Charles Fain Lehman on Why Cities Got Safer

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk Guest: Charles Fain Lehman on Why Cities Got Safer Date: June 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Yascha Mounk sits down with Charles Fain Lehman, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an influential voice in criminology, to explore the dramatic fluctuations in crime rates across major American cities over the last several decades. The conversation delves into why cities like New York and Los Angeles became much safer, why Baltimore lagged behind, the effectiveness of different crime reduction strategies, and the complex moral trade-offs embedded in criminal justice policy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Puzzle of Baltimore’s Divergence

• Baltimore's Atypical Crime Pattern: Unlike cities such as New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, Baltimore did not experience the steep declines in murder rates during the 1990s and 2000s. Even into the 2010s, young Black men in Baltimore faced persistently high homicide risk, outstripping other large cities (05:02).
• Freddie Gray’s Death and Aftermath: The 2015 death of Freddie Gray, subsequent protests, and riots marked a turning point, sparking a durable spike in crime and further undermining fragile community-police relations (05:41).

"Baltimore really struggled with homicide well after other cities had dealt with homicide as an issue... what little control the city had... was totally lost yet again for the next several years."
— Charles Fain Lehman (05:44)

• Institutional Weakness: Persistent challenges in the management, funding, and staffing of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), plus community mistrust and lack of support from civilian leadership, stymied efforts to reduce crime (06:09).

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2. Why Did Other Cities Get Safer?

• Strategic Policing as a Key Factor: Lehman attributes most of the urban crime decline to “deliberate and strategic policing” — notably proactive resource deployment, hotspot policing, and focused deterrence, pioneered by figures like Bill Bratton in New York (07:21–08:47).

"The answer is deliberate and strategic policing... for the first time [police asked]: Where is crime really happening? What are the hotspots of crime? How can we deploy resources strategically to enhance safety?"
— Charles Fain Lehman (07:21)

• Demographic Change: About half of the national crime wave and subsequent decline is explained by demographics, particularly the aging out of baby boomers from the highest-risk crime years (08:52–09:06).

• Hotspots Policing & Place-Based Interventions: Proactively placing police in high-crime micro-areas (hotspots) reduces criminal opportunities and has measurable effects, without simply displacing crime to nearby zones (14:09–14:39).

• Built Environment Matters: Improving, cleaning, and reclaiming blighted spaces—vacant lots, parks—helps restore informal social control, making areas “governable” and thereby reducing crime (15:04–18:12).

"What I do think is that it renders the space more governable... the thing that deters antisocial behavior is informal surveillance—‘eyes on the street’... when you clean up a park... natural governance... is restored."
— Charles Fain Lehman (17:07)

• Focused Deterrence (Ceasefire): Strategies targeting tightly knit social networks involved in violence — conveying a clear, credible threat of enforcement and following up with consequences — can dramatically reduce retaliatory shootings (19:44–20:46).

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3. The Social Dynamics of Urban Violence

• Honor Culture vs. Rational Crime: Most violence isn’t orchestrated by rational, profit-maximizing gangs but emerges from “honor cultures” where retaliatory violence, impulsivity, and the need for status among young men drive conflict (23:02–24:48).

• Weak-State Environments Foster Honor Cultures: Where the authority of state institutions (police, courts) is weak or mistrusted, informal codes and cycles of personal retribution dominate, sustaining violence (28:12–29:15).

"Honor culture is ultimately the result of the state having insufficient power to be the ultimate arbiter... The way you get away from honor culture is through legitimate dispute resolution through the courts."
— Charles Fain Lehman (28:12–29:12)

• Crime as Both Cause and Effect: High crime is not only a result of deprivation but also a direct cause of further socioeconomic disadvantage, undermining education, reducing property values, and perpetuating cycles of harm (39:03–39:35).

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4. The Policy Debate: Root Causes vs. Direct Action

• Limits of Addressing Only “Root Causes”: While structural factors (e.g., poverty, racism, inequality, gun prevalence) matter, American experience shows that direct, tactical interventions can lower crime even when those root conditions persist (36:32–38:58).

"We know today in a way that we did not in the 70s what works to reduce crime... Policy can and should be used to free children from the risk of being shot and murdered."
— Charles Fain Lehman (38:58)

• Policy Accessibility: Unlike broad socioeconomic change, focused justice system changes are “policy-accessible”—they can be implemented and produce real results.

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5. Baltimore’s Recent Turnaround

• Remarkable Recent Improvement: Starting in 2022, Baltimore experienced a dramatic drop in murders—from 333 in 2022 to 133 three years later—the fewest since 1965, over a 60% decline (47:01–47:19).

"That’s a more than 60% decline... It's just a stunning and dramatic decline."
— Charles Fain Lehman (47:14)

• What Changed: Two critical shifts enabled this change:

  1. New Prosecutor: Ivan Bates replaced Marilyn Mosby, shifting prosecutorial philosophy and increasing follow-through on violent crimes (49:00–49:13).
  2. Implementing Focused Deterrence: For the first time, city government and executive leadership fully committed to the focused deterrence model, with robust cross-agency coordination and sustained implementation (49:18–49:45).

• Sustained Executive Support: Previous attempts failed due to lack of buy-in from city leadership; now, unified mayoral and departmental commitment appears to be a key difference (44:26–44:49).

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6. The Role of Prosecutors & the Progressive Movement

• Progressive Prosecutors — Mixed Impact: While some evidence links progressive prosecutors to increased petty/property crime, violent crime outcomes are less clear. The greatest risks arise when prosecutors categorically refuse to pursue certain offenses (e.g., felon in possession), weakening deterrence and police leverage (51:05–52:46).

• Disproving Popular Myths About Mass Incarceration: Contrary to claims (e.g., Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”), only a tiny fraction of prisoners are low-level, nonviolent drug offenders; most have serious priors or were involved in violent or major trafficking offenses (56:35–57:01).

