Mississippi was hit by epic thunderstorms the other week. Like thousands of other people across the state, perhaps you were left without electricity?

For me, no electricity meant trying to work without air-conditioning. Not having any AC was not a productive experience. As I sweltered in the heat, I was left wondering how people in Mississippi managed before the advent of AC?

Invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier, within living memory, there were plenty of homes and offices in Mississippi that did not have any AC. For a start, it was once very expensive. According to the website HumanProgress.org, the cost of AC units has fallen by 97 percent since the early 1950s. AC only became ubiquitous in cars and shops within the past two or three decades.

Imagine what life would be like in Mississippi without refrigeration? As late as the 1950s, that was how a significant number of people in our state lived.

When the first self-contained refrigerator, the Frigidaire, went on sale in 1919 it cost $775 – or about $12,000 in today’s money. Today, you can buy a vastly better refrigerator for only a fraction of the cost.

It’s not only the costs of keeping cool that have come down.

In 1979, to buy a 14-inch television, the average American earning the average wage would have needed to work 70 hours to earn enough. Today, a vastly better TV can be purchased for the equivalent of 4 hours of work.

The other day I re-watched Wall Street, that classic 1980s movie starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the movie, Gekko uses one of the first commercial cell phones, a DynaTec. Apparently, Gekko’s phone retailed for almost $4,000 at the time, or over $10,000 in today’s prices. It needed re-charging after 30 minutes.

Today, even someone on the minimum wage in Mississippi could afford a vastly better cell phone than anything available to Wall Street billionaires a generation ago.

Among those officially classified as ‘poor’ in America, 99 percent live in homes that have a fridge, 95 percent have a television, 88 percent have a phone and over 70 percent own a car.

1996, the real cost of household appliances has fallen by over 40 percent. The cost of footwear and clothes by 60 percent. Indeed, the average American home is full of gadgets, entertainment systems and labor-saving devices many of which had not even been invented when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

As my friend the author, Matt Ridley puts it, “Our generation has access to more calories, watts, horsepower, gigabytes, megahertz, square feet, air miles, food per acre, miles per gallon, and, of course, money than any who lived before us”.

And here’s another remarkable thing. We get all this extra stuff without having to work as hard. In 1913, the average American worker put in 1,036 hours that year, compared to less than 750 hours a year now.

Often, I hear people talking about there being ‘too much technology’. It is fashionable to say that we should turn away from technology and get back to a pure and simple past. Really? I’ve heard anyone express that sort of opinion in the poor places, such as Uganda or Kenya, that I’ve lived in. If anyone ever tells you that we have too much technology, you might want to suggest that they switch off the air-conditioning for a few hours and think about it.

Thank goodness for modern technology – and the free market that makes it available at an affordable price for everyone.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the U.S.–Mexico border than on the other? Why is income per capita in Taiwan almost three times higher than it is in China? What explains the fact that the average Canadian is 12 times richer than the average Moroccan? 

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 and 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 United States. 

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 who were prepared to wait had what we call a low time preference. The less patient kids who 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 toward 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 United States, Canada, Finland, and Japan are relatively rich because they are countries with low time preferences? There’s a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, such as Mexico and Russia, have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries, such as 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 have similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences affect 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’re 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 from that of someone who 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 affected the time preferences of East Germans, compared with those who lived in West Germany (although the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world). 

When considering some of the United States’ deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. How do 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. The importance of time preferences might be one of them. 

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has hired Ava Grace Coley and Edward Wilson Jr. as its interns for the summer.

Ava Grace Coley, a native of Richland, Mississippi, will help the Mississippi Center for Public Policy this summer with data collection and direct mail, as well as aid in the production of audio and visual output. 

This fall, Coley will be going into her junior year at the Magnolia Homeschool Program. In 2021, she participated in two formal debates and in 2020 participated in a mock trial. 

Coley would like to help make the case for changes to improve the education system. She believes deeply in the need for an education system that takes into account everyone’s individuality. She also strongly supports women’s rights and religious liberty. 

This summer, Edward E. Wilson Jr., a native of Jackson, Mississippi, will aid MCPP in crafting reports on the issues of governmental pay disparity and work with the Center in its data collection and storage.

