusually high level of violence? I was just reading an old New York Times interview with Raymond Aron, who was a French sort of Cold War public intellectual, and he described America as, “A violent country with an extraordinary attachment to legal niceties,” and basically implied that, for example, in France, that if France were experiencing the level of violence that Americans accepted in their cities, that it simply wouldn’t happen.
Some kind of Duarte style enforcement would pop up, and we wouldn’t continue to observe civil liberties in the face of what you’re describing as basically war zones, right? Concentrated war zones in America. So why is it, it seems like … first of all, what are some of the root causes that you dismissed, in particular poverty? Because we had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC saying like, “Oh, crime is up in 2020 and 2021 because people need to steal an apple to feed their kids,” right?
Rafael Mangual:
Somehow you have to shoot people to do that, right?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, and I think that’s a persistent association between poverty and crime, in part because it’s seemingly since the 1960s and 70s, it’s hard to think of poverty without these kinds of high endemic crime levels, like poor neighborhoods seem to have higher crime. Has that always been the case? What is the actual relationship between poverty and crime since the 1960s?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, I mean, look, there’s certainly an association between poverty and crime, which is to say that if you were to look at criminal offending populations, particularly when you’re talking about violent street crime, a huge portion of those offenders are going to be from lower income and socioeconomic strata. That doesn’t necessarily tell you when you think about the direction of causation, and this is I think, where the kind of rubber meets the road in this debate. Yes, it’s true that a big portion of criminal offenders are also people who have lower levels of socioeconomic status, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the lower level of socioeconomic status caused the crime. It could also be, and I think very likely is, the case that the sort of disposition that leads someone to see a life of crime as sort of a viable way of living is also not associated with economic success in our society.
The reason that I think that’s the case is because if you look at trends in poverty and other socioeconomic indicators, you don’t see those trends track neatly with violence. So for example, in 1989 in New York City, the poverty rate in our city was actually slightly lower than it was in 2016. Now, why do I pick those two years out? I picked those two years out because 1989 is the year before New York City peaked in terms of homicides, experiencing 2,262 in 1990 and 2016 is the year before we hit our valley with homicides of 292. So you have a 90% reduction in homicides while the poverty rate remains pretty flat over that entire period, hovering from just under 19% to just over 21% in that period, and actually moves in the wrong direction slightly, which is to say again, that the 2016 poverty rate was slightly higher than it was in 1989 and yet, you have a significantly lower homicide count.
You see the same thing with respect to other socioeconomic indicators like unemployment, for example. We had the great recession in this country not all that long ago. Between 2006 and 2010, the unemployment rate basically doubled at the national level, and yet the homicide rate declined by 15% over those years. You don’t see this kind of consistent relationship. Barry Latzer, who’s a great researcher in this space, wrote this fantastic book on the rise and fall of violent crime in America where he looks at violent crime trends in post World War II America up to about 2015, and also looks at the potential relationship between those crime numbers and other socioeconomic indicators. One of the things that he finds is something called crime adversity mismatch, which is basically a term that describes the following phenomenon, where you have two groups that are both afflicted with high rates of poverty and lower socioeconomic status.
Yet, really large disparities between those two groups in terms of violent criminal offending. So in New York City, for example, Hispanic New Yorkers experience poverty at a significantly higher rate than Black New Yorkers. Same thing for Asian New Yorkers and yet, Black New Yorkers are involved in violent crime at significantly higher rates than both of those groups. So all of that kind of complicates the sort of simple story that I think people want to tell about the relationship between poverty and crime. I think the reason that they want to tell it is because they’re so uncomfortable with the kind of enforcement that has produced public safety gains in recent years, that they are trying desperately to find other alternative answers.
And the best answer that they can come up with is social spending as a means of reducing crime, and I think the question that you should be asking in response to that is, I mean, we’ve spent trillions of dollars on anti-poverty programs over the last several decades, and how has that helped the locales that are again, are currently experiencing all time highs with respect to homicides and shootings and other kinds of serious violent crimes? I think it has been borne out that we do not need to solve poverty in order to reduce crime significantly. We saw that throughout the 1990s and 2000s. It’s also been borne out that social spending on crime is not an obvious solution. It’s not a solution at all. There’s just no clear relationship that people can point to. So when I lay all that out, people will then say, “Well then what do you think the root causes are?”