"There's a study... that something like 2% of state offenders and 6% of federal offenders can be characterized as nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. Everybody else has a violent prior, is in a gang, was involved at the trafficking level..."
— Charles Fain Lehman (57:00)

• Trade-offs of Prosecutorial Discretion: Curtailing certain offenses to avoid false positives can lead to many missed opportunities (“false negatives”) to incapacitate dangerous individuals, with real consequences for community safety (59:24–59:44).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On policing tactics:
  "The primary way that policing works is through deterrence... You put a cop in a place, he's going to deter criminal behavior in that place." (14:37; Charles Fain Lehman)

• On the design of public space:
  "Cleaning up a park, restoring community space, allows or encourages people who otherwise have been absent from that space to recolonize it... Natural governance is restored." (17:07; Charles Fain Lehman)

• On criminal motivation:
  "The reason you don't have an honor culture is because it undermines the state's ability to come in and say 'we're making decisions about who is right and wrong'... The way you get away from an honor culture is through legitimate dispute resolution through the courts." (28:12–29:12; Charles Fain Lehman)

• On recent success in Baltimore:
  "They are just trying to run the criminal justice machine properly. And when you do that, things get better." (49:52; Charles Fain Lehman)

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Important Timestamps

• Discussion of Baltimore’s lagging crime declines: 04:30–05:57
• Strategic policing in NY, LA, DC: 07:18–08:47
• Hotspots & environment interventions: 14:07–18:12
• Focused deterrence & social networks: 19:00–20:46
• Honor culture & state legitimacy: 23:02–29:15
• Root causes vs. policy accessibility: 36:32–39:35
• Baltimore’s recent decline in homicides: 47:01–47:19
• Role of progressive prosecutors and myth-busting on incarceration: 51:39–57:01

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Tone and Language

Throughout, the conversation reflects a fact-driven, clear-eyed pragmatism. Lehman stresses empirical evidence, institutional analysis, and direct mechanisms rather than ideological posturing, but openly acknowledges the complexity of trade-offs between public safety and civil liberties.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a comprehensive, deeply informative exploration of crime trends in American cities, offering clarity on what works to reduce violence and why. It demystifies common misconceptions, underscores the importance of implementation and political will, and leaves listeners with a sense of both caution and optimism about the potential for institutional reform to produce safer, freer urban communities.

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Transcript

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[Charles Fain Lehman]

The numbers I look at in 2022,

which is when things started to turn, there were about 333 murders in Baltimore. 2022 last year. Three years later there were 133 murders in Baltimore. So that's a more than 60% decline in count terms, that's the fewest murders

that Baltimore has seen since 1965.

And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.

[Yasha Monk]

Why is it that many American cities like New York and Los Angeles were extremely violent a few decades ago and

have since seen a very significant decrease in their violence?

What actually drives crime when you're trying to rein in crime?

Is this all about tackling the root

causes of crime like poverty and deprivation? Or is it about nitty gritty things like police tactics and beautifying public parks? And what about the outliers? Baltimore, where I'm often to teach, remained much more dangerous than New York or Washington D.C. for much longer. And yet for the last two or three years there's finally been good news for murder rate in Baltimore, for example,

has finally gone down.

Why that huge delay? Why did Baltimore develop in such a different way from these other cities? Well, to answer all of these questions, I've invited onto the podcast one of

the most interesting criminologists who are thinking about these topics today.

Charles Fain Lehman is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and has written very interestingly about all of these topics. In the last part of this conversation we talk about how to pursue two values, both of which I find to be non negotiably important, but both of which can come into conflict with each

other some of the time.

One is providing effective public safety for people and the other is making sure that we don't send innocent people to jail. Is there a trade off between those two? Should we just pick one of those two? Is there a way of avoiding choosing between two values that both seem fundamentally important?

And finally, I ask Charles about the

outlook for Baltimore, for New York, for

Los Angeles, for those other big American cities.

Is crime going to stay at a comparatively low level, or could bad policy choices easily lead to crime surging back to listen to that part of the conversation. To support the podcast, to support what we do here, go to writing.yashamonk.com and become a paying subscriber that's writing for Yashamonk.com.

Charles Van Diemen, welcome to the podcast.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

[Yasha Monk]

So you know, as a broad question in the United States about why it

is that there was a lot of

crime in the 80s and 90s and then a significant drop in crime in many cities across the United States in the following decades, and then possibly a slight uptick since the pandemic, though that is somewhat contested. Depends on the kinds of crime you look at. You've been trying to think about this by looking at a particular city that

I know well, somewhat well, Baltimore, because I teach there some of the time.

And Baltimore to me was always a

big intellectual puzzle because it had not gone through some of those same transformations at the time. In the 2000s and the 2010s, when Washington, D.C. became a lot safer, Philadelphia became a good bit safer, New York became much, much safer than it used to be.

But Baltimore kind of didn't.

So perhaps we can go back and start with that.

Why is it that even as all

of these other cities on the Eastern seaboard were really making inroads in reducing the murder rates, in becoming quite a bit safer, Baltimore at the time didn't

seem to be following the same positive trends.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah.

Well, and the first thing I want

to emphasize is just the extent to which that is unusual, that Baltimore really struggled with,

with his experience with homicide well after other cities had dealt with

homicide as an issue or has substantially reduced the homicide level in their cities. Right. If you look at young black men in the city of Baltimore, compared to other major cities, they experience far less significant of a decline in their risk of death by homicide over the period that we're talking about in the 1990s and the 2000s. It's a dramatic reduction. As a result, when you get to even 2014, 2013, their risk is substantially elevated over the rest of the Nation. That's before 2015, when the killing of Freddie Gray results, or the death of Freddie Gray results in citywide protests, some

rioting, and a durable crime spike that

I think there's been an up in a number of papers arguing to me

persuasively that what little control the city had wrested in the immediate prior period

was totally lost yet again for the next several years.

I think there are different factors that are conceivably going on there.

There's long been a struggle over the management, funding, staffing, levels of BPD.

BPD's trust in the Baltimore Police Department's trust in the community, the civilian leadership's trust of the Baltimore Police Department.

That relationship sort of long been problematic. And I think Freddie Gray was sort

of a microcosm of broader community concerns.

I remember I once met a.

An MPD police officer in D.C. who

would commute an hour and a half each way to work for MPD because he didn't want to work for Baltimore pd.

That's sort of the struggle that they had. I think there's also been a pattern.

[Yasha Monk]

I'm surprised. One way of thinking about this is we're trying to get to the comparative. So this is a classic question of comparative politics, as well as many other kind of social science disciplines, like why does something happen in one set of places, not in the other set of places? And so standard methodological advice, you can only explain a difference in outcome by a difference in independent variables, by a

difference in what kind of factors.

So perhaps let's make it comparative.

Right.

I mean, the other way around, what is it at that time that was happening in New York city, in Washington D.C. and so on, that was reducing the crime rate?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah. I mean, and to a first approximation,

the answer is deliberate in strategic policing. New York City is the prime example of this. The deployment of strategic policing under Bill

Bratton, where they actually, in the 1990s, for the first time go, where is crime really happening?

What are the hotspots of crime?

How can we deploy NYPD resources? And then how can we do that strategically to enhance the safety in any given area?

I think about Bryant park or Times Square, where they really went in, searched resources and cleaned up. The same thing is happening in other jurisdictions in LA, later on in Washington,

Washington, D.C. it happens sort of across the board. There are efforts to do this in Baltimore in the 90s, 2000s.

