Matt Yglesias

USA: A Land of Murder and Mayhem

I watched the first episode of the British TV series Life On Mars with the girlfriend the other night, and I said British murder investigations must look different from American ones since there’s so much less murder over there. She said she thought there was plenty of murder in the UK. Then I had a moment of panic where I thought maybe I was wrong, especially since crime’s been on the rise in many Western European countries, but the US is still incredibly murderous compared to most other developed countries:

Obviously there’s an incredible amount of place-to-place variability in this, with cities like DC, Baltimore, and Detroit being much more dangerous than average and much of the country experiencing a murder rate far below average. Still, even cities that are low-murder by American standards look pretty terrible compared with our non-Poland peer nations. The dramatically lower murder rate in the United Kingdom strikes me as especially noteworthy, since they have a pretty high level of socioeconomic risk factors like inequality and single-parent households.

One moral of the story is that, as I think Mark Kleiman would tell you, one of the main benefits of having relatively few murders is that it’s easier to prevent future murders. In Washington the ratio of murder victims to investigative capacity is quite high and as a consequence it’s relatively easy to get away with murder. London can throw much more resources at any given case, which deters murder and, in turn, makes it easier to maintain the low-murder equilibrium.

The Real Cost of Crime

Vacant rowhouses in Baltimore (cc photo by Eli Pousson)

Interesting Baltimore crime fact from Ezra Klein: “Of the 234 murders last year, 194 of the victims (82 per cent) had criminal records and 163 (70 per cent) had a history of being arrested for drug offenses.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates comments that this is “one of the many reasons why a ‘dangerous neighborhood’ often feels more dangerous to outsiders . . . a lot of the ’survival’ that goes on in the neighborhood involves who you hand around, and where you hang within that neighborhood.”

That, in turn, is a reminder that the bulk of the cost of crime almost certainly isn’t the cost directly paid by victims, it’s the costs incurred in terms of crime-avoiding behavior. Some of this cost is in terms of the efforts people living in high-crime areas go through to keep themselves safe. And some of it is quite far reaching. A dangerous neighborhood may, in fact, be relatively safe for people who live their and know the score. But it’s dangerous to outsiders. Which means that even if you’ve got some great recipes it’ll be hard to open up a restaurant and attract customers no matter how low the prevailing rents are. Which means that jobs serving the food and cleaning up won’t be available, and it means that young people who might get those jobs won’t acquire the skills that would have been involved in working alongside you and learning your recipes.

Residents of the neighborhood would prefer, all things considered, not to raise their kids in an environment where the question of “who you hand around” can be a life or death issue. So people with relatively high levels of income and social capital put together enough money to leave. Which means that the neighborhood lacks strong political advocates for delivering basic services adequately. Or at another level, you could tally up all the money Americans spend on things like securing guards and alarm systems and iron bars on doors or “the club” and note that these are not really productive investments or enjoyable consumer goods.

Dynamic-Concentration and Parenting

Law enforcement officials in low-crime jurisdictions have it easy. With little crime happening, it’s easy to monitor things and easy to punish wrongdoers. And with potential criminals knowing that crime is likely to be punished, there’s little crime. But in high-crime jurisdictions, it’s another thing entirely. When lots of serious crimes are happening, your ability to punish crimes of moderate severity gets very low, and the chances of being punished for even serious crimes is only middling. That encourages people to commit crimes. Which makes it even harder to enforce the law. Mark Kleiman’s idea of dynamic-concentration is a way around the problem.

The Economist observes that this can even work for parents:

Three weeks ago I read a post by our own Free Exchange referring to a recommendation Mr Kleiman made in his book, “When Brute Force Fails“, that police could combat gangs more effectively if they publicised a prioritised list of which gangs they were cracking down on most heavily. This would lead Public Enemy #1 Gang to give up in the face of reduced competitiveness. At that point Public Enemy #2 Gang becomes the highest-priority, and thus least-competitive, gang, and they give up too. And so on down the line, gradually reducing the number of gangs the police have to cope with. In my case, my kids were waking up early on school-day mornings and sneaking downstairs to watch TV. Under Mr Kleiman’s influence, I tried a new tactic: I announced that if both were found watching TV, only my daughter, the oldest, would be punished, because she was responsible. If only my son broke the rule, he would be the only one punished. Both kids are far more afraid of being punished disproportionately than of being punished equally. The school-day morning TV-watching has stopped.

