Our attorney, Aaron Rice, the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, spoke on a panel today at the Intermediate Legal Strategy Forum hosted by the Heritage Foundation. He discussed pretrial planning, drafting key motions and conducting effective depositions.
Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the US-Mexico border than on the other? Why is the average Canadian twelve times richer than the average Moroccan, despite having similar size populations?
We are often invited to believe that a society’s relative success has a lot to do with its geography or climate. Not so.
There are plenty of resource-rich countries in Africa, blessed in every imaginable way by geography and climate, that still produce only grinding poverty. Conversely, there are plenty of resource-poor places, such as Japan or Iceland, that prosper.
Much more important than a country’s natural resources is its political economy.
If property rights are insecure, power arbitrary and taxes high, a society will remain poor. If, on the other hand, people are free to spend more of their own money and make their own choices for themselves and their families, society overall will thrive.
Perhaps the single best illustration of this is Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula has been divided. North Korea has been run by a communist dictatorship, under which there are no property rights and rules for everything, including what you can wear. South Korea, especially since the 1980s, is an open, free-market society, with relatively low taxes and light regulation.
The North today can barely feed itself. The South is as wealthy as Europe or the US.
Korea shows us what happens when a society is subjected to two different extremes – one free market, the other a tyranny.
Making sure that every society is run along free market principles is essential to maximize prosperity. But even with the most liberty-minded policies in place, would everyone in a free market society flourish?
In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, undertook a famous experiment. He offered kids a marshmallow on the understanding that they could either eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait a few minutes and have two.
What Mischel was doing was measuring each child’s time preferences. Those kids that were prepared to wait had what we call a low time preference. The less patient kids that opted to have one marshmallow right away, had what we call a higher time preference.
Having assessed each kid’s time preference, Mischel then tracked their progress over the years that followed. He discovered a startling correlation between having a low time preference (being prepared to wait) with academic and other kinds of success. Those inclined towards instant gratification, his research seemed to suggest, would be less successful.
Time preferences, it seems, play an important part in how we as individuals do. Might time preferences also have a role in explaining the different trajectories societies take?
Could it be that the USA, Canada, Finland and Japan are relatively rich because they are countries with low time preferences? There is a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, like Mexico and Russia have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries like Tanzania and Nigeria have really high time preferences.
The conventional explanation for this is that prosperity produces lower time preferences. Might it not be the case that lower time preferences produce prosperity?
If being wealthy explained your time preferences, not the other way around, you might expect that people with comparable incomes in different countries had similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences impact outcomes, not the other way around.
Mainstream economists have a lot to say about how individuals transact with other individuals. They less often look at how we as individuals transact with our future selves.
Surely how people in a society transact with their future selves is critical in explaining economic outcomes? In a society with a low time preference, people are more likely to defer consumption and save. Dropout rates in education are likely to be lower. Capital and knowledge will accumulate from one generation to the next.
Time preferences are a key factor driving a society’s economic development. What about propensity to commit crime? Presumably, if you are willing to risk seeing your future self sent to prison in return for the chance of an immediate material reward you have a different time preference to someone that isn’t?
Time preferences can clearly be influenced by public policy. Hyperinflation, for example, would give people a powerful incentive to spend, rather than save. Some research has suggested that exposure to communism had impacted the time preferences of East Germans, compared to those who lived in West Germany (albeit that the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world).
When considering some of America’s deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. Here’s a heretical thought; how might time preferences vary across the country?
What can we do to lower time preferences? Can one actually lower time preferences, or is it perhaps a case of not raising them?
Idealists believe that if only we adopted the right policies, we would get better outcomes. A conservative idealist should recognize that there are some aspects of human nature that we can neither change nor perfect. Time preferences might be one of them.
Far too often we only hear bad things about Mississippi. Many media organizations seem to relish any chance they get to put our state down.
Mississippi is, I believe, getting a lot of big things right – and improved public policy is starting to generate some successes.
Here are four recent trends impacting our state that show we are heading in the right direction on some important policy areas.