[Yasha Monk]

But before we get back to Baltimore,

tell us a little bit more about what the strategic policing looks like, because obviously there's a huge debate about what it is that led to this decline in crime in places like New York and la.

So explain to us the different kinds

of explanations that have been given and why you think that sort of what strategic policing actually is and why strategic policing in particular is the thing that really is responsible, according to you, at

least for a significant chunk of that decline.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, and it has to be a

significant chunk insofar as. So you see a large decline, this large increase in homicide and Other major

crimes in the 1960s, 1970s, peaks in

the 80s, starts declining in the 90s, precipitous decline through the 2000s and early 2010s.

Just for your listeners who don't know

these things,

a large portion of that is demographic, structural, by which I mean

the baby boomers aging into and out of crime.

If you do age adjustment, about half

of that effect disappears. So it's just like people commit more

crimes when they're younger.

The baby boomers were in their peak crime, committing years in that hump.

Then they age out of that. Okay, that's about half of it.

[Yasha Monk]

So to be clear, you're saying here, not that there's something particular about baby boomers that made them more prone to violence, but simply that there was a particularly large number of young men, and that is a demographic that commits a lot of crimes.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Correct.

[Yasha Monk]

So you just expect there to be more murders when the number of people who are 20 years old is high.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Correct, exactly. So if we're talking systematically about the

increase and decrease in violence, that's a big part of the story.

Then there are other sort of. And you wanted to talk about other explanations. I think there are a number of them we can get into talking about

things like lead in crime, where I

just don't think the evidence is there. But then you sort of have to think about. There are specific cities where we see

very large decreases in violence. New York, again, is the paradigmatic example.

Its crime decline is twice as deep

and twice as long as the rest of the nation.

Or Boston is another good example, where

they saw a precipitous decline, particularly in youth violence in the 1990s.

And when you look at what those departments did, and often those departments are talking to each other and communicating with each other about what their taxes are, often they're run by the same people.

It's often very small circles.

Their theory is that basically through the 70s and 80s, policing had been highly reactive. You hear about a crime, you go,

you arrest somebody, maybe, maybe you don't.

And they said, look, we have these resources and tools.

Let's use them proactively.

Let's identify the people who are frequent fliers, that the guys who we know are driving the violence disproportionately, the places

where violence is happening disproportionately.

Let's go there and focus on those people. And if we do that, maybe we will see some substantial improvement. And indeed, many jurisdictions implement this kind of strategy, and they see the substantial

improvement that you would expect given the model.

[Yasha Monk]

Why Is that so successful? What about the model causes this decrease in crime? It's not immediately obvious why police officers are saying this. Where the crimes happen, we just hang out there. Is going to reduce crime that much. For one, if a lot of murders are connected to the drug trade and to gangs and so on, you'd think, well, if a lot of the time these shootings happen in place, a. But we still have. We're still in competition with our rival gang, we still want to revenge some other crime that happened, well, we'll just go and carry out the murder somewhere else.

Right.

So there would be all kinds of reasons. If you're telling me about this as an idea before, there's this empirical evidence that is actually working to think how can that possibly work? So why is it that it seems to be working?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Your specific question there is about displacement,

and I think that the balloon effect.

Why is it that if you do something here, people don't just move over here?

A lot of the answer comes down to murder is objectively very rare because overwhelmingly you are unlikely to be murdered. I am unlikely to be murdered.

It may happen.

It's very sad when it does, but it's extremely unlikely. And that's because murder requires violence. Gun violence particularly requires sort of a

brew of different things to go wrong in order for it to occur.

You need, as I like to say, you need young men with guns, a

culture of honor or culture of beef,

and low levels of formal and informal social control. That mix of things does not. And I get to what he says are. But that mix of things does not

occur naturally in most places, in most

times, which is why violence is usually

concentrated in pockets, even within cities and

even within those places, often a specific set of people. Violence is not an efficiently produced phenomenon.

It's not a market phenomenon.

And so if you don't have the right environment for it, if the environment

is not built in a certain way,

if one person gets pulled out of the social network, it can collapse really easily because, you know, in the default, in a modern, highly surveilled and forced

society, violence is not the norm, it's the exception.

And so if you can take one of the, you know, mix my metaphors,

if you take one of the Jenga blocks out, all of a sudden violence becomes much less likely.

[Yasha Monk]

So what is it about this form of policing that is so successful in taking one of the Jenga blocks out? What does it actually look like? So cops know this is kind of the particular part of a particular neighborhood where gang warfare is particularly endemic. Or where there's a particularly high level of crime, they go, they hang out there. Is it to make people feel surveyed? Is it to build relationship? Is it to warn people?

What does that look like concretely?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

So I've used the phrase strategic policing. That's really just an umbrella term for police departments. Rather than being reactive, thinking proactively about how to allocate their resources and identifying

places that are problems and remedia.

So one version of this looks like hotspots patrol policing.

And we have a bunch of evidence on hotspots policing where it's basically like

you make a heat map of crime and you go, where's the crime happening? You put the cop down in that place. We have a lot of evidence that when that happens, crime levels go down

and they don't displace.

That hotspot is a hotspot because it's

an area uniquely conducive to crime.

Police are a visible deterrent. That's the primary, in many senses, the

primary way that policing works is through deterrence.

If you put a cop in a

place, he's going to deter criminal behavior in that place. He's going to remove the opportunity for crime to be committed.

That's not the only thing you can do. I talked a minute ago about place based policing. We have a lot of evidence that

the built environment matters a great deal for crime, that environments can be more or less criminogenic.

And one thing you can do is surge a burst of police resources to help clean up, beautify, facilitate the surveillance

of a neighborhood, of a park, of an area that has been taken over by crime, that can durably reduce crime in that area. That's another approach.

And then there's a third approach which we can get to in a minute, which is this idea of focused deterrence, which is about deterring the spread of violence as a sort of infectious pathogen

within a social network.

But go ahead.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, tell us about some of these in a little bit more detail. You know, again, you are not a kind of airy fairy policy analyst. You're not a kind of, not one of the progressive voices in the debate that thinks that the only cause of crime are kind of deprivation and people being too mean to criminals and so on. So perhaps it's somewhat surprising that you're saying beautifying a public park or sort

of changing the built environment a little bit, that really has this big impact

on where the crime takes place in one kind of register. That sounds to me like what the German artists I grew up around might say. If only our cities were more beautiful, there'd be less crime. Right. And yet here's this hard nosed,

I

guess, right of center. If that's correct, if that's how you describe yourself. Policy analysts saying going out and beautifying this park is really gonna bring down crime. So why should we believe that? What is it about these architectural interventions or these interventions in public space that actually prove effective in influencing crime?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

The first answer of why you should

believe that is just that we have a fair amount of high quality evidence that says clean and green vacant lots

force landlords to clean up problem places,

cleaning up houses, all of these things causally reduce crime. So then the question becomes why?