Wilson recently completed his high school career at Jackson Prep and will be attending the University of Mississippi’s Sally McDonnell Honors College in the fall, pursuing a degree in international studies through the Croft Institute and Public Policy Leadership with the Trent Lott Institute for Public Policy. During his time at Jackson Prep, Wilson was Captain of his Debate Team, culminating in a 2023 second-place National Finalist finish. He also worked as an opinion writer for Jackson Prep's newspaper, “The Sentry”, for which he won the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association 2023 Award for Mississippi State Wide Best Opinion Editorial.  

Wilson strongly believes in reforming the education system to account for greater autonomy in school choice, as well as increased economic reform to encourage further private investment into Mississippi.

"I am super excited to have Ava and Edward joining us over the summer!" said Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. "Ava and Edward will be working with us as we advocate for the changes Mississippi needs to prosper – and it is great to have them as part of our team."

The average person in Mississippi is 25 percent richer today than they were in 2017. In just five years, the per capita income in our state went from $36,902 to $46,248.

Before you ask, those dollar amounts are in constant 2022 dollars. In other words, even allowing for inflation, Mississippians are a quarter richer now than they were only five years ago.

Does it surprise you that Mississippi is actually doing well? For as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi has been browbeaten into believing that we are bottom of the class, with the lowest income and slowest growth.

It is time we stopped thinking of our state as last. As someone new to this state, I can see it’s an outdated image. As someone that has looked at the numbers, I know it just isn’t so.

Between 1959 and 2022, Mississippi was the second fastest-growing state in America, with average annual growth of 2.61 per year.

Pretty impressive, no? It would have been a lot more impressive if it was not for the period between 1980 and 2010. Having achieved some remarkably fast growth relative to other US states in the 1960s and 1970s, Mississippi slowed down dramatically in the 80s, 90s and the noughties.

Mississippi had three decades of sluggish growth from about 1980 to 2010 because our state had bad public policies.

For much of the period from 1980 to 2010, Mississippi was a one-party (Democrat) fiefdom. The size of government grew. More and more people were hired to work at public expense, crowding out the private sector. With too much government and too many people living at public expense, taxes rose relative to those in other states. More bureaucrats meant more bureaucracy. After decades of more government, you needed permits and approval for far too many things in our state.

With Mississippi not prospering, her leaders turned to Washington for help. Politics in the state focused on how to secure handouts from the feds. If grants from the federal government made a state rich, Mississippi would be the richest state in America. They don’t – and Mississippi stayed in the economic slow lane.

The real news is that after decades of these bad public policies, Mississippi is starting to grow rapidly again. Why? Because bad public policy is being replaced by good public policy.

In the past few years, Mississippi has significantly cut the tax burden, notably slashing the state income tax to a flat 4 percent. Since 2018, the size of the public payroll has been significantly reduced.

In 2021, there was an important move made to deregulate the labor market, with a universal occupational licensing law. This has put pressure on licensing boards to remove some of the most arduous red tape.

As a direct consequence of this not only is per capita income in our state rising, but we are growing faster relative to other states. Having been one of the slower-growing states since the 1980s, between 2020 and 2022, Mississippi was the 15th fastest-growing state in America.

Just imagine what our state might achieve if we were to build on these public policy improvements and completely eliminate the income tax?

What if we repealed some of the so-called CON laws that inflate the cost of health care in our state, and made Mississippi a less costly place for employers to hire?

Far from being bottom of the class, Mississippi school standards have in fact improved. The use of phonics and testing has had a significant impact on children’s literacy. What if we built on that achievement by giving mom and dad control over their child’s share of education tax dollars to spend at a school of their choice?

Mississippi needs leaders prepared to build on the impressive reforms of the past few years, and which are already having a significant impact in improving our state. We need leaders who believe that with good public policy, Mississippi can be the equal of any state. It is good policy, not federal handouts that will decide if we prosper.

You don’t have to be a supporter of either to believe that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump haven’t been given a fair hearing.

Less than four years after he was elected Prime Minister with a whopping 80 seat majority in Parliament, Boris Johnson has not merely been thrown out of office. He has now in effect been ousted from his constituency seat by a committee of MPs, without having lost an election. On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump faces federal charges that he endangered national security by keeping a stash of classified documents he should have left in the Oval Office.

Trump, who according to the latest polls is front runner to be the 2024 Republican party presidential candidate, is not the first former President to have held on to classified material that was not his to keep. He is, however, the first former President to be prosecuted for doing so. Trump, who many believe could beat Biden, may face a substantial prison sentence if found guilty.