1. More Mississippi kids are now learning to read properly:
For years, Mississippi was ranked bottom of the class for education. Not anymore.
Mississippi has seen a significant improvement in literacy standards, following an insistence on the use of phonics and testing. The National Assessment of Education Progress test results show that over the past decade, Mississippi has moved from near the bottom to the middle for most exams.
2. Thanks to improved policing, Jackson’s homicide rate appears to be falling fast:
At the end of this month, we will be halfway through 2023. So far, it seems that there has been a significant decline in the murder rate.
In 2021, Jackson had one of the highest homicide rates in America, with 160 murders - making our state capital twice as deadly in per capita terms as Atlanta. In 2022 things were not that much better, with 138 people killed.
As of writing this, we have had 41 homicides in the city so far this year – still tragically high. But the number is significantly lower than at this stage last year, or the year before. In fact, if – and it is a big if – the trend we saw in the first five months of 2023 continues, we could be on course to have the lowest homicide rate in the city since 2017. It seems that changes in the way that we police our state capital are working. Well done to all those that are helping make that happen!
3. Unemployment in our state has never been lower:
Unemployment in Mississippi is lower today than ever, with fewer than 42,000 people out of work. A decade ago, there were well over 100,000 Mississippians out of work.
There are a myriad of reasons why unemployment is lower. Some might emphasize how lower income tax encourages more people to earn an income. Others might point to labor market deregulation, which makes it easier for people to get occupational licenses. Whatever the reasons, this is great news for our state.
4. Our state’s personal tax burden is falling:
According to the Tax Foundation, Mississippi now has one of the lower per-person tax burdens in America. There are only 15 states across the country where people pay less personal tax than we do. Our state’s top marginal rate of tax is down to 5 percent as of January this year. Compare that to California’s 13 percent or New York’s 11 percent.
To me, it seems that many opinion formers in our state seem embarrassed about Mississippi. Others seem to want to signal their supposed superiority with relentless condescension. As someone that has chosen to make my home in Mississippi, I believe we need to stop feeling defensive about our state.
Mississippi is a great place to live. And with record low unemployment, rising literacy rates, falling taxes and signs that we might at last be getting a grip on crime in Jackson, it is getting even better. The Mississippi Center for Public Policy exists to make sure that happens.
Failing to arrest and lock up violent criminals is no favour to black communities
Over the past decade or so, America has undertaken a radical experiment in criminal justice reform.
The number of people arrested each year is dramatically down. In 2011, there were in excess of 12 million arrests. By 2021, that figure had fallen to 4.5 million. Even before the death of George Floyd in May 2020, the police seemed to be much more reluctant to arrest people.
When the police in America do make an arrest, there is now a much greater chance that public prosecutors won’t prosecute. At the same time, those that do get convicted are generally now given shorter sentences than before. As a consequence of all this, America’s prison population is now 25 percent lower than it was in 2011.
This move to a more lenient criminal justice system was driven by a curious coalition of both left and right.
Radical progressives, emboldened by the Black Lives Matter movement, have pursued an explicitly anti-police and anti-prison agenda. The criminal justice system, they believe, is irredeemably racist, given its tendency to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate a higher proportion of black people. Their solution is not only to defund the police, but elect as public prosecutors social justice activists who often won’t prosecute. The prison system itself, some on the radical left argue, should be abolished.
What is often less appreciated is that this leniency agenda has been supported by many well-meaning conservatives, too.
In 2018, Donald Trump proudly supported the First Step Act, a piece of federal legislation that explicitly aimed to reduce the prison population. Within the past decade, dozens of conservative states have passed laws that automatically allow offenders a right to apply for parole. Maybe, many conservative think tankers mused, the police can be a little too “militaristic”. And doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?
A brilliant new book, published by Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, blows apart these asinine arguments. Criminal (In)Justice uses hard facts to show that criminal justice reform has produced a criminal justice disaster.