And there are people who go, it affects the psychology of criminals, so they

offend, which I don't think is true.

But what I do think is that

it renders the space more governable.

What I mean by governable is this

goes back to Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Good American Cities.

This idea that the thing that deters

antisocial behavior in public is first and foremost the sort of informal surveillance that we all engage with, the eyes on the street is Jacobs language that the

reason many spaces are not crime ridden is because there's a high ratio of

law abiding to non law abiding people in that space.

When you clean up a park, when you restore community space, when you clean up the lines of sight, when you clear out Penn Station, that allows or encourages people who otherwise have been absent from that space to recolonize it. And then the sort of natural governance

that comes from informal social actors is restored in that space.

So it's about facilitating that sort of

informal enforcement, that informal surveillance and indeed

coercion that is made by having a space that feels like people are welcome

in it and they can govern it and it's theirs.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, it's not about the psychology, but it is about the ability of exercising social control over those most dangerous parts of a city. How does that relate to this third idea we raised?

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[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah.

So one of the things that you

get out of the criminological literature as I said earlier is that violence is really concentrated. A lot of things have to go wrong. And, and a corollary of that is

that basically violence is highly concentrated in social networks, which is to say most violence in America today is driven by people who know each other and who

are often in conflict with one another, who have beef with one another, who

are all dating the same people, who are all from the same blocks, et cetera. As a result. One observation is that violence becomes contagious within these groups. You and I pick a fight. I shoot you, your friend comes back and shoots me, my friend comes back and shoots him.

[Google Chrome Advertiser]

You get.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Get this cycle of escalation.

I talked about Boston earlier.

Part of how they drove down violence

in Boston is this strategy called focused deterrence, or ceasefire. And the idea was very simply, if you identify the people in the network who are connected to each other, who commit crimes, when you go to them and you say, we are no longer tolerating violence, if you commit a violent act, if you commit a shooting, we are going to come after you with

everything that we can.

And then when a shooting happens, you follow up with those people and say, remember what we told you, There are going to be consequences for you escalating.

You establish deterrence, you establish a deterrent threat.

And that strategy implementation fidelity is challenging. It's hard to get this right. But when you get it right, there are often dramatic reductions in violence because you've established for that population, we know who you are, we are watching you. There are going to be consequences if you escalate. So don't escalate. And if you stop the escalation, much like stopping a camp cancer from growing, you prevent many more murders than just

the one interaction would otherwise generate.

[Yasha Monk]

So the idea is that

there's one

shooting often that could lead to this whole retaliatory cycle of shootings. But because you're just fast enough in intervening, it doesn't. And then obviously, if you succeed at that, then perhaps for six months there's no shootings and there's no particular reason for another shooting. I mean, I was wondering in the

background, what is the account of what

drives these shootings and how does that matter? One way of thinking about this, I imagine, is as being very strategic. You have two different drug gangs. They are trying to expand territory. In order to do that, they have to engage in a kind of urban warfare.

And so actually, the logic of this

can be modeled out with a rational choice model or something like that.

At a certain level, it's a very rational set of processes. And in order to contain that, you might think you need one kind of interventions. On the other hand, you might have a model which is way less rational,

where it is just about people at

the age where men are most violent, carrying these deadly weapons around for all kinds of reasons, and they just so happen to run into somebody who slept with her girlfriend three months ago outside a bar when both are kind of drunk, and that's where it kicks off, right? Or somebody has the impression that somebody's disrespecting them, undermining their honor in some kind of way in they feel that they need to defend their honor in order to not become vulnerable to attacks and all kinds of things. And so in that moment, they then engage in conflict. If you think that a lot of the causes of violence are kind of near random in that kind of way, where structures of a situation give you the likelihood of conflict, but each particular conflict is actually not a kind of rational choice that might lead to a very different kind of model about what it takes to rein in these crimes. So is it sort of clear? Is it a mix of these two types of things? Is it clear which of these two types of things really drives the most damaging violence? How do criminologists think about this?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I mean, the short answer is it's the second one. And the way I would push back

on your framing the second one is

that there is an intrinsic.

There's an inherent rationality to honor culture, right? It is not just impulse.

I mean, there's intrinsic impulsiveness, but there

is a logical form to it, which is that.

[Yasha Monk]

And I was starting to get at

that, which is that if you allow yourself to be disrespected, you become a target for further disrespect down the line.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Well, a being aggressive in a way that is antisocial can garner you benefits, right? The guy who's picking fights on the train, the guy who's playing his music too loud, who's getting in somebody's face,

who's smoking on the train, he's doing it to establish his dominance in the public space.

[Yasha Monk]

That's the.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

That's a related attitude. So it's not just reactive.

It's not just, I am going to engage in this beef because otherwise I lose face and there's risk to me.

It's also, if I provoke this beef, I will gain face and I will

gain relative social standing and I will be in a position to be better off.

But it is also the case that, and there are a bunch of great

books on this topic Jill Levy's Get

Aside Coat of the street by Elijah Anderson. When you're in an environment of relatively

low formal social control, where there's relatively

low state legitimacy or projection of state power, honor culture is a very natural thing to emerge and to persist over time. And when you're in that kind of environment, particularly if you're a man, particularly

if you're a young man, you're stuck

in the game, you're going to fight back and forth. You're going to be obliged to engage

in this sort of dispute of honor

in order to protect yourself, but also

in order to gain status.

I think that's overwhelmingly more important as

an explanation for why violence happens in

America today than the sort of story about rationally acting drug gangs. I think people tend to overstate the degree of violence associated with the drug trade. Sort of like there's a particular political economy of the crack crisis in the 1980s. But that does not always generalize to

what every illicit marketplace looks like. And I think today, much less violence,

there's still violence associated, but much smaller

share of the violence is explained by that versus by the honor dynamic.

[Yasha Monk]

Now, if you're saying it is about honor culture in that kind of way, another way of reframing it is how do you discourage honor culture? Or differently put, how do you reduce the consequences within an honor culture of either having this high status or having this low status? And of course, the strange thing about honor culture is that the examples I can think of where honor culture really governs social interactions are some schoolyards. A lot of the things you were talking about apply to the school bully, who you just know is kind of crazy enough that they're always going to escalate. So if they ask for your lunchbox, you're just going to give them a lunchbox. Because the stakes, if you don't, are too high. It applies to parts of inner city America, and there's a lot of interesting sociological anthropological research on this. It applies to parts of a bonheur in France, but it also applies to

17th, 18th century European aristocrats.