I think that’s a complicated question. It’s not one that I’m super concerned about. My main concern right now is just doing what we know will work to reduce crime in the short term, because I think we owe it to the communities that are suffering to do that. One of the things that I think we have to look at is family structure. There’s been a significant change in family structure since the 1960s where we see much, much higher rate of single parenthood, of out-of-wedlock child-rearing. Why do I think that’s important? Because I think the psychological literature tells us pretty clearly that two pro-social parents are better than one, and why is that? Well, because one of the most important functions that parents serve is the socialization of their children.
Now, parents are much more likely to succeed in socializing children if they are both pro-social in their disposition and they’re both present. If that socialization process breaks down, one of the things that you start to see is that kids at a very young age will start to develop conduct disorders, and a good proportion of those kids will have those conduct disorders kind of metastasized over time into more serious kinds of personality disorders over the life course. That process is much more likely to break down, that socialization process if you have a kid being raised in a single mom household. That’s just a conversation that very few people want to have, but I think it’s a really important one to have, again, for those reasons. I mean, lots of people have it in their head that sort of humans are born intrinsically good, and the ones that go bad we’re sort of taught to go bad or influenced down the wrong path.
I think they kind of has it backwards. I think the research pretty clearly shows that most people are born with antisocial dispositions, and then what we’re taught by our parents is how to resist that temptation, how to resist that natural tendency to use violence to get what we want and to use coercion. We call that the socialization process. If you take a toy away from a toddler, his first instinct is going to be to swing at you. We don’t sort of think of it that way, but these are actually some of the most violent people in our society today that just can’t do that much damage, but over those periods of years, our parents tell us like, “No, you don’t hit, you use your words. You don’t bite. You don’t take things that don’t belong to you, you share.”
So over that process, the kids are kind of socialized out of those tendencies, but that process takes a lot of work and it takes dedication, and it often takes two parents to be very successful. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that over time, we’ve seen this big boom in single parenthood, and there are a lot of challenges that communities in which single parenthood is significantly higher with respect to crime. So a lot of … I’m actually working on a paper right now, looking at the relationship between family structure and crime. One of the things that we’re seeing is that high crime areas tend to have much higher rates of single parenthood. I don’t think those two things are unrelated. Then, there’s culture. I think there’s certainly a cultural element to crime that we don’t talk a ton about.
There’s certainly pockets of concentrated crime in this country in which the culture there elevates violence as a legitimate means of respect acquisition, and a legitimate means of dispute resolution. This isn’t my idea, this isn’t a new idea. One book that I would really recommend that your listeners read is called “Code of the Street,” it’s a book by an anthropologist named Elijah Anderson, and he kind of does this sort of deep dive anthropological assessment of North Philadelphia in the early 1990s and sort of documents this sort of set of morays that kind of govern everyday life and it aligns with, I think, at least a partial cultural theory of crime. So those are two things that I think we should be considering in this debate as potential root causes.
One of the, I guess, depressing aspects of that is that if those two things are in fact at the root of some significant portion of our crime problem, those are two things that the government is not very well positioned to do anything about. I don’t know that the government has the tools or the know-how to solve the out of wedlock birth rate problem. I don’t know that the government really knows what the right culture is, let alone how to institute that. So it’s a real challenge, and it’s one of the reasons why my focus and the focus of my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute has been on providing concrete answers for public safety provision that have to do with the things that we know work, and that is enforcement that is intelligent and deployed through the use of data and informed by learned assessment.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. You’re anticipating where I want to go, because we talk all the time, we have been always referencing the … we’ve been referencing 80s, the 90s, and this crime spike that really shows up in the late 60s into the 70s, that begins this trajectory upward, when previously like … when we always talk about crime statistics, we always basically start it in the 1960s. Now, that may be because there wasn’t as much recorded or something, but my impression is that crime before that, even in urban areas, was not as much of a high social problem in the way that it is now, of course, you had organized crime or in the 1920s and so on and so forth, that there seems to be this explosion and just general public safety going in the tank after essentially the cultural revolution.
I’m wondering, one, is that true? Is that impression true that our sort of modern battle with crime starts basically concurrently with a series of cultural upheavals in the 1960s, and whether there’s … because you have almost a psychological interpretation of crime more than … or the cause of crime more than I guess both, psychological and cultural. You used this phrase about entitlement, right? Because you just referenced these kinds of personality disorders, and it seems to me that our culture is very much encouraging of entitlement, even if it doesn’t come out violently, as in there’s a zillion articles written about the psychological profile of successive generations and a rise in entitlement mentality.