The causal mechanism here actually strikes me as different, but either way it’s good to see that reading about public policy has practical applications.

Public Perceptions of Crime Rate Becoming Unmoored From Reality

John Sides looks at some Gallup data and comes up with a fascinating finding. In the 1990s, public perception of whether crime was getting better or worse largely tracked objective reality. But in the past decade that relationship has broken down (click on the image for a bigger picture):

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Lyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.).

Speculating . . . speculating . . . I feel that since the end of the 1990s, crime has really fallen off the map as an official topic of public and political concern. That could mean that people are seeing less reporting of actual facts about the crime rate and coming to be more influenced by the “if it bleeds it leads” phenomenon. But I don’t know how you would test that hypothesis.

Nurse Home Visits in Health Reform

(cc photo by TedsBlog)

Raising kids is hard. It’s also incredibly important. And there’s tons of evidence that the environment children grow up in from the youngest age makes a big difference in long-term development and life trajectory. And one thing parents with a lot of financial resources and social capital do is draw on those resources to get a lot of help, both practical help and just advice, about what they should do. And as Mark Kleiman notes, it turns out that when you take parents who lack those resources and go out of your way to help them out the results are very positive:

Thirty years ago, a professor of pediatrics named David Olds (then at Cornell, now at the University of Colorado, Denver) came up with a straightforward idea: send nurses into the homes of poor and undereducated first-time teenage mothers to coach them through their children’s difficult first two years. There are now 18,000 families receiving that service in 29 states, from a variety of local government agencies and nonprofit groups, supported by some $80 million per year of federal, state, and foundation funds, under the watchful eye of the Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office, a spinoff of the University of Colorado.

The program was designed to improve health, not to control crime, and the health-care savings from lower rates of sickness, substance abuse and welfare dependency among the mothers and children more than cover its costs. But it turned out that by the time the kids were 15 years old, those served by the program had been arrested less than half as often, and convicted only one fifth as often, as similar children who weren’t given the assistance.

Seems like the kind of program I would fund in expand in a national health reform effort. Or, if I were a conservative, the kind of thing I might demagogue and misdescribe in an effort to kill reform:

When a provision for nurse home visit grants was added to the House version of the health-care bill, the House Republican Conference promptly issued a statement mocking the program as a “nanny-state boondoggle.” They called it “billions for babysitters” and suggested buying copies of Dr. Spock’s child-care book instead. Lindsey Burke of the conservative Heritage Foundation warned of a “stealth agenda” to “impose a federally directed, top-down approach to parenting” and an increase in the federal role in preschool education. [...]

to Heritage legal expert David Muhlhausen, small-government principles outweigh crime control. “Open up your Constitution and read Article I, Section 8,” he says, referring to the section that enumerates the powers of the Congress. “Juvenile delinquency prevention is not in there.”

You see here the cost of a really irresponsible elite in the United States of America. Surely even Koch Industries and Ruper Murdoch don’t really have a problem with a cost-effective program to improve children’s health outcomes that turns out to also have substantial crime reduction benefits. But they can’t be bothered to think this kind of through.

Sexual Abuse in Prison

Americans generally take it for granted that corporal punishment, Singapore- or Saudi Arabia-style, is inhumane. We don’t just chop people’s hands off or tie them to a post and beat them. In practice, however, being sentenced to a U.S. prison in effect is a sentence to physical abuse. But rather than the level of abuse being determined by a judge and by the law, it tends to be determined by the vicissitudes of chance and gang affiliation. Read, for example, Carrie Johnson’s writeup of a recent report on sexual misconduct in federal prisons:

In what the inspector general called a “particularly egregious case,” a ring of corrections officers provided gifts to prisoners in return for sex, allowed the inmates to leave their cells and gave prison employees keys to offices so they could engage in sex with prisoners. To prevent detection, the officers allegedly intimidated prisoners to keep them from cooperating with investigators. Six of the officers were indicted in 2006, and when agents went to the prison to arrest them, one correctional officer pulled a smuggled gun and shot at random, wounding a prison lieutenant and killing inspector general agent William Sentner III.