Right. When you read all of these people dueling, including obviously some of the founders of the United States, that's because they

were embroiled in an honor culture where

it felt that if you allow somebody to disrespect you, that would have all of these downstream consequences for your life and for your reputation. So you needed to engage in these extremely risky acts to protect your reputation. So this is not something that somehow may be characteristic of particularly Poor neighborhoods mostly populated by a particular ethnic group in the United States today. But that is not true. Across history, there's been very, very different groups at different ends of a socioeconomic scale, including some of the most privileged people in 17th, 18th century Europe who've been embroiled in these kind of honor cultures. And one question is, how do you

change those cultures in such a way

that as the 18th century goes into the 19th century, the response to some kind of insult is not meet me tonight at midnight and I'll have my adjutant and you have your adjutant, and we'll fight it out. But rather the kind of bourgeois idea that sticks and stones may break my bones, but your stupid insults will never hurt me. And so I'll just kind of smile beatifically and say, well, you're really just degrading yourself by hurling these insults at me. And I move on with my day.

Right. Like, how do these changes happen?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, well, you know, I think Barry Latzer, the Meredith Presser CUNY criminologist, in

his book the Rise, Fall of Violent Crime in America, makes a related argument about why is it that you see honor culture disproportionately in inner city black communities in America? And his answer is, it's just Southern honor and culture. Right. And the American south is a long tradition of honor culture.

And it's just getting transplanted from the

south as people move through the Great Migration, which I think gets to the point it's not sort of sui generis

to raise or it's not specific to race or poverty status.

It's about where does the culture come from?

[Yasha Monk]

As a good Hobbesian, I guess I would have thought it's about the absence of an external authority.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I'm getting there. And I think that what happens in the south is the state.

The south has a long tradition of.

It's a little more complicated than just sort of saying weak state formation, relatively weaker states. But they do ultimately have weaker states. And I think that that is true also in the other environments that you're talking about is that honor culture is ultimately the result of the state has insufficient power to be the ultimate arbiter,

to be the thing that resolves all conflicts or claims a monopoly on the resolution of conflicts. Right.

The reason you don't have an honor culture is because it undermines the state's ability to come in and say, we're

making decisions about who is right and wrong.

The way you get away from an honor culture is through legitimate dispute resolution through the courts. That's, you know, how do you get out of that to that bourgeois attitude?

Well, it's because I have recourse to

the legal infrastructure, but the legal infrastructure

is undergirded by the state's threat of violence. That's, it's, you know, it's.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah. I'm imagining being somebody who's growing up in an environment where you feel embroiled in honor culture, and perhaps you have a wherewithal to recognize that that is dangerous, that that can lead to an early death through a duel or a shooting or whatever, and you're trying to get out of it. The ability to secure your basic rights and belongings and safety through authorities is going to govern a lot what your incentives are in that situation here. Perhaps we are in a kind of strategic logic, right? So if the schoolyard bully comes to you and wants to take your lunchbox, if you feel like you can tell a teacher and the teacher will punish the bully reliably and it's not going to lead to all of your classmates turning on you as a snitch, then why fight the bully? If you think that actually the teachers won't care because they think, oh, just kids being kids, and even if the teachers do care, then all of your classmates are going to ostracize you because you snitched and your social life is going to be totally miserable, Then you basically face this choice of it's not just my lunchbox today. This bullies take my lunchbox every day once I acquire a reputation. But I'm easily bullied, so perhaps I

should fight him because that's the only

way to protect not being hungry all day long.

And so that sort of ability of

having recourse to an injustice or protecting yourself from not becoming vulnerable in the

future if you step out of the honor culture is what governs the kind of strategic incentives. And that's true for a kind of trivial example like the lunchbox at school, but it also seems to be true

for much more life and death examples.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

I think the bully analogies are useful because the bully gets something out of it too. The bully gets two lunges. It redounds to his benefit to engage in bullying behavior.

And in some senses, the reason that

we want states and the reason that we want law enforcement and everything that

goes with it is because the predatory

conduct of the bully is not a thing that society wants to have to tolerate.

To aggressively abuse the metaphor, we want one very big bully whose job it

is to suppress all of the other bullies.

We want the teacher because having to

live around predators in that way is extraordinarily socially toxic. And

the reasoning is sort of intrinsic and obvious.

It's just like if you spend your whole life worrying about being victimized, you are much worse off.

But we know things like kids who are exposed to shootings do worse in school.

Kids who are exposed regularly to violence, they have worse outcomes as adults. There's disinvestment, there's harm to property prices,

all these sort of objective measures that correspond to our native intuition of if I have to go through my community every day worrying that 1 to 5%

of the young men in my community are going to victimize me at random for their own benefit, I will be much worse off.

[Yasha Monk]

And so let's bring that back to the arist in the United States where there is the most crime. I mean, is this partially then about sort of trust between residents of those neighborhoods and the police? Is a lot of source of that that you feel like One response like your best friend or your brother is shot and you sort of know who did it? I mean, one response to that is to go to the police and make sure that they go to jail forever. And obviously, whether or not the norms in that neighborhood allow you to do that without yourself becoming a target for further violence, retaliation and so on is going to strongly influence whether faced with tragedy, you go to the police or you say, that's not a route that's available to me for all kinds of reasons. So let me get in a car with a couple of buddies and look

for the person who did this.

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[Charles Fain Lehman]

yeah.

And so when we're talking about the

sort of modern era of high violence, the big years, the great crime wave in the 60s, 70s and 80s, I think there are a couple of different factors that are going on there.

One is that to return to this

idea of governance, many parts of America's big cities become ungoverned or ungovernable. There's sort of a systematic decay of both the little things and the big things. If you think about New York in the 1980s, I know I'm sticking on New York, but you could talk about

cities that haven't recovered, like Detroit or Gary, Indiana, or large parts of the

capital of Washington, D.C. that become just

sort of totally lost. There's a fixed stock of police resources,

and if crime becomes sufficiently bad, then the police may be inadequate to addressing the issue. Sort of in the stable equilibrium.

Right, you have to do something to shift the equilibrium, because in the stable equilibrium, the police are just proportionate in that period of time. That dynamic is exacerbated by, to sort of put it over simplistically, our collective

belief that policing doesn't do anything, and

this is like a real position that is held by many people of influence

in American society in the 60s, 70s

and 80s, is that policing has no effect on crime. They're just convinced that the criminal justice system can't work until you address the

root causes of crime.

This goes back to the Kerner Commission,

the Katzenbach commission in the 1960s under the Johnson administration.

Until you address the root causes of crime, poverty, deprivation, racism, et cetera, you

will not have any impact.