Now in your upper class girls’ neighborhood, that’s going to come out in a series of different things than it is for young boys without fathers, but how tied in is this entire sort of cultural revolution and the spirit of 1968 with this battle that we now take for granted, this sort of battle for public safety in urban areas?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say. I mean, I do think that the battle really did start in the 1960s. That’s kind of when criminologists say that the crime wave that lasted through the early 1990s really began. I think part of it is just a function of the sort of demographic shift in our country where we became a much more urban nation. We had this huge push toward urbanization starting in the 1920s, as a result of the technological revolution that happened, right? I mean, we went from a time in which lots of people were working in more rural parts of the country, in the agricultural space. Then, there was this sort of economic shift that moved a lot of people into cities because that’s where the work was, and we had more factories and sort of more technological and service-based employment that brought a lot of people into American cities and cities are much more conducive to crime.
So cities are much more conducive to crime than more rural or exurban areas. For crime to thrive, I’m a sort of a subscriber to the routine activities theory of crime. So for crime to thrive, you need three things. You need the presence of motivated offenders, you need the presence of vulnerable targets, you need the absence of capable guardians. Those things are much more likely to be present in denser cities than in sort of more rural environments. If you are in a very small town in the south in the 1950s, there’s a good chance that everyone kind of knows everyone. So it’s hard to rob somebody and have that person not know who you are, and then be able to get away and not get caught by the police.
When the country shifts into more dense urban living, that urban environment provides you with the kind of level of anonymity that you need to get away with street level crimes like robberies and rapes and aggravated assaults where you can commit a crime and then disappear into a crowd, a la Anthony Hopkins, at the end of … gosh, now I’m forgetting the name of the movie-
Inez Stepman:
“Silence of the Lambs.”
Rafael Mangual:
Silence of the Lambs. That’s right. So that I think certainly played a role, was the sort of just shift in terms of urbanization and a bigger chunk of our population living in cities and in environments in which you kind of had many more motivated offenders coming into contact with vulnerable targets, and at the time, where we didn’t really invest in the sort of capable guardianship in the form of policing and didn’t have the kind of technology like CCTV cameras that we have today that really raised the transaction costs of crime in urban environments. So I think that was part of it. I think other demographic shifts were part of it too. I mean, we had this boom after the war, where lots … we had the baby boom, so you had lots of young men coming into their late teens and early 20s in the 1960s.
That’s the population that’s often responsible for the bulk of crime, right? More than nine out of every 10 prisoners in the United States are male. That’s a disparity that very few people talk about, but it’s just a reality. Men are just much more likely to be criminal. So that does coincide with the kind of cultural revolution that happened in the 60s, but it’s hard to say whether it was that cultural revolution that really drove this, or whether it was the sort of shift toward urban living, I think is probably most things a little bit of everything, and in terms of the culture, I think you’re exactly right with this idea of entitlement. I mean, in the book, I talk about entitlement in sort of the clinical sense and the way that the DSM talks about entitlement as sort of a psychological marker.
It’s true, I do view crime through a mostly psychological lens, and one of the reasons for that is you mentioned the personality disorders, and this is another reason I think to be more skeptical of the sort of poverty story of crime, is that more common than poverty among prisoners is a personality disorder. So if you look at the general population of men, for example, in the United States, something like antisocial personality disorder has a prevalence rate of between two and 4%, depending on the analysis that you’re looking at. If you’re looking at surveys of prisoners and studies of prison settings, what you’ll find is that that number ranges between 40 and 70%. So it is a huge, huge disparity, and what that tells me is that things like personality disorders, things like substance use disorders are far more predictive of crime than economic deprivation.
We have lots of poor people in this country. The majority of them, the vast majority of them, are good law-abiding citizens who live their lives well and with dignity. The vast majority of poor people in any community don’t go out and commit crime. So it is, I think, disparaging to the good people in this country who don’t have means to say that, “Poverty just naturally leads to crime.” That’s just not the case. I think a more serious explanation leaves a lot of room for the role of these sort of psychological conditions. Again, I think that those psychological conditions are really closely tied to that developmental process that happens in early childhood. I think that is very closely tied to family structure. So, that’s something that I don’t think we can get away from, if we’re really going to sort of get to the root of what actually drives more serious kinds of crime.