I would add that when you’re “engag[ing] in sex” with someone who’s in prison and you’re a prison guard, you’re raping the prisoner. The prison/guard dynamic is obviously not conducive to any normal idea of consent.

Executing the Innocent

The grim business of executing criminals has long been haunted by the specter of killing someone innocent. Common sense and the fact that a number of people on death row have been exonerated suggests that it’s happened, but no specific case has ever been widely acknowledged. Now it looks like David Grann, writing for The New Yorker, has our man Cameron Todd Willingham accused by Texas of setting a fire that led to the deaths of three children. The case, as Grann argues, is a mess. It’s founded on forensic evidence that’s not backed up by any real science, a mentally unstable semi-repentant jailhouse snitch, and some badly flawed eyewitness testimony.

You should read the story for yourself. The tragedy inherent in executing an innocent man is pretty clear. But it’s sobering to note that these death penalty cases are more heavily litigated than other kinds of charges that might lead to “only” ten or fifteen years behind bars. Given the staggeringly high number of people in prison in the United States, it stands to reason that we have thousands of innocent people behind bars. Part of the problem is simply that no system is foolproof. But part of the problem is a mentality among law enforcement and prosecutors that convicting the innocent is a workable second-best alternative to convicting the guilty. This leads to enormous and irrational resistance to ever rethinking “successful” prosecutions.

Drug Prohibition and Drug Use

Peter Moskos and Stanford Franklin make many good points in their op-ed brief for drug legalization, but this is a silly argument: “If prohibition decreased drug use and drug arrests acted as a deterrent, America would not lead the world in illegal drug use and incarceration for drug crimes.” That just doesn’t follow logically. What’s more, the actual evidence from the alcohol prohibition era indicates that common sense is about right: making booze illegal caused less booze to be consumed, and the strength of the effect was related to the vigor with which the rules were enforced.

But that’s not to say that making alcohol illegal was a good idea and I certainly don’t think that handing out jail sentences for marijuana possession makes a great deal of sense. But in terms of hard drugs, I think that what Moskos and Franklin are mostly doing is marshaling the evidence for a dramatic change in police priorities rather than legalization of drugs as such. Tactics like the High Point Initiative appear to work as ways of shutting down overt drug markets. If a city can do that in its most problematic areas, the best thing to do seems to me to be to have its police . . . move on to worrying about something else. If people are selling drugs in a manner that’s not a nuisance for their neighbors and doesn’t involve violence, why not turn a blind eye? The knowledge that drug dealers who aren’t making problems for others will be left alone should encourage people to try to find less destructive business models. That’s still a far cry from saying that there should be heroin at the corner store, while CrackCo International hires the top marketing minds and lobbyists in the country to dream up exciting new ways of turning kids into addicts.

Historical Murder Rate

Eric Rauchway posts a chart illustrating Douglas Eckberg’s reconstruction of the correct homicide rate in the early 20th century United States, which was underestimated by the census bureau at the time:

I think this illustrates some of the dynamics of crime control. When there’s relatively little murdering happening, it’s easier for the crime control apparatus, from the police to the prisons and all the rest, to be pretty effective at keeping murder in check. Consequently, the murder rate stays low. But when it’s high, the system gets taxed and the tendency is for there to continue to be a lot of crime. If we were able to get ourselves back down to the murder rate that prevailed from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties the benefits would be enormous, and it probably wouldn’t be that hard to sustain ourselves at the lower level.

Meanwhile, the United States is strikingly more murderous than other rich democracies and has been for a long time.

Prison Riot in California

It seems there was an eleven hour prison riot in California that led to hundreds of injuries. This sort of thing is why courts are ordering California to start releasing prisoners in order to curtail severe overcrowding. Unfortunately, when you do this you’re going to wind up with more crime.

The good news is that there are things one can do to reduce crime other than lock more and more and more people up. Smart things. Things that are detailed in Mark Kleiman’s excellent forthcoming book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. I’ll be saying more about this book when you can really read it in stores. But the key overall analytic point is that the extent of the punishing going on in the United States is a sign of how poor a job we do at controlling crime. If we were better at supervising people and credibly communicating to them excellent odds that they’d be caught and punished—even if the punishments were not so severe—then we’d have many fewer people committing crimes and thus less punishing going on.