Leniency, Mangual shows, has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in crime. As America’s prison population has fallen by a quarter, violent crime has soared. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of homicides in America rose 56 percent, from 14,661 to 22,900. In progressive-run cities on the west coast, such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, homelessness and drug taking are endemic. Shoplifting is tolerated. Violent offenders are treated as though guilty of a mere misdemeanour. The middle classes in such cities appear reluctant to stay and enjoy these social justice utopias, and are leaving in large numbers.
Even in conservative states such as my own Mississippi, the impact of misguided criminal justice reform has been devastating. The murder rate in our state capital, Jackson, has risen almost fourfold since new sentencing laws were passed in 2013, giving violent felons an automatic right to apply for parole.
America is learning the hard way that if you release from prison people that have an 80 percent chance of reoffending within the next ten years, this will increase crime.
Reformers pushed their anti-incarceration agenda claiming that there were better ways of reducing crime than by filling up the prisons. If there are better ways, America has yet to find them. Once you factor in for selection bias, there is remarkably little evidence that rehabilitation programs have anything like the efficacy those that run them want them to have.
Crime, Mangual shows, particularly violent crime, is hyper concentrated not only geographically, but demographically too. The victims of this new wave of violent crime are disproportionately African American.
According to data from JAMA, since 1990, the rate at which white men are killed by firearms in America has remained low and relatively constant, at well below 5 homicides per 100,000. Among black men in the US, however, the firearm homicide rate is now about ten times higher than it is for white men, at over 50 per 100,000.
Is America’s criminal justice system, now that it has fewer proactive arrests, less prosecution and shorter sentencing, doing a better job today for African American men? Given that the black male firearm homicide rate in the US has increased so dramatically in recent years, it is difficult to see how it can be.
America’s experiment in criminal justice reform was perhaps fuelled by a sense that the system was discriminatory and unfair for minority communities. What Mangual shows is that the move towards leniency has in fact had disastrous consequences for those communities. Different outcomes in the criminal justice system, the data suggests, are not reflective of any apparent biases within the system, but are reflective of differences in behavior.
As more and more Americans begin to recognise that crime is on the increase as a consequence of bad public policy choices, the race will soon be on to find solutions that actually work. Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, recently made it clear that if elected president, he would look to repeal Trump’s bill on criminal justice reform.
While the economy still polls as Americans number one concern, over two thirds now say that crime is a real threat. Interestingly, according to one recent poll, concern that crime is a real threat is particularly pronounced among nonwhite voters, a key part of the Democratic coalition.
Expect to see Democrats, as well as Republicans, offering tougher alternatives in place of the leniency of the past.
Douglas Carswell is President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
This article originally appeared in The Telegraph.
I have just finished reading a rather good book about Mississippi politics. ‘The Switcher’, by Judge Jim Herring, is a biographical account of Mississippi’s colorful election campaigns and candidates.
First elected as a District Attorney in 1971, Herring ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1976 and then for Governor in 1979 – each time as a Democrat. Herring, however, ends up serving as Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party for seven years.
‘The Switcher’, as the name implies, is a book about one man’s personal journey from the Democrats to the Republicans. But it is also the story of how an entire state flipped to the GOP.
Until Thad Cochran’s election as US Senator in 1978, Mississippi had not had any state-wide Republican politicians since the 1880s. Not much changed until 1992, when Kirk Fordice and Eddie Briggs were elected Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Even then, it was not until 2011 that the Democrats lost their hold on the state Legislature.
Why did Mississippi flip? For Herring – and indeed for many Mississippians - Ronald Reagan clearly exerted powerful pull factor. A key moment the book refers to came when Herring heard ‘the Gipper’ speaking in Gulfport about the need for “steadiness of purpose, fidelity to ideals and love of country”.
Reagan’s brand of conservatism, with its attachment to the free market, limited government and uncomplicated patriotism, attracted millions of traditional Democrat voters across the South. Mississippi's switch was made possible, too, thanks to the heroic efforts of Billy Mounger, Wirt Yerger and Clarke Reed. In some sense, one might even argue Mississippi's 'switchers' made possible not only the conversion of our state but perhaps too, the Reagan Revolution. Thank goodness for ‘switchers’! Without them, there would have been no Reagan Democrats, and the 40th President is unlikely to have been a conservative.
