Despite calls to clear SV's jails from local advocates, new data convincingly proves: Incarceration works.
Manhattan Institute legal policy fellow tax Tal Fortgang argues that decarceration fans like County Supervisor Susan Ellenberg get it all wrong, and that violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders—that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, Fortgang argues, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.
Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual.” The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows.
Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.
The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners—the core of America’s incarcerated population—had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City . . . involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.” And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals—0.1 percent of the city—were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.
These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact . . . with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest.” Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features,” the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality.” As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”
The case for an incapacitation-first approach to crime control follows directly from these indisputable facts. An analysis of the Swedish paper reveals that violent crime would fall nearly 80 percent if perpetrators could be prevented from re-offending after their first conviction and would fall by half if they were fully incapacitated after their third. So concentrated is violent crime among a profoundly antisocial few that making even a tenth violent conviction punishable by life without parole would cut overall violent crime by 20 percent.
Given crime’s extreme concentration, this chiefly means separating the antisocial few from the pro-social many. “What the government can do is to change the risks of robbery,” Wilson wrote, “and to incapacitate . . . those who rob despite the threats and alternatives society provides.” Of the punishments not deemed legally cruel and unusual, only incarceration and capital punishment guarantee incapacitation. Wilson became the leading voice in the latter half of the twentieth century pressing for more prosecutions of the antisocial few and longer sentences to keep them off the streets.
For decades, Americans intuitively accepted incarceration as justified by incapacitation. It fell out of favor, thanks to a long period of success and low crime rates, which provided an opening for activists and critics to make arguments about “mass incarceration.” Now, after years of criminal-justice reforms and anti-policing measures, crime has returned as a kitchen-table concern, but Wilson’s insights have faded from memory. We are not only far from reaffirming his conclusions; we have lost the habit of asking his questions.
Yet today’s debate over crime and punishment typically still begins with the premise that America suffers from “overincarceration.” Nearly 2 million people are held in prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and other detention centers. As abolitionists and police-defunding advocates repeat, the U.S. rate of roughly 580 incarcerated individuals per 100,000 people remains the highest in the Western world. Starting from this premise, so different from Wilson’s public-policy approach, activists naturally ask whether the nation is locking up too many people.
The modern view wrongly treats crime as a dispute between perpetrator and victim. Television dramas that let victims decide whether to “press charges” reflect this confusion. In reality, prosecutors represent “the People,” the political community harmed whenever one of its members is attacked or the law is broken within its borders. Antisocial behavior is an assault on the social order itself. Each crime signals that law-abiding citizens cannot rely on shared norms, forcing them to approach daily life with suspicion rather than goodwill. Lawlessness drives the law-abiding away; yet their interests must come first.
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