What to Do With a Retired Police Chief

Mark Kleiman says that he hopes Bill Bratton will return to public service after a few years of cashing in, perhaps as FBI Director. Kevin Drum observes that “Mueller’s term is up in 2011, so that would give Bratton a couple of years to earn some private sector dough before returning to the trenches.”

This strikes me as a not-so-hot idea. As Kleiman himself says, “The FBI would be a stretch: agents aren’t really cops, counter-terrorism isn’t policing, and any fight to change Hooverville would run into serious resistance from the Ba’athist dead-enders at on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The whole concept has a kind of Peter Principle air about it to me. Here’s a guy whose proven to be really good at running large urban police departments, so let’s put him in charge of a federal agency that’s not really a police department at all. That doesn’t make sense. Having well-run urban police departments is important on its own terms. We should be encouraging people who’ve proven successful at that to . . . keep doing it. Unfortunately, after New York and Los Angeles there’s no more upward step, so concepts like the FBI come to mind. But wouldn’t it be better if there were some kind of federal (or perhaps philanthropic) program dedicated to spreading best practices among urban police departments? Some kind of federal initiative to bring more and better policing to America’s more resource-strapped cities would be a boon to the poor people who are the main victims of crime and would be an appealing alternative to building ever more prisons.

That’s a kind of half-assed idea, but the larger spirit is that when people are doing important work successfully you should be finding ways to get them to keep doing that stuff instead of moving on to other things.

William Bratton Steps Down as LAPD Chief

This seems like a definitely loss to the world:

Chief William J. Bratton announced Wednesday that he would leave the Los Angeles Police Department after nearly seven years to lead a private international security firm.

At a City Hall news conference here, Mr. Bratton said he was resigning effective Oct. 31 to become chief executive officer of Altegrity Security Consulting, a new unit of Altegrity, whose headquarters are in New York.

One of the most important things in the world is trying to make public institutions work well, since the less-effective ones don’t just naturally go out of business the way corporations do. And yet unfortunately this isn’t something we know a great deal about. One thing we do know, however, is that first in Boston then in New York City and then in Los Angeles Bratton has put together an impressive record of presiding over police departments that succeed in reducing the incidence of crime both in absolute terms and relative to national trends. We need more people like that in public service.

The Madness of “Three Strikes”

California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law has always been nuts, but with federal judges ordering the state to release prisoners in order to ameliorate dangerous and inhumane prison conditions it’s about to get truly insane.

The thing about imprisoning someone is that even though it’s a costly and brutal thing to do, it can bring real gains. A person in a prison cell is a person who’s not out on the street committing crimes. But how well this works has a lot to do with how likely the person you’ve incarcerated actually is to commit additional crimes. And this has a lot to do with age. Criminal behavior peaks in the early twenties and tapers off dramatically after thirty. Consequently, very long prison sentences, especially as applied to repeat offenders, are pretty wasteful. And if you’re facing a court order to reduce your incarceration head count, the sensible thing to do is to start letting older prisoners out. Some of them will probably offend again, but the majority will have “aged out” of serious criminal activity. And older criminals tend to engage in less-risky, less-violent crime that’s not as bad.

But thanks to “three strikes” California mostly can’t do this. Instead of letting out some of the vast number of mostly harmless offenders they have behind bars, they’re going to need to keep them locked up and instead cut loose people with fewer crimes on their record. This is going to be a younger and much more dangerous group and letting them out will lead to higher crime. And that, in turn, will increase demand on the state’s punitive apparatus but it’s not going to magically conjure up any new prison beds and lots of the ones they have will continue to be occupied by oldsters who don’t need to be behind bars.

Dark Blue: The Madness Continues

I watched episode three of TNT’s Dark Blue last night and the show continues to be driven by the absurd and reprehensible notion that the world would be a better place if there were more rogue unaccountable police units. In this episode, our heros first try to entrap an innocent man. Then when that fails, as a fallback plan they just frame him instead. And, weirdly, they refer to this framing as “entrapment” and acknowledge that it kinda sorta might involve crossing a line, as if to obscure the fact that their initial plan was also illegal. Then, using the innocent man as a confederate, they successfully infiltrate some drug organization where a dude gets arrested but the innocent man is killed.