Mississippi proves that you do not – or at least did not - need to be a Republican to be classified as conservative. Plenty of folks that voted for Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Bill Clinton in 1992 had conservative views when it comes to Faith, Flag, Free markets and Family.
Herring himself remains consistent to his political principles across each chapter of the book, favoring limited taxes, light regulation and adherence to the Constitution.
He, like many in our state, might have switched parties, but his conservative ideals remain largely unchanged.
Being a conservative is more than just allegiance to a particular party. It ought to be about more than having the right bumper stickers or watching Fox News over CNN.
Although Jim’s book doesn’t mention Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish forefather of the conservative movement, reading it is clear to me that he is a Burkeian conservative at heart – like most folk in Mississippi, and perhaps indeed America.
Burke, an early supporter of the American Revolution and doughty defender of free trade, believed that throughout a nation’s history, a process of trial and error means some laws and government arrangements survive, while others die out. Those that survive we should therefore regard as a sublime inheritance because they represent in effect the aggregated wisdom of past generations. That, to me, seems to be the essence of conservatism.
Mea culpa. My bad. In a recent article on crime, I wrote that “from 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741 percent, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.”
Actually, those numbers are wrong. I took the figures from the Mississippi Crime Statistics website in good faith, but it now seems that the website only includes partial data for 2016.
To make the point that criminal justice leniency is fuelling an increase in crime, I should have stuck with the 260 percent increase in homicides in Jackson between 2013 and 2021. The actual statistics are grim enough without me needing to (inadvertently) provide erroneous ones. My apologies.
Each Memorial Day, we come face-to-face with the human cost of freedom. While we observe the holiday to honor our war dead – not all U.S. veterans – it is nonetheless an especially significant day to our surviving veterans. They have learned the hard way, having lost friends in battle, that honoring the fallen is more than just a platitude.
Veterans know better than most that the fallen young we honor each Memorial Day are not just names on a wall. They are not an abstraction. They were real people, with their own hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Many of them dropped those plans to answer the call and never got the chance to pick them back up.
The wartime loss of our best young men and women leaves gaping holes in families and communities across the nation. In a tragic reversal of the natural order, it compels mothers and fathers to bury their sons and daughters, and young children to venerate mythical parents they never knew.
Returning veterans shoulder the burden too. They visit with the spouses, children, siblings, parents, and friends of their fallen brothers and sisters in arms. After their service, they find that they must forge a new life and identity, shorn of the mission and comradery that gave them purpose, all while grieving the loss of too many close friends whose lives were cut short.
While some veterans struggle to find their place in life after combat, most find that the personal grit forged through their wartime experience serves them equally well in civilian pursuits. In George Washington’s farewell address to the Continental Army, he urged veterans of the American Revolution to “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens, than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.” Today’s veterans continue to live up to that charge.
Yet even decades later, as veterans reap the hard-won blessings afforded by our great country, their minds endlessly return to the young dead who never got that chance. The chance to marry that special someone. To buy that first home. To bring those wonderful children into the world. To experience the satisfaction of a rewarding career. To reach their golden years, surrounded by friends and family, secure in the knowledge that they preserved the blessings of peace for themselves and their posterity.
As they shoulder these burdens, veterans must also find the balance between fostering appreciation of the honorable sacrifices made for our great country and maintaining their own personal code of integrity. In one of Shakespeare’s tragic dramas, Roman general Coriolanus disappoints the crowd while seeking public office by refusing to show his war wounds, finding it beneath his dignity. While angst over participation in this ancient custom may seem arcane to most, it is a dilemma familiar to many veterans.
Stories of sacrifice by our veterans and their fallen friends can move later generations to a deeper appreciation of the greatness of our country. The lived experience of survivors can also correct misperceptions that war veterans are too scarred to be social assets, needing instead to be pacified with government benefits and dismissed from the larger community.