Many Americans are uneasy about the prosecution of Trump, and not necessarily because they support him. As with the way Boris has been treated in the UK, many view it as a politically motivated attempt by his opponents to destroy someone that they fear they cannot bring down using the ballot box.

Politically motivated prosecutions have long been a feature of politics in certain less stable parts of the world. In Brazil or Rwanda or Malaysia, those that have lost elections get prosecuted on what some might say are spurious charges.

Until a few weeks ago, that was not how we did things in Anglo American democracies. Even the most corrupt and venal leaders – Richard Nixon in America

or David Lloyd George in Britain – were allowed to live with dignity. Now I am not so sure.

Both Boris and Trump trigger in their opponents a similarly deranged reaction. Instead of opposing them, their opponents set out to vilify and destroy.

Rather than accept that Boris Johnson, having lost the job of Prime Minister, might remain as a humble backbencher, penning the occasional newspaper column, his critics have driven him from the Commons altogether. Petty and petulant, the third-raters that sit on the House of Commons Privileges Committee have even demanded Johnson be denied the Parliamentary pass issued to all ex-MPs.

In their report, the Committee insist that Boris deliberately misled Parliament, without producing anything much in the way of hard evidence. Their report perhaps tells us more about prejudices of its authors than it does about the conduct of the former Prime Minister.

The irony is that there are so many things that Boris Johnson, like Donald Trump, ought to be asked to account for.

Why, like Trump in America who deferred Anthony Fauci, did Boris go along with the pro-lockdown public health officials? How did he end up imposing a lockdown that turned out to be as economically ruinous as it was epidemiologically unnecessary?

Instead of asking these, the real questions, Trump and Boris’ enemies are making them look like martyrs.

For all the attention and the outrage Boris and Trump attract, what, I wonder, did either actually achieve? Yes, I know that Boris Johnson broke the Brexit deadlock. But there is another way of looking at what happened after Britain voted to leave the European Union seven years ago.

Having headed up the Brexit campaign in the summer of 2016, Boris and other leading Brexiteers proved incapable of working together to form a government. As a consequence of their dysfunction, we ended up with the hapless Theresa May as Prime Minister – and the attendant attempts to overturn the referendum result. Ergo the deadlock.

Eventually Boris promising to break that Brexit deadlock won him an election landslide that allowed him to make Brexit a legal and constitutional reality. Even then the as yet unresolved issues surrounding the Northern Ireland protocol, and the miniscule progress made in decoupling the UK from the EU’s regulatory orbit, mean that Brexit is not as done a deal as is sometimes supposed.

As for Johnson’s other apparent big achievement, I am not convinced that further committing Britain to Net Zero will be seen as a wise decision in the future. In fact, alongside compulsory lockdowns, it may yet rank among the worst.

What about Trump? For all the sound and fury, what did he deliver? He made some strategically significant appointments to the Supreme Court, which could potentially

have long term consequences for the size and shape of America’s administrative state. In the Middle East, Trump achieve what many US foreign policy experts once saw as impossible with the Abraham Accords.

Trump gave America tax cuts, but without any attempt to rein in federal spending, he put America on the path towards the level of fiscal incontinence achieved by Joe Biden today.

There is a strong sense that both Trump and Boris could have accomplished so much more. Why didn’t they?

“The administrative state was against them at the outset” some will say. The permanent bureaucracy – or ‘deep state’ as some refer to it - was always going to resist some of what Trump and Boris wanted.

That is precisely why each of them desperately needed a phalanx of completely loyal, committed and – above all –competent staff around them. Instead, each of them presided over a court of chaos. Downing Street and the White House saw some decidedly odd choices of lieutenants.

To overcome the enmity of permanent officials, conservative leaders need to be prepared to recalibrate the machinery of government around them as a day one priority. Neither Boris nor Trump could see the importance of doing so, until it was too late. They could not even use the power of appointment competently, with Boris elevating ideological enemies and Trump sometimes not filling key vacancies for months.

As someone that worked in the early days of the Boris government on Whitehall reform, I saw urgent issues constantly allowed to squeeze out the important. Eventually the thing that was squeezed out was Boris.

Of course, it is not impossible that either Trump and Boris could bounce back. The events of the past few weeks have, if anything, made them more electable. Having failed to take on the administrative state first time round, I suspect a second term President Trump or Prime Minister Boris would not make that mistake again.

No wonder there are some people determined to make sure that never happens.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, one of the leading think tanks in the southern US.

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.