This is all acknowledged as a harrowing weekend at the office, but nobody seems to notice that effect police work is supposed to reduce, not increase, the quantity of people killed.

Specifics of the show aside, what’s totally missing from this conception of police work is any sense that there’s an actual purpose to the enterprise. Instead, you have a certain number of criminals and you have some cops so the cops are supposed to catch criminals. But nobody says at the end of the episode “now that we’ve arrested this guy there will be no more cocaine in Los Angeles.” Because that would be stupid. But then what are they trying to accomplish? Note that it’s not impossible for drug enforcement to accomplish something worthwhile. Open air drug markets are a huge nuisance for people who live in the neighborhood, and it’s possible to shut them down for good and make everyone’s life better. Or you can target enforcement on gangs that are being violent, or employing kids. But you need some kind of coherent theory about what the problem is in your community and how it is that law enforcement activity is going to make the problem better.

National Review Wants Cops to Kill Civilians

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.

Dark Blue

TNT’s constant advertising for Dark Blue during the NBA playoffs and the fact that I used to love The Practice back in the day has been enough to suck me in to watching the first couple of episodes of the show. I suppose it’s well-executed enough to be watchable, but the basic thesis of the show—that it would be really awesome if the LAPD had more unaccountable rogue police units—is both absurd and reprehensible.

Meanwhile, last night I finally got around to watching a few episodes of Season 2 of The Shield on Netflix. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever seen, but as an alternate treatment of the very same “unaccountable rogue LAPD unit on basic cable” concept it sure is a lot better. Also manages to work in the fact that in some ways an unaccountable rogue policy unit might be problematic. A little corruption maybe!

Annals of the Predictable

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (wikimedia)

I didn’t see the president’s press conference last night. But I understand he got a question about Skip Gates in which Obama observed that the officer in question acted stupidly. I would say that any time you wind up arresting a guy on charges stemming from an alleged break-in to his own house and then drop the charges, that by definition you’re acting stupidly. Anyways, Spencer Ackerman at the time of the incident tweeted:

GOD I can’t wait to read the white backlash against Obama’s Gates comment. To the Corner I go!

And the Corner delivered. You didn’t even need to wait for one of the really repugnant Corner writers either. Instead, the relatively reasonable Yuval Levin delivered the outrage on behalf of an aggrieved white America.

Many Large Cities Report Crime Decline

I’ve noted previously that murder is on the decline in 2009 for the District of Columbia, and today’s Post brings the news that the tend seems to be going national:

Violent crime has plummeted in the Washington area and in major cities across the country, a trend criminologists describe as baffling and unexpected. The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

In his excellent forthcoming book on crime Mark Kleiman makes the point that it’s much easier for a law enforcement system to be effective when there’s relatively little crime. With few people committing offenses, it’s pretty easy to monitor crime hotspots and to deploy swift and effective punishment. And because it’s pretty easy to capture offenders and punishment for offenses is likely to be swift and effective, people tend to be deterred from committing crimes. Which makes enforcement easier which makes crime decline which makes enforcement easier and on and on and on.

In other words, there’s at least some reason to expect that the past 15 years’ worth of success at better controlling crime in many of America’s major cities will just have a lot of momentum that can carry us forward even through unfavorable labor market conditions.

Murder Down in DC

After experiencing a large decline starting in the 1990s, the number of murders in DC has been creeping up slightly the past couple of years:

So far this year, however, murder is way down:

There’s been some concern across urban America that poor economic conditions will lead to a return of the high levels of crime seen in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the historical evidence on how likely that is is mixed. Certainly, any such increase would be a very unwelcome development. Crime, after all, features a lot of tipping point and feedback loop effects. The fewer murders there are in the District in any given year, the more time and attention MPDC can afford to dedicate to investigating any given murder. The ability to devote more attention to particular cases increases the odds of apprehension which decreases the odds of violation. That, in turn, makes policing easier.

And of course with less murder there’s more resources available to deal with other kinds of offenses. A reduction in crime also encourages people to be out and about more, which creates “eyes on the street” and can further reduce crime. It also spurs economic opportunities and job creation which, in turn, reduce crime. By contrast, rising crime can swamp the law enforcement infrastructure and then start to devastate the tax base which supports it.