But many veterans are quiet professionals, wary of contributing to these important narratives for fear of profiting from the sacred sacrifices of their brothers and sisters. Especially in today’s culture of victimhood, where success often depends on one’s ability to tell a compelling story of experiencing prejudice or adversity, veterans fear sullying noble service by seeming to seek personal advancement or victim-class status, even when their motives are pure.
That partly explains why you do not hear veterans brag about their wartime adventures or complain about their struggles. They are far more likely to worry about overstating their service and sacrifice. When asked about it, many are quick to volunteer that they didn’t do anything special. It is a way of preempting gratitude they have never felt comfortable accepting, especially when friends of theirs didn’t make it home.
What do we owe our fallen this Memorial Day? Remembrance, of course. Yet we can also strive to be a nation deserving of the veterans who buried our fallen. A country that believes in our veterans, that knows they have important contributions to make on the home front, and maintains its appreciation, even when it is never asked for.
***
Aaron Rice serves as the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, which brings constitutional litigation on behalf of Mississippians whose rights have been threatened by government action, and has won major victories for the personal, economic, and religious liberty of Mississippians. Prior to his legal career, Aaron served in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq, where he received the Purple Heart for sustaining combat injuries that resulted in the loss of his left leg below the knee. He is also a Truman Scholar, a recipient of the Buckley Award in recognition for his leadership in the conservative movement, and has been named one of Mississippi's Top 50 Most Influential leaders.
Mississippi, it is often said, has an incarceration problem. Our state locks up too many people for too long, we are told.
Over the past two decades, Mississippi’s prison population has in fact fallen. In January 2014 the prison population of our state was 21,008. By January 2022, that figure had declined by almost a fifth to 16,931.
Those who argue Mississippi should incarcerate fewer people have been getting exactly what they asked for.
Now let’s take a look at what has happened to violent crime in our state over that time.
From 2016 to 2022, violent crime in our state increased by 741 percent, according to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. We went from 538 violent crimes a year to 4,529. That is 3,991 more violent crimes and more victims.
Anti-prison advocates like to argue that locking people up in large numbers does not work. Crime, they point out, was high even when Mississippi locked people up in greater numbers than almost anywhere else in America. The trouble is that Mississippi after these anti-incarceration reforms is a vastly more violent place than Mississippi was without them.
In 2013, the year before Mississippi enacted legislation designed to reduce the rate of incarceration, 28 people out of every 100,000 Jackson residents were murdered. By 2021, that number had nearly quadrupled to 101 homicide victims per 100,000 residents in our capital city.
Of course, just because there has been a surge in violent crime at the same time that the prison population has been reduced, it does not automatically follow that the former has been caused by the latter.
The reality is, however, that across America the average state prisoner released has around five previous convictions. That means that we have a pretty good idea of who is committing the lion’s share of the extra crime; those that have already been convicted and released.
"But it is so expensive to lock up so many people!" the reformists insist.
It is expensive to maintain prisons, just as it is expensive to maintain our country’s borders. But there are some things that the government needs to do even if costly.
As Shad White, our State Auditor has shown, leniency is expensive, too. According to estimates by the State Auditor, each homicide in Mississippi costs taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.2 million. On top of that, of course, come all kinds of other costs paid for by the victims of the violent crime.
"But what about the human cost of incarcerating people?" the anti-prison advocates are quick to ask. "Locking people up harms families, and the children of inmates suffer."
Anyone who assumes that releasing violent criminals back into the bosom of their families will automatically be good news for those families might not have met many violent criminals.
Eight years ago, back when every policy-maker in Jackson seemed intent on drifting along with the anti-incarceration vibe, we were told that there were better ways to reduce crime than by filling the prisons.
Unfortunately, we have yet to find them. When you factor in selection bias, there is remarkably little evidence that most rehabilitation programs have the efficacy that those who run them want them to have.
Anti-prison advocates are currently campaigning to have Mississippi’s Parole Board release more parole-eligible prisoners from custody.
