{"id":77870,"date":"2015-10-28T16:57:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T00:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=77870"},"modified":"2015-10-28T16:57:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T00:57:20","slug":"the-decriminalization-delusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=77870","title":{"rendered":"The Decriminalization Delusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather MacDonald writes<\/a>: In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. \u201cThese are young people who made mistakes that aren\u2019t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,\u201d the president told the waiting reporters.<\/p>\n

The New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama\u2019s prison excursion. There is but a \u201cfine line between president and prisoner,\u201d the paper noted. Anyone who \u201csmoked marijuana and tried cocaine,\u201d as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the Times.<\/p>\n

This conceit was preposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up in federal prison. But the truth didn\u2019t matter. Obama\u2019s prison tour came in the midst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory. Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting a daily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks and insanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as Black Lives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standing discourse from the academic Left about \u201cmass incarceration,\u201d policing, and race.<\/p>\n

Now that discourse is going mainstream. As the press never tires of pointing out, some high-profile figures on the right are joining the chorus on the left for deincarceration and decriminalization. Newt Gingrich is pairing with left-wing activist Van Jones, and the Koch brothers have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lowered prison counts and less law enforcement. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill support reducing or eliminating mandatory sentences for federal drug-trafficking crimes, in the name of racial equity.<\/p>\n

At the state and city levels, hardly a single criminal-justice practice exists that is not under fire for oppressing blacks. Traffic monitoring, antitheft statutes, drug patrols, public-order policing, trespass arrests, pedestrian stops, bail, warrant enforcement, fines for absconding from court, parole revocations, probation oversight, sentences for repeat felony offenders\u2014all have been criticized as part of a de facto system for locking away black men and destroying black communities.<\/p>\n

There may be good reasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement of criminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda have been as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users. It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and the current campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results.<\/p>\n

Two days before his Oklahoma penitentiary visit, Obama addressed the NAACP national conference in Philadelphia and raised the same themes. The \u201creal reason our prison population is so high,\u201d he said to applause, is that we have \u201clocked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.\u201d This assertion is the most ubiquitous fallacy of the deincarceration movement, given widespread currency by Michelle Alexander\u2019s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. That a president would repeat the myth is a demonstration of the extent to which ideology now rules the White House.<\/p>\n

Pace Obama, the state prison population (which accounts for 87 percent of the nation\u2019s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013, drug offenders made up less than 16 percent of the state prison population, whereas violent felons were 54 percent of the rolls and property offenders, 19 percent. (See graph below.) Reducing drug admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states\u2019 prison count by only 7 percent, according to the Urban Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heather MacDonald writes: In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77871,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77870\/revisions\/77871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}