Inez Stepman:
So I’d be remiss if I don’t close this conversation by talking about police itself, policing as a function of public safety. Your dad was a cop. You’ve talked about how he reacted to you potentially becoming a police officer. Do you worry that, what Heather Mac Donald has called the Ferguson effect, but I think in recent years, a combination of “racial reckoning” in 2020 as well as I think I have to say here, vaccine mandates in cities, right? We’ve seen a real difficulty in recruiting police and probably consequently, in the quality of people who are actually being recruited into these departments. Are you worried about the … I guess the opposite question is that I’m guessing you often get, you probably often get the question about the prevalence of police brutality, right?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
I’m asking almost the opposite question, which is, are we going to be able to recruit going forward a class of competent, stable personality-wise people who are going to fill this very important role in public safety going forward?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah, I mean I think that’s going to be probably the biggest challenge for policing as an institution for the next decade. It certainly has been among the biggest challenges for that institution really since even before the pandemic. As early as 2019, organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum were putting out research calling attention to the workforce crisis. In the mid 20-teens, we started seeing departments around the country lower standards, get rid of tattoo bans, stop considering prior drug use as disqualifying for potential officer recruits. That was all in response to the difficulty of recruiting officers. One of the things that we’ve seen really since 2015 is that we’ve really raised the transaction cost of a career in policing.
What I mean by that is we made it more costly in the following ways. Especially in blue cities, police, I think not unreasonably, feel like they have a target on their back, which is to say that progressive DAs who are trying to make a name for themselves, progressive lawmakers and politicians, I think sort of feel like they need to get a cop on the hook whenever they can. So we’ve seen this push for more “Accountability” like … I’m not against accountability, I don’t think anyone is against actual accountability. I think the worry is that what gets termed accountability is really just singling out police for unfair treatment because it’s politically convenient to do so. So for example, we have the Diaphragm Law that got passed here in New York City, which criminalizes the placement of even accidental force on the chest or back or neck of a suspect, even if that suspect is resisting.
It makes it a crime for the police to do that, even if it’s accidental. So that’s just an example in which I think sort of police are starting to feel like they are being put behind the eight ball in a way that puts them in more legal jeopardy. We’ve seen lots of efforts to … some successful efforts to get rid of things like qualified immunity and other things that just may make a career in policing more costly for that individual. Obviously, there’s the risk of being tried and convicted in the court of public opinion if you are involved in a sort of viral force incident, even if you’re completely in the right. I mean, we saw that with the shooting of the young girl in Ohio who was just about to stab another girl when a police officer shot and killed her.
Yet, despite the very clear video evidence that she was about to use deadly force against another unarmed woman when she was shot, the police officer was still plastered all over the front page of newspapers and people were calling for his head. LeBron James, I think put his information out there to millions of followers. So there’s this sense that policing just isn’t really worth it, and what that I think has translated into is that lots of people who have options, people with high levels of education, people with high levels of psychological stability are choosing other options, except a career in policing. What we see, I think in urban departments especially where those risks are a little more pronounced, is that police officers in those departments are actively retiring early, resigning altogether, or leaving for jobs in more suburban environments where I think they perceive the risk to be lower, where they perceive the support level to be higher in terms of public support and political support, and I think what that means over time is that the quality of the median police officer in American cities is going to go down. Ironically, what that means is that we’re going to see more problematic uses of force. We’re going to see more mistakes in the field, and that’s just going to kind of create this cycle where people can then … who are critics of police, will point to those mistakes that are a result of this sort of decline in the quality of the median recruit and then, use that to demonize the institution further.
That’s a real shame because I think the professionalization of the institution of policing is one of the really great success stories of urban America over the last 30 years. I mean, policing in the 1960s, 70s, and even 80s was seen as kind of just a blue collar city job. Not really different from being a garbage man or something like that. It became a profession, it became something that required education and it became something that really recognized the honor and the responsibility that came with a government issued badge and gun, and we saw this radical shift upward in the quality of police officers around the country. That’s evident in the use of force statistics. I mean, take the NYPD for example. In 1971 when the department started keeping track, I think they shot more than 220 people. They killed almost a hundred.
I think in 2021, there were only 36 firearms discharges by NYPD officers. I think they killed less than 10 individuals, they use force in about 3% of all arrests. It’s a very different picture than what you’ve seen, and what really makes me sad is that I think at the root of a lot of the demonization that is driving this sort of lack of enthusiasm among potential recruits for a career in policing, that criticism, that demonization is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding or mischaracterization of use of force and what that actually looks like. I think it’s just really important for people to understand that despite the narrative that we’ve all been kind of spoonfed by legacy media outlets, that police use of force is the likely outcome of a police citizen encounter, particularly if the citizen is Black, is just false. It’s just false.