It is true that our Parole Board currently approves a lower percentage of parole applications now than it has done for years. But that is because there has been a massive surge in the number of people automatically entitled to apply for early release to the Parole Board.
Why the increase in parole applications? Because of legislation that the anti-prison advocacy groups helped pass which automatically entitles violent offenders to appeal to the Parole Board in the first place.
The Parole Board has recently been criticized for getting some parole decisions wrong. I can’t help wondering if the Board might have done a better job if they had not been flooded by new cases at the insistence of anti-prison activists.
The tragedy of this misguided anti-prison agenda is not only that it is driving a surge in crime. It has detracted from Mississippi implementing the type of prison reform that conservatives ought to support.
More needs to be done to make our prisons more humane. The prison system ought to do a far better job of differentiating between violent criminals and the non-violent. With so many young men graduating from the prison system each year, surely we could do a better job of ensuring they emerge with a better set of life skills?
These reforms are only going to be attainable if we have a prison system that achieves its primary purpose; locking up bad people in order to prevent them from doing bad things to good people.
There is now overwhelming evidence that we should abandon Mississippi’s flirtation with an anti-incarceration agenda – and it is not just a question of crime. If Mississippi wants to see the kind of economic growth that other states have experienced, we need to reduce our crime rates.
Over the past few years, we have been told that America’s police and criminal justice process are systemically racist.
The police, it is implied, are inherently unfair in their treatment of African Americans and other minorities. Prosecutors and the courts, it has often been suggested, are much harsher in their treatment of certain groups. Systemic racism, some tell us, explains different outcomes when it comes to criminal justice.
The narrative of systemic racism is nonsense - but it needs to be exposed as nonsense or it risks becoming dangerous nonsense.
Rafael Mangual, who came to Jackson last week, is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute. His book, Criminal (In)Justice reveals that the supposed biases of the criminal justice system are nothing of the sort.
According to Mangual’s research, different outcomes in the criminal justice system are not reflective of any supposed biases of the system. They reflect differences in behavior.
Crime in America, particularly violent crime, is hyper-concentrated, both geographically and demographically. This might be an uncomfortable truth for some, but the truth needs to be acknowledged. Moreover, as Mangual, and others have shown, the victims of violent crime in America are disproportionately African American.
When left unchallenged, the narrative of systemic racism undermines law enforcement It has enabled radical activists – often aided by well-meaning conservatives – to advance an anti-police / anti-prison agenda over the past decade.
Citing the fallacy of police discrimination, activists have successfully demanded that the police be less proactive in arresting wrongdoers. There has been a large decline in the number of arrests made in America each year since 2010.
Radical reformers have also demanded that public prosecutors go easy on those that break the law. They have even advanced an anti-prison agenda, claiming that felons should not face jail time. America’s prison population is today 25 percent lower than it was in 2011, and the incarceration rate in Mississippi has fallen significantly in the past two decades.
These reforms, introduced in the mistaken belief that America’s criminal justice system is discriminatory and unfair, have had disastrous consequences – especially for the minority communities that the reformers claimed they want to help.
Below is a graph from the Wall Street Journal, citing data from JAMA. It shows the firearm homicide rates for men by race.
During the 1990s, when get tough measures were taken to reduce violent crime, the firearm homicide rate for African American men fell dramatically. When the current wave of reforms started to take effect in about 2015, homicide rates for African American men soared.
Is the criminal justice system, now that it has fewer proactive arrests, less prosecution and shorter sentencing, doing a better job today for African American men?
Here in Mississippi in 2014-16, well-meaning conservatives introduced legislation to overhaul sentencing laws. They did so claiming that there were better ways to reduce crime than by filling the prisons.
How did that work out?
In 2013, the year before policies were introduced to reduce the rate of incarceration, 28 people were murdered in Jackson per 100,000 people. By 2021, almost four times that many people, 101 per 100,000 people in our capital city were homicide victims.
Despite what is often claimed, Mississippi does not have a problem with over-incarceration. Since 2002, the prison incarceration rate in our state fell from 1,207 per 100,000 to 916 per 100,000 by 2021. Mississippi’s incarcerated population decreased from 21,008 on January 3, 2014, to 16,931 by January 3, 2022, a decrease of 19.4 percent.