Cops, therefore, not just both, crime has gotten bad enough that the corresponding response in the equilibrium from the police is relatively ineffective. And also we have decided that police can't do anything.

And so police select the least useful things to do with their time. And on top of that, are often quite corrupt.

So it's really not a good. It's not a good equilibrium on either side of the equation.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, I mean, that is a huge debate in Europe and in Britain as well. And. And one of the things that marked out Tony Blair's Third Way was a famous sound bite he had in the run up to his 1997 victory, which is tough on crime, toughen the causes of crime. So he was basically saying, we don't need to choose between those. But that's because you can only understand the impact of that sentence because the conventional wisdom in the Labour Party for the previous 20 years had been it's just about the causes of crime. It's not about reining this in to the people who might be tempted by that position. Why is it unhelpful to think that we need to get rid of the deeper causes of crime? Certainly it's true that when I look at some relatively affluent countries, whether that's Switzerland or Singapore or Japan, there's much

lower levels of crime.

Perhaps that is because they have a wealth estate and they have less social deprivation and so on and so forth. So what role do the causes of crime, the root causes of crime play in bringing about the relatively high level of crime? That you have in the United States, even in the places where things have gotten a lot better. Right. I mean, New York is much safer than it was. Many cities in America are much safer than they were, and yet they continue to be a lot less safe than Zurich and Singapore and Tokyo.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, two things. One is that there are structural factors

that explain that variance and that matter, although I tend to point to sort of more direct ones.

We have a lot more guns in

the United States than peer countries. And I'm actually squish on guns in the Second Amendment relative to other people who are on the right.

But I think it's sort of a fact of American life that we do. But that explains a lot of the

variance in terms of violence in particular.

It's just much easier to harm other

people in the United States than it is in pure countries.

That doesn't explain all of it, but

it explains some of it.

I think there are lots of. There are structural factors where if you

sort of plug them into a model, they will explain some of the variants.

That said, I think it's important in

the American context to observe that

rising

affluence is not necessarily correlated with receding crime. There's a great line from James Q.

Wilson, the political scientist who observes that in the 1960s, we did all of these. We dramatically overhauled the criminal justice system. We made it much less punitive, much more rehabilitative. We launched the Great Society. We made huge investments in the inner city, in welfare, in transfers, all through the first half of the 1960s, and then crime exploded. Similarly, if you look at the 1990s, inequality is rising, the economy is doing relatively well, but there are real problems with poverty, particularly in some of these major cities. The poverty rate goes up under Giuliani in New York City, and yet crime dramatically declines. And to me, all of that. You can talk about the big structural variables, but those are relatively hard to move. And part of my argument is crime is policy accessible. We do actually know today in a way that we did in the 70s. We do actually know what tools work to meaningfully reduce crime. We know that we can use policy

to bring crime down.

And last point, crime is itself a

cause, not just an effect. Crime is a cause of deprivation.

The point I made earlier, if you

live in a crime ridden neighborhood, neighborhood,

you are systematically worse off. You are systematically disadvantaged relative to if you didn't. Policy can and should. Policy interested in remediating disadvantage should say, we need to free children from the

risk of being shot and murdered or the fear of being Shot and murdered.

That's a thing that's in their interest

in the long run, that's a disadvantage they should not have to suffer from.

So policy can change crime in a

way that I would argue it's much

harder to change those other core variables. And we should understand crime as an independent cause of the sort of quote,

unquote, root causes, not just an effect of them.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, just to spell this out a little bit, it sounds like you're making two different kinds of responses to this.

Right.

The first is that actually just looking at the root causes doesn't give you a lot of explanation. You look at times when the supposed root causes improve. Obviously, the United States in 1970 has much more generous welfare programs. It's much less overt racist than it

was 20 years previously. And yet crime is higher in 1970 than in 1950.

And secondly, you then look at the

period in which crime really declines, and

it's not obvious that these factors had

gotten a lot better during those years.

So it's just not that explanatory.

The second point, which is slightly different

but I think important, is

sometimes the root causes aren't the things that are actionable.

And I've actually drawn on this James Q. Wilson example in talking about a very different topic of populism in some of my work, which is to say that perhaps the root causes of populism are globalization or whatever. I'm not sure that I fully buy that argument, but even if it were, well, we're not going to undo globalization in order to save ourselves from populism. It's just not clear how that might work.

But you might learn how to run

a different electoral campaign, or you might

adopt certain kinds of policies.

Moderate political parties might learn how to speak to people in ways that find that soft, putting those interventions that are

kind of doable in a way that

just change the entire global structure in order to lessen the deep causes of

those phenomenon are unlikely to be actionable. And so obviously, if you thought it was just about the root causes, then you just wouldn't be able to do anything other than fight root causes. But what you're saying is, look, whatever exact role the root causes play, perhaps play some kind of role, what we do have is lots and lots of empirical evidence. There'd be specific kind of interventions like focused policing, like changing the architectural environment of cities, like going in and warning people who are in particular danger of committing a serious crime at a very particular time that that is going to have consequences, can actually reduce crime to bring it back to Baltimore. So this is going on in New York and LA, in Boston and Washington, D.C. and these cities transform quite radically.

There's still some corners of New York

that are quite violent.

But whenever friends of mine come to the city and they ask, should I be worried? I say, you would really have to, you know, set out to go to a dangerous place to end up there. Right. As a tourist in New York, just walking around the city and going to the places that you're likely to go to, you're really not going to come into a dangerous neighborhood. Now you can do some crime tourism

and go to the most dangerous parts

of New York, and you'll find neighborhoods that are still less dangerous than they were 30 years ago, but they're going to be more dangerous than Union Square. But this is just not going to happen around. That's very different. Different from what New York felt like

in 1990 when I talked to relatives

who lived there at the time. For example, Washington, D.C. even more extreme.

Right.

It used to be that the area on Dupont Circle was kind of safe,

but only really particular blocks around it.

And then you stray a couple of

blocks in the wrong direction.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

There were crack markets behind the White House.

[Yasha Monk]

Right, right.

And obviously Washington, D.C. today has also

radically transformed in these kind of ways.

And yet during all of his periods, Baltimore didn't. So is it the that people in Baltimore just didn't learn these lessons?

What happened there?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, it's a really great question, one to which I only have part of the answer, but I think there were several parts. One is that, as I alluded to earlier, they've had real problems making the

Baltimore Police Department an effective tool for doing some of these things. Just at an institutional, cultural level. BPD has had real scandals, They've had real struggles.

There's a lot of adversarialism between BPD

and between the civilian leadership of the city.