Voting Rights For Felons

Patrick Appel has a great item in the Atlantic’s “ideas” section about voting rights for convicted felons. He makes the critical point that the evidence indicates this is actually a counterproductive crime control measure:

According to a 2004 study, former prisoners who vote are half as likely to reoffend. If suffrage constitutes even a small nudge toward the straight and narrow, why shouldn’t we grant prisoners the right to vote? As things now stand, criminal-voting laws vary widely by state: in some, a first-time drug offender will be denied the right to vote for life; in others, murderers can vote while behind bars. But overall, America’s position on voting rights, particularly with regard to former criminals, is the most punitive of any developed nation. [...]

Crime costs this country an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. Unless disenfranchisement helps reduce that number — and the evidence suggests that it does the opposite — then denying prisoners the vote in order to minutely heighten the virtue of the voting pool is a bad trade.

Unfortunately, the crime control discussion in the United States tends to be heavily focused on people’s emotional sense of outrage, on nobody wanting to be seen as an advocate for criminals, and on a certain amount of denial that this is even an important issue. But it is an important issue—high crime rates are really damaging—and we have a strong interest in using punishments that work, and eschewing punishments that don’t.

As a bonus, here’s a map showing the variance in state-by-state policies:

Unfortunately, the reality is that there’s a lot of partisan politics in the way of changing this.

Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent

John Roberts (Wikimedia)

Here’s a beaut of a decision from the increasingly brutal and inhumane conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Not content with gutting anti-discrimination legislation, a 5-4 majority has decided that if people are wrongfully convicted they should be punished anyway because, hey, tough on crime!

In 1993, William Osburne was convicted of kidnapping, assaulting and raping a woman in Anchorage, Alaska. He spent the next 14 years of his life behind bars. Osburne insists that he is innocent, the State of Alaska has in its possession DNA evidence which will once and for all prove his guilt or innocence, and Osburne has offered to pay for DNA testing out of his own pocket. Allowing Osburne to prove—or disprove–his claim of innocence will cost Alaska literally nothing.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court held today in a 5-4 decision by Chief Justice Roberts that Osburne is out of luck. Although Roberts conceded that “[i]t is now often possible to determine whether a biological tissue matches a suspect with near certainty,” he determined that Osburne has no right to pay for a test that could exonerate him for a crime he did not commit. Allowing Osburne to prove his potential innocence, Roberts said, risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

Obviously, the purpose of the established system of criminal justice is to use punishment of the guilty as a means of controlling crime. The general hostility of most people in the law enforcement and prosecutorial universe to exonerating evidence is a little bit hard to understand. The predominant thinking of Alaska in this case seems to be that the punishment of the innocent works as a close substitute for the punishment of the guilty, so that given the heinous nature of the crime the state has a strong interest in convicting someone or other of it irrespective of the facts. This is exactly the sort of madness and injustice we rely on the judicial system to rescue us from. But not the new Roberts Court!

The two cases handed down yesterday are just two new additions to the trend observed by Jeffrey Toobin, “in every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” That’s conservative jurisprudence in a nutshell.

Sotomayor and Felon Disenfranchisement

Ian Milhiser’s explanation of the issues and distortions in play regarding Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in a case about the voting rights of felons is excellent. It’s also an excellent example of how hollow conservative rhetoric about the judiciary is. As he explains, here’s how conservatives want to understand the application of the Voting Rights Act to the question of felon disenfranchisement:

In a case called Chisom v. Roemer, the Supreme Court held that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act even if it unintentionally causes people to lose their right to vote on account their skin color. So if New York actually does systematically disenfranchise minorities by overincarcerating them, the Voting Rights Act forbids New York from continuing this practice.

Nevertheless, a majority of the court held that felony disenfranchisement laws are immune to scrutiny under the Act. Essentially, the court said that Congress did not really mean it when it enacted a law providing that “no voting qualification” may discriminate.

As Ian observers, suddenly conservative reverence for the text goes out the window the moment strict adherence to the text would produce a progressive result.