The reduction in the incarceration rate in our state has been mirrored by a significant rise in violent crime. If you quit locking up bad people, you free them to do bad things to good people.
Rather than measure the rate at which we lock people up relative to the number of people in our state, perhaps we ought to measure the incarceration rate against the level of criminality in our state.
There is nothing credible about claims that America’s criminal justice process is systemically prejudiced. Such claims must not be allowed to undermine the effectiveness of the fight against crime.
Nor is there anything good or noble about misguided criminal justice reforms that allow offenders to reoffend. It is time that these truths were spelled out.
Over the past decade or so, America has experienced a radical experiment with criminal justice reform.
The number of people arrested each year has fallen sharply. Public prosecutors now prosecute significantly fewer cases. Those that have been convicted have generally been given shorter sentences. As a consequence, America’s prison population is now 25 percent lower than it was in 2011.
It isn’t only those on the far left, motivated by an anti-police and anti-prison agenda, who have pushed for these changes. Plenty of well-meaning conservatives signed up for criminal justice reform, too. Everyone needs a second chance, right?
In 2018, it was conservatives in Washington DC that passed the First Step Act, which explicitly sought to reduce the prison population. Here in Mississippi in 2014, we overhauled sentencing laws in the belief that there are better ways of preventing crime than filling up our jails.
Criminal justice reform might have cut the number of people arrested, prosecuted and jailed, but these measures have not cut crime. Quite the contrary, in fact. These well-meaning reforms are responsible for the sharp spike in crime that we have seen in many parts of America, such as Jackson, Mississippi – a city that now has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country.
In 2013, the year before Mississippi overhauled sentencing laws, 28 people were murdered in Jackson per 100,000 people. By 2021, almost four times that many people, 101 per 100,000 people in our capital city were homicide victims.
When the Mississippi Center for Public Policy recently surveyed Jackson families about education opportunities, I was shocked to discover that their overwhelming concern was not school standards or even transport. It was safety. Decent families worrying about their kids getting shot are the price we pay for naïve criminal justice reforms.
Those that make public policy need to deal with the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be. To give us a reality check, we hosted a large public event with Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and our tough-on-crime state auditor, Shad White.
The author of the best-selling book, "Criminal (In)Justice," Rafael Mangual spelled out a few uncomfortable truths.
Firstly, the majority of crime in America – and Mississippi – tends to be concentrated in a small number of places. That said, it would be a mistake to think that if we were to exclude Hinds County from the stats, Mississippi would be safe. Even without the Jackson crime hotspot, crime throughout our state is far too high.
As Shad White added, we need statewide action and cannot dismiss crime as a distant problem.
A second truth that Mangual spelled out is that the victims of crime in America are disproportionately African American. Conversely, Mangual showed, when the police, prosecutors and the courts do decide to get tough on violent offenders, crime rates fall – and the beneficiaries are overwhelmingly African American.
A narrative has been advanced in recent years that America’s police and criminal justice system is systemically racist. Mangual showed that this narrative is simply wrong. Different outcomes in the criminal justice system do not reflect supposed biases of the criminal justice system but are reflective of offender behavior. Some have suggested that there is a link – or at least a correlation - with the breakdown in family structure, too.
As for the idea that we need to give people second chances, reflect on the fact that the average released state prisoner in the United States has approximately five prior convictions. Second chance? Sounds more like a fifth chance to me.
Who is not moved by the idea of redemption? The cold reality is that approximately 80 percent of released state prisoners will be rearrested at least once over a 10-year period after their release.
Yes, prison should aim to rehabilitate, but too often in the name of redemption, we are releasing criminals to reoffend. The primary purpose of prison must be to incarcerate bad people so that they cannot do bad things to good people.
Far too often when I read about a murder in our state, it emerges that the perpetrator has a previous history of run-ins with the law, and often convictions. There is nothing good or kind about misplaced criminal justice reform.