And as a result, I think you see this. You need to use the tools of

the criminal justice system to accomplish the policies that I'm talking about, and they

just not have this sort of institutional infrastructure. And then conversely, this is related. When they tried to do these things, they really couldn't build the executive support that they needed. So we talked about focus Deterrence. I've written about their most recent Focus Deterrence Implementation, which I argue works. And everybody I talked to in the city basically said, we've done this before.

We did it in 1999. They did it, I think, in 2014. And both times the implementation just fell apart. And the reason Was they didn't have executive support.

They didn't have people who said, we believe that violence is a problem and we're going to put our shoulders into it at the mayoral level throughout the city government, we're just going to say,

this is the thing that we're fixing right now.

And so they didn't get the resources they need.

There's a great deal of skepticism, and

I think that results in, if you can't, this is the challenge of strategic policing. And the more strategic approaches is it takes deliberate action.

It takes institutional know how and institutional commitment.

And if you don't have those, then

you can just sort of get stuck in this quagmire.

You can really struggle to overcome the problem. And then that's all downstream or downstream of the sort of more deeply entrenched problems, which is just like many neighborhoods

in Baltimore have deeply entrenched gang cultures. Deeply entrenched.

When I say gang cultures, I really mean these social networks, these tight networks

of young men with guns who all

know each other and are all primed to shoot at each other because the

city government is not really committed to solving the problem.

[Yasha Monk]

Okay, so this is a story of, in a way, the city not quite getting its act together because of structural

features,

but it doesn't allow it to,

even when it sort of tries to

effectively deploy some of the tactics that end up working in other places. And so if we'd recorded this conversation

two or three years ago, that would

kind of be where it stopped, right?

Until quite recently, it was still the

case that Baltimore was really the most dangerous major city on the eastern seaboard. That as Washington D.C. and New York and Boston had improved very significantly, Baltimore improved a little bit from the heights of crime in the 90s and so

on, but it was just notably less

safe than those other major cities. But then it turns out that over

the last few years there's been the beginnings of quite a remarkable success story. Tell us, first of all, what's the

evidence that, that Baltimore seems to be finally turning it around?

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[Charles Fain Lehman]

You know, I think the most straightforward

answer is just you can draw a straight line down in terms of their homicide rate. So the numbers I look at in

2022, which is when things started to turn, there were about 333 murders in Baltimore 2022 last year, three years later,

there were 133 murders in Baltimore.

So that's a more than 60% decline. In count terms, that's the fewest murders

that Baltimore has seen since 1965. It's just a stunning and dramatic decline.

And then I think if you talk

to people on the street, there's some

polling, there's a little bit of polling,

less than I would like.

But then also, if you just go

and talk to people who live in Baltimore's most violent communities, they will say to you, things feel safer. We can go out, we can walk around.

And I think it's in particularly in

those places where the change is felt. It's not every category of crime. It's not that systematically all measures of antisocial behavior have gotten better. It's that the city has said, we're no longer going to tolerate murder, and

murder has precipitously declined, and shootings have

precipitously declined in kind.

[Yasha Monk]

And so we talked about the structural features which make it hard for Baltimore to implement some of these things. The tension between the Baltimore Police Department with its leadership, the high levels of corruption, the Baltimore Police Department relative to other police departments on the Eastern seaboard, all kinds of other things. I think one of the things that I've heard anecdotally, I don't know whether there's reliable evidence for that, is that, for example, a lot of Baltimore Police Department doesn't live in the city of Baltimore. They live in the county of Baltimore, around the city.

And so they don't feel the same

kind of stake of ownership that perhaps the average officer of the NYPD might feel who is more likely to live in the city or something like that.

Presumably all of that didn't change overnight.

So what did change? What is it that allowed Baltimore to implement some of the successful tactics from other places?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

So I argue that there are two answers to that.

One is that they got a new

prosecutor who made a really big difference in the way a prosecutor is sort

of a gating function.

A good prosecutor on its own will

not make a difference. But a bad prosecutor can cause real problems if you're trying to fix the situation.

So they did that, and then they built out an implementation of focused deterrence,

that strategy that I talked about earlier,

that that actually has executive buy in,

and that isn't all of government effort.

And that there is a real effort

for the first time to get the. As people there claim to me, there's a real effort for the first time to get the Implementation details. Right.

Rather than just sort of attempting and

not really doing it.

Those two factors together, everybody picks one or the other and I sort of say, no, it's probably both of them.

And they're probably really reinforcing each other. And they both matter. And the bigger picture is they are

just trying to run the criminal justice machine properly. And when you do that, things get better.

[Yasha Monk]

So tell me about the role of prosecutors here.

And how is it that the previous prosecutor in Baltimore was bad? How is it this new prosecutor made a difference? And more broadly, I think you've argued that the kind of movement to install progressive prosecutors in a lot of major American cities has actually backfired and led to significant rises in crime. What's the reasoning, the evidence for that?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, it's a little complicated.

So Baltimore's state's attorney is a guy named Ivan Bates. He in 2023, he was elected again

in 2022, took office in 2023.

He replaced his predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, who

left under a pile of scandal. She was under multiple federal investigations.

She ended up getting. She was convicted federally of various fraud charges. But Mosby came in as one of these sort of as a quote, unquote, progressive prosecutor. And the idea behind the progressive prosecutor

movement is

prosecutors in the United States have prosecutorial discretion.

They can decide that they want to prosecute or not prosecute offenses.

You can use that power, the progressive prosecutors argue, to unilaterally limit the reach

of the criminal justice system and or

just like stop prosecuting whole classes of crimes. So Mosby, what do we know about progressive prosecution? It's a little bit thorny because it's very easy to call yourself a progressive prosecutor. That's different from implementing all the same policy mix. So there are a couple of studies that look at what is the effect of electing a self identified progressive prosecutor

on crime in a given jurisdiction.

The answer there is depending on how you count which study you like, there's an increase in petty offending or disorder

offending, and that's in one study.

And then in another study, there's an increase in property offending. Neither of these studies finds increase in violence. And then my response to this is that many progressive prosecutors just sort of run on things that don't make a big difference. If you promise to deprosecute jaywalking, for example, which some of these guys do, the response to that is no prosecutor has. American prosecutors don't prosecute jaywalking.

That's not a real thing.

So you're not really making a policy

change of any meaningful significance against.

So your first order effect doesn't matter. But then you sort of have to look under the hood of what are they actually doing. And there are decisions that they can make that are really impactful. So, for example, refusing to prosecute felons in possession. If you're a felon, you can't carry a firearm, you're a prohibited person. There are some big city prosecutors who

will refuse to prosecute that charge, even

though it's a way to get a

criminal with a gun off the street.

