The flat-earthers of crime discourse.
When you look at the horizon, it looks like the earth is flat, right?
There are truisms in U.S. politics that seem obvious, based on your political bent, but are as wrong as worrying you’ll sail your ship off the edge of the earth.
A few examples: How can global warming be real when you freeze your ass off in the winter?
In reality, there’s virtually universal consensus in the scientific community that climate change is real, and that it will directly fuck all of us and not just our abstract future descendants.
Immigrants take our jobs!
Immigrants start businesses. They bring with them the education they attained in their home countries (which the US taxpayer does not pay for). Due to America’s pathetic STEM education, we need people from abroad so someone in America knows how to do math.
My dad is an engineer. His boss once joked that if he interviewed someone without an accent, he was instantly suspicious. For decades my dad worked alongside engineers from Turkey, Ethiopia, Pakistan, India, Korea. And you know, aerospace engineers—their job is to make planes safe and more energy efficient. Do you want Tyler who was surgically attached to a beer bong for four years of college in charge of that? Or a person with a PhD determined to “make it” in America because going home is not an option?
Conversely, they do jobs no American would be caught dead doing. Tyson chicken just loves refugees, especially from groups on the verge of genocide, like the Karen minority of Burma. Picking at chicken innards all day still beats genocide.
Criminal justice discourse follows a similar trajectory. But unlike the notions described above, which Good Liberals™ project onto those hicks in flyover country, crime—what stops it, what makes it worse, what we should do about it—blinds liberals, even lefty progressives (see Ana Kasparian) to what’s really going on.
One trueism is that there must be a balance between “justice and safety—that efforts to make the criminal system more fair may come at the expense of victims of violence, so we must remain vigilant so that reform doesn’t “go too far.” Balancing safety and justice is the slogan of choice for blue state Democrats who can’t gin up points bashing trans people or bringing back capital punishment, but can reliably convince the wealthy that while they deeply care about reforming the criminal justice system, public safety remains paramount.
Another related true-ism is that right-wing DAs maintain public safety, while reform DAs are playing dice with our lives because of a misplaced sympathy for criminals.
The right lies and vilifies reform DAs like poor Chesa Boudin. Boudin tried to counter the recall by citing crime data, which showed that violent crime fell during his tenure. But it was like a high-school nerd trying to prevent a swirlie by explaining the gravitational forces that make a toilet flush. Once the gazillionaires had ginned up the storyline that every crime, every homeless encampment, in San Francisco was Boudin’s fault, logic and numbers didn’t have a chance.
Liberals and progressives go the route of, “We believe in reform, but…” Some of the cite their great concern for people of color when they promote more police and “tough-on-crime”DAs.
But there are realities (or surreal nightmares) in the criminal justice system that upend the seemingly obvious conclusion that putting criminals in prison for longer leads to less crime.
First, despite the existence of virtual and literal life sentences, most crimes, including most violent crimes, do not lead to life behind bars. Our system prioritizes plea deals over trials. So if you’re DA, no matter how tough! you are on criminals, in virtually every case, you’re going to seek a plea deal which leads to a lower sentence than the maximum possible.
A suspect has no incentive to take a deal if the deal is, “You’ll get the maximum sentence for the maximum charges.” Prosecutors always downgrade charges, it’s just that people only notice or care when a reform DA does it.
Last week, a man reportedly beheaded the mother of his child in San Mateo, California. The DA of San Mateo, Steven Wagstaffe, is one of the toughest! DAs in the country. Yet, twice during his tenure, prosecutors in his office gave the suspect in the beheading probation instead of prison time, for two separate violent crimes against women in his past.
In 2012, he was accused of having sex with an unconscious woman. The maximum charge here is probably rape one. But the charge was downgraded to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a person three years younger.”
The second charge occurred late last year, when he got in a fight with the woman he would go on to murder.
As far as I know, not a single pundit—left, right, center—is asking why a tough! DA released an alleged rapist and domestic violence abuser. No one is asking what it is about the tough-on-crime prosecutor movement that allows tragedies like this to occur.
I’ll give it a try. When you prosecute everything you can, including “quality of life” crimes, as Wagstaffe has boasted his office does, you clog the system with non-violent offenders and violent people are more likely to slip through the cracks.
Second, if your goal is to rack up guilty pleas, you will pursue less serious charges in violent incidents. If your spiel is that you want to make the system more just, you’re not going to be boasting about how many people you put behind bars during your re-election campaign.
And third—going back to the original point that most sentences don’t add up to literal or virtual life behind bars (as they should not). Even if an offender gets 5 or 10 or 15 years under a tough! DA, they’ll go out in the community when their term is up. While most people go on to lead good, crime-free lives after prison, many people emerge traumatized, confused about the world, and lacking the things in life that make re-offending less likely: purpose, good work, strong family and community ties.
That means that a minority of offenders might, in fact, pose more of a danger when they get out at 25 after seven years behind bars, than they would have if they’d been given the chance to finish high school at age 18 instead of going to adult prison.
Now doesn’t that seem pretty obvious?