Meanwhile, legal issues aside, as a policy felony disenfranchisement laws are a terrible thing. They’re not a meaningful deterrent to crime, but they are a lasting stigma on ex-offenders and a barrier to their reintegration into society. What’s more, they serve to further politically disempower the disproportionately poor, disproportionately minority communities in which convicted felons are typically found. There’s no good reason for this policy, but upholding it serves the dual goals of “tough on crime” posturing and advancing conservative political power, so it’s extremely difficult to get rid of.

Times Change, Successful Political Movements Change With Them

Noemie Emery did a pretty goofy article for the Weekly Standard, suggesting that conservatives need to emulate Ronald Reagan’s actions from 1977 to put themselves back in power. Missing from the piece is any kind of sense that Reagan’s political successes might have related to specific elements of the era that aren’t necessarily replicable at all times and places. Ed Kilgore notes:

I’d add that even Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric and domestic agenda is hardly a panacea today. In 1977 the federal government had been steadily acquiring barnacles for 35 years. The top federal income tax rate was 70%. The number of violent crimes had more than doubled in the previous ten years, as had the number of Americans on public assistance

At any rate, to state the obvious successful political movements need plausible answers to problems people care about. When marginal tax rates were extremely high, “cut marginal tax rates” fit the bill. With rates much lower, it’s not clear that it does these days. But in some ways, the crime thing is the best example. Violent crime went up a lot under the liberal regime of the mid-60s to late-70s and was a fruitful issue for the right in the 1980s. More recently, crime is down from its peak. But the murder rate in the United States is still much higher than it was back in the “good old days” and also much higher than in other developed countries. So this could, in principle, continue to be a fruitful political issue. But since it’s not really financially feasible to undertake further dramatic expansions in the prison population, conservatives seem to have just dropped the whole subject.

The Kill Ratio

I was aware that declining rates of “intimate” homicide have been a significant, though oft-overlooked, component of the declining murder rate in the United States. Now I see at sociological images that there’s an interesting gender twist to this:

My Internet search for explanations was cursory at best, but it turned up nothing. I have only two ideas:

1. Men Behaving Better. Men have stopped doing those things that made women want to kill them.

I offered this explanation to two women in the Justice Studies department here. They rejected it out of hand and without comment. (Maybe they didn’t like the blaming-the-victim assumption: if women kill men, it’s because of what men do. Or maybe they were using a convenience sample of anecdotal data on men’s behavior.). One of these women, Lisa Anne Zilney, offered a counter-explanation . . .

2. Women Having Options. Women’s shelters and other facilities have given women an alternative. Without these, the only way to escape an intolerable situation at home was to get rid of the cause. Providing abused and desperate women a safe place to go saves lives – and apparently not just the lives of women.

Lisa writes that she’s “not wild about either of these explanations” and neither am I. A further twist is that it used to be the case that the United States had an unusually low level of gender inequality in intimate homicide. Consequently, it may be that the thing which needs explaining is not the divergence but the previous scenario in which there was no divergence.

“Stress Tests” For Cities?

Here’s an interesting idea from Ryan Avent:

I actually think it would be helpful to have a process of economic health reviews in place, which could then lead to temporary federal government receivership of failing cities, in which institutional barriers to reform are addressed and budgets supported while the broader economic potential of the place was considered.

This seems like a good idea, in principle. The idea is that a negative shock can send a city into a downward spiral. Some kind of misfortune reduces the city’s tax base, but it’s stuck with a fixed infrastructure. So the quality of services declines. That further encourages people to leave the city, leading to further deterioration of the tax base. Soon enough, you’re left with a city primarily populated by people who are too poor to leave, trapped in a bad-services equilibrium. From a national point of view, this is wasteful because a lot of fixed investment in the old city—housing stock, office buildings, roads, rail lines, etc. winds up devalued and eventually lost as ruins. A discrete, one-off infusion of funds and reorganization backed by a credible commitment could halt and reverse this process and allow resources to be mobilized in a more efficient way.

In practice, I have serious doubts as to whether or not a workable system along these lines can be put in place. There are technical aspects to these kind of issues, but fundamentally it’s too much of a political topic to hope to erect some kind of purely technocratic path for receivership. But I think that some of the thinking behind recent changes to federal education policy—more resources for high-poverty districts combined with provisions to allow for the reorganization of persistently underperforming school districts—captures some of the merits of this suggestion. William Stuntz’s proposal to incrase federal support for police departments in poor cities could have some of the same impact.