Or categorical non prosecution of all sorts

of drug related offenses, or not engaging in. In

not engaging in strategic prosecution where you use it to pick off people.

Not using gang enhancements is another example.

So I think in Mosby's case, I think she was fairly aggressive, particularly after 2020, she stopped prosecuting a whole variety

of low level offenses.

That concurrent with depolicing in 2020, everything

else that drove the increase in violence

then led to a similar increase in violence in Baltimore, as many other jurisdictions saw. But I think when you talk about the role of the prosecutor, you need the prosecutor as a backstop. He's the guy who establishes the credibility

of the threat of arrest.

And so when you don't have a prosecutor who's likely to send people to prison, then the credibility of the threat

of arrest declines significantly. It becomes harder for police to do their job.

[Yasha Monk]

Let's steel, man, sort of a case on the other side and explain why it's not right. Right. I mean, I think there's a widespread conviction that I think is often based on somewhat shaky empirical evidence that a huge share or significant share of a US prison population is there because of nonviolent drug offenses. This is partially rooted in Michelle Alexander's

book the New Jim Crow.

And so if you believe that, then it seems very reasonable for prosecutors to come in and say we shouldn't be locking all of these people up because they're drug addicts. And sadly they use those drugs. And so some cop encounters them with a few grams of pot or perhaps a few grams of a more serious crime like meth or heroin or whatever in their pocket, and we're locking them

away to waste away their lives for

a really long time.

That seems really bad.

More broadly, I guess the idea would be that things like gang enhancements are racially discriminatory in some kind of way.

Right.

That is just a way of discriminating against black men who grow up in poor neighborhoods where there's a lot of gang infiltration. And it's gonna be inevitable that they have some kind of associates as acquaintances who are members of gangs.

And so the same crime that they

commit is gonna end up being punished much worse than the crime that an idiot 17 year old white teenager in a nice affluent suburb commits. And so why should we send them for jail for way longer, whereas we let off a 17 year old making

a dumb mistake in the suburbs with a little bit of a warning. Right.

I'm trying to steel, man, the kind of argument. Why is it that that story, which I think, you know, a kind of reasonable, not super political acquaintance of mine might make, misses the mark?

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is that it just sort of doesn't

line up with the empirical facts.

And if you can, I once did the work to try to run down

some of the claims in the New Jim Crow in Michelle Alexander's book about this. I'm going to get this wrong, but

I think she claims that a majority

of the increase in the prison pop since the 1980s is attributable to drug offenses.

And if you go into the. I have this in an essay. If you go into the footnotes and figure out where she got that number

from, she clearly misread the relevant table

and the figure is actually much smaller than that. And there's a lot of things like that in the literature where you go poke around and the empirics are kind of shoddy. The bigger picture point is when you talk about who is really, who is really getting prosecuted for the kinds of

offenses that you are talking about, who is the object of prosecution in the war on drugs?

And my argument has been that the war on drugs was strategically misguided.

It didn't accomplish the primary goal that it was meant to accomplish, which is to say aggressively suppressing the drug trade. But I think it gets a bad rap for a bunch of other reasons that are not well supported.

One of those is that the assumption

that basically we were locking up for very long periods of time, low level nonviolent drug offenders.

There's a study I that looks at

the composition of the prison population in

1997, looks at drug offenders and works out that something like I think it's 2% of state offenders and 6% of federal offenders can be characterized as nonviolent

low level drug offenders.

And everybody else has a violent prior, is in a gang, was involved at the trafficking level, was some sort of major offender. That gets to the like, like the sort of deeper issue that we want to get into, which is the reason for prosecutorial Discretion is that you need to be able to make decisions about

who is and is not worth your time.

And that's a person level decision as

much as it is an offense level decision.

So those critiques often look at what people get locked up for, what people get arrested for, but they are not able to observe who is it that is getting arrested, who is it that's getting locked up. There are lots of arrests every year today still for drug possession. Almost nobody goes to prison for drug possession. Why? Because drug possession arrests are mostly a pretext to bring in somebody that you need to bring in so that you can engage with them. And it's easier to establish probable cause for drug possession than it is for the thing you actually need to lock them up for. That's like a. I'm assuming for some

[Yasha Monk]

portion of that 2% of state prisoners and 6% of federal prisoners. The non violent conviction may also be a result of a plea deal.

Right.

Where you likely have the evidence from committing a violent crime. You're not entirely sure you're going to win the prosecution. Or there's a lot of pressure, which I think is problematic in all kinds of ways on the system to avoid jury trials because they're so much more lengthy and costly and so on. And so what you agree to on the plea deal is a nonviolent drug offense. But the underlying reason for the prosecution is something quite different.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Right. That is also often the dynamic and

it gets to the deeper point of in many cases, the thing that looks weird on paper is happening because of

circumstances that are outside of what the paper is measuring.

People are concerned about that. And that is the deeper conversation is

about how much discretion should the criminal justice system have.

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Have.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

But often what. To return to the point, I have progressive prosecutors, often what they're doing is saying, this whole category of offense, this whole tactic or strategy is going to be off limits to us. When previous prosecutors would say, I'm going to use this as leverage towards my overall goal of incapacitating people who really

need to be incapacitated.

The progressive prosecutor worries a lot about false positives, but as a result they incorporate a lot of false negatives. They say, this person shouldn't be locked up because I can't. I don't like the charge that we

would use to lock them up. I don't feel like we can get them on this.

On the bigger thing, When a prior prosecutor would go, I can get them on this and they need to go away for five to 10, so I'm

just gonna get them on this.

[Yasha Monk]

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we

talk about two very important topics.

The first is how to make the

judicial system more effective, make sure that people who do bad things go behind bars.

That that helps us provide public safety without giving up on another value that is absolutely fundamental and for good reason to the liberal tradition, which is that we must do everything we can to

minimize the number of people who go

to jail even though they are innocent. Is this a trade off when we allow a lot of prosecutorial discretion, for example, do we just have to balance those two values off against each other? Or is there a way to hold

sacred our collective endeavor not to send

innocence to jail while still enhancing the

ability of a system to provide public safety?

We also talk about the outlook for

crime in major American cities.

Can we be relatively certain, certain that

the comparative low levels of crime that have shaped New York, Boston, Louisiana and other cities in recent years are going to continue?

Or could bad policy choices suddenly lead

to a resurgence of crime to the

levels that we saw in those Cities

in the 1990s or in Baltimore until five or 10 years ago? To listen to that part of a conversation to support what we do here to get ad free access to two episodes of For Good Fun every week to stop hearing these annoying paywalls at the end, go to writing.yashamon.com and become a paying subscriber that is writing.yashamonk.com.

[Charles Fain Lehman]

Foreign.

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