It’s not supported by the data at all. I mean, if you look at deadly force in particular, I did an analysis that I talk about in the book, where I look at 2018 data and I estimated the police in this country fired their weapons at about 3000 occasions that year, which sounds like a lot. It’s about six to eight shootings every day, but police made 10.3 million arrests that year. We had 700,000 cops almost in this country. They had about 75 million public contacts. So in the context of 10.3 million arrests, 3000 firearm discharges is not very high. That means police are using deadly force in 0.03% of arrests. If you look at non-deadly force, the case for a police violence problem doesn’t really get much stronger. Again, as I mentioned, the NYPD only used force in I think 3% of arrests in 2021.
That was a year in which the department fielded 6.4 million calls for service. They made 166,000 criminal arrests, and that’s kind of the higher end of force rates that I’ve seen. There was another study that I talk about in the book from 2018 that looked at three different police departments, one in North Carolina, one in Louisiana, and one in Arizona over a two-year period. Those three police departments collectively fielded over a million calls for service and made over 114,000 criminal arrests. They used force just one out of every 128 arrests, meaning that more than 99% of the arrests in that dataset went off without the use of any force whatsoever, and in 98% of the cases in which force was used, there was no or mild injury to the suspect.
This is based on expert medical examinations of the suspect’s records on intake at the county jail. In that entire dataset, there was just one fatal police shooting. So one of the sort of themes of my work in the book is that there is a disparity between what the narrative posits and what reality tells us. I think the perpetuation of that disparity has been completely destructive in so far as it has driven the police recruitment and retention crisis, in so far as it has given a lot of momentum to the more misguided elements of the criminal justice reform movement, and all of that collectively has done two things. One, it has raised the transaction cost of enforcing the law in this country and two, it has lowered the transaction cost of breaking the law in this country.
When you raise the transaction cost of one thing and you lower the transaction cost of another thing, you get less of the thing for which you raise the cost and you get more of the thing for which you lower the cost. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that from 2015 on, we’ve started to see elevated levels of violence, nor do I think it’s a coincidence that from that point on, we’ve started to see lower levels of police enforcement, incarcerations, jail entries, et cetera. So I think we’re just moving in the wrong direction. I hope that we are all smart enough and sort of remember our history well enough so that the pendulum swings back toward equilibrium sooner than we did in the 1960s and 70s and 80s, which took us almost 30 years of resurgent crime to kind of get tough again.
I don’t think that’ll be the case this time around, but the hope is that we just do it quickly, more efficiently and that we don’t overshoot the mark the way that we did in the 1990s. That’s something that I probably don’t say enough, but I do think it’s important to recognize that the reform movement enjoys some of its momentum because to some degree or another, we overcorrect it in the punitive direction, but that kind of overcorrection becomes more likely the further we let the crime and public safety picture deteriorate.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. What did your father … because you took the police exam, right?
Rafael Mangual:
Yeah. Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
And you were choosing between going into policing and going into … I think you ended up going to law school.
Rafael Mangual:
I did.
Inez Stepman:
So, what did your father tell you when you started to think about going into his profession?
Rafael Mangual:
I mean, he basically threatened not to talk to me. I mean, he was very upset by the idea and the case that he made is something that would sound very familiar to you if you were reading exit interviews of police officers leaving urban departments today. I mean, he was basically saying like, “Look, you’re taking a real risk with your career and your life. I mean, God forbid you’re involved in a controversial use of force. You’re going to get plastered on the front page in the newspaper. The politicians aren’t going to have your back. They’ll throw you under the bus, and if you’re lucky, all that’ll happen is that you’ll lose your job, and if you’re not lucky, you may get prosecuted or sued into oblivion and for what? To serve a community where you’re going to get spit on a daily basis or where no one is going to say thank you.”
It was really sad because I know that policing was something that he loved and it was a part of his life that I think he is still really proud of, but I think even back then, this was 2010, he saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want me to take that risk, and he saw it as a risk more than anything else. I think that really has to change if we’re going to get to a point in which the best and brightest are doing the job that carries with it the most responsibility, arguably, of any other government job that you can take.
Inez Stepman:
Well, thank you very much, Rafael Mangual. His book is “Criminal Injustice.” You can buy that everywhere, Amazon, all sorts of places. His other work is over at the Manhattan Institute. Thank you so much, Rafael for coming on High Noon.
Rafael Mangual:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.
Inez Stepman:
Thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected] Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
