Joshua B. Hoe interviews Bruce Western about his National Academies of Sciences report on Racism and Crime
Full Episode
My Guest – Bruce Western
Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He studies poverty and socioeconomic inequality with a focus on the U.S. criminal justice system. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison and Punishment and Inequality in America. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He is also the co-author of the new National Academies of Sciences Report “Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science, Practice, and Policy.”
Watch the Interview about Racism and Crime on YouTube
You can watch Episode 139, Bruce Western – Racism and Crime on our YouTube channel.
Notes From Episode 139 – Racism and Crime
The title of Bruce’s report is Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science Practice and Policy, you can find it here.
The books Bruce suggested were:
Richie, Davis, et al., Abolition. Feminism. Now
Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition
Desmond, Poverty By America
Full Transcript
Josh Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 139 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Bruce Western about the National Academy of Science’s report, Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Policy and Practice. Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and the Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He studies poverty and socio-economic inequality with a focus on the US criminal justice system. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison, and Punishment and Inequality in America. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He’s also the co-author of the new National Academies of Science Report, Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science Practice and Policy, which we will be discussing today. Welcome back for the third time to the Decarceration Nation podcast, Bruce Western.
Bruce Western
Thanks so much, Josh. It’s a pleasure.
Josh Hoe
As you probably remember, I always ask the same first question, but since you’ve already answered it twice, let me ask how you came to work on this particular project with these particular people? What was the origin story of this project?
Bruce Western
Oh, that’s a great question. This project has been in the works for a long, long time. And the National Academy of Science consensus reports are a very particular kind of report. And the idea of the report is that you gather together about 15 or 20 experts in a field, they meet over a period of a year, and they have to come to a consensus around the best science, in answer to the question that is put to them. The question that was put to us is, how do you summarize what we know about racial inequality and in policing, and in the courts, and in our prisons? And how do we use that social science to reduce racial inequality? And the National Academies is one of the oldest scientific bodies in the country and was established by congressional charter. So the reports that are produced by the academies, they have to be reported out to our Congress. And they really try and summarize our best scientific understanding of the problem. And NAS reports on the criminal justice system have a long history, they go back to the 70s and 80s. And we’ve had important reports about recidivism and deterrence and policing and incarceration. And racism has always been a theme that’s run through these reports over many decades now. And this is the first time that an entire NAS report is devoted specifically to the topic of racial inequality and the question of how to reduce it. I give a lot of credit to Jeremy Travis and Ruth Peterson, who as members of the National Academy of Science Committee, had really been trying to get this report off the ground for many years now. And then finally, with the wave of activism and the national concern around problems of racial inequality, particularly with respect to policing around George Floyd, in the summer of 2020, I think we finally had the political impetus within the National Academies to do a report that focused on racial inequality, specifically.
Josh Hoe
So this is not your first National Academy report. And you talked a little bit about how it came together. And you say that everybody, in essence, has to get together and meet for a year and get these things done. But what is the actual process of putting together and including the research? because there’s quite a bit of research, it’s a 300-page report.
Bruce Western
The breadth of this report, I think, exceeds any other NAS report in the Crime, Law, and Justice area as this area’s known to the Academy. And so you begin this process by assembling a committee. And, this committee was very multidisciplinary. So we had a lot of different kinds of expertise represented. We had people like me, sociologists, and other social scientists, we had people who studied public policy, we had lawyers, we had practitioners, a federal judge, and practicing attorneys, we had people who were directly impacted, formerly incarcerated who had direct experience with the system, and people from the advocacy community as well. So compared to most other NAS reports, which often focus on sometimes a narrow group of academics, this was a very diverse group. And I think the composition was so broad because the charge to the committee was so broad, we had to review the entire system. And so that was how the committee was formed. We plan out the basic outlines of the report, and we break into different working groups: one would work on policing, one would work on major trends in incarceration, and so on. And we would hash out what we understood the research findings to be and write them up. And so I think the process is very demanding and the diversity of the group means the findings are our best effort at representing the best science.
Josh Hoe
So you talked a little about the context of when it started, kind of the impetus for it was somewhat George Floyd. But starting a little bit after that, we start getting COVID, we get an increase in crime, particularly in homicides and gun violence. Do we know how that crime has been distributed? I know the report came first to some extent, but do we know how that crime has been distributed? Now, the impact of that crime and punishment for that crime is playing out in terms of racial impact, which is kind of the topic of the book.
Bruce Western
Yeah, it’s a really important question for our working process. Because, you know, we began meeting at the end of 2020. And, a lot of our work was done through 21. And by 2021, it became clear that there had been a very, very significant increase in serious violence in the country the previous year, in 2020. And there’s very strong evidence that shootings increased, particularly in major urban areas, particularly in black communities. And, homicide increased very substantially, as well. A big part of the increase in shootings and homicides in 2020, was overwhelmingly concentrated in black communities, and black homicide victimization rates really escalated dramatically. And that was, that was a lot of the context as, as these reports began coming out, that was a lot of the context in which we were doing our work. And, of course, politics changed as a consequence of this change in serious violent crime and reports of serious violent crime. So the politics really began to shift quite sharply in 2021. And I think we were gripped with a real urgency to stick to the problem of homicide victimization. There’s a massive racial disparity in homicide victimization. And as we think about reducing racial inequality in the system, it’s imperative that we also have strategies for improving racial equity and community safety.
Josh Hoe
I think so often that these things get caught up in, you were talking about the politics of the moment, where you have a large population of folks who are victimized in communities of color. And also, at the same time a bunch of people who are impacted by the changes in laws that move people into the system and create system contact. How did you all negotiate those questions? And did you come to any conclusions from that?
Bruce Western
Yeah, yeah. That’s a really perceptive point. I think in the political debate, I think something we were aware of, is that a choice is often posed between criminal justice reforms that are designed to reduce racial inequality and community safety. And often, elected officials will say, well, the rising crime is due to things like bail reform, and so on, the evidence for that is very weak. And, so a choice is presented to the electorate, you can have justice or safety, but you can’t have both. And I think in the view of the committee, we see Justice and Safety as complementary goals, they very much go hand in hand, if there’s a large racial disparity in homicide victimization, the way we respond to the problem of homicide can’t be so punitive, that it winds up causing tremendous social damage in the communities that are suffering the highest homicide rates, very punitive approaches can exacerbate problems as social and economic disadvantage that ultimately contributed to racial differences in crime. And that’s one of the, I think, the leading implications of the report, that the whole task of reducing racial inequality has to take on the challenge of Safety and Justice jointly. And we believe there are strategies that can both reduce racial inequality and promote community safety at the same time, and that particularly means promoting safety in low-income communities, and low-income communities of color.
Josh Hoe
And one of the problems that you highlight in the report is that there’s actually not one justice system. There’s a multiplicity of overlapping and competing systems of justice and punishment. You know, I always look to The Wire when I think about this, that there’s this bureaucratic inertia that confounds all of our efforts at so many levels. You know, before we move to the solutions and things like that, how did you all struggle with this kind of notion of multiplicable, a system full of very different parts?
Bruce Western
I mean, you’re exactly right, particularly right, if we include the police in that discussion, you know, there are over 10,000 police agencies in the country, on top of all of the county sheriff’s departments and the State Department of Correction and, and, you know, the countless county courts – and so in order to make a really significant dent in racial inequality, to really move the needle, because you’ve got all of these systems that are overlapping and interlocking, and often working at cross purposes, and so on, the system is so decentralized – it’s really important in the view of my committee, that we take a coordinated approach. And reform has to be systemic. And so that means it’s going to cut across agencies, cut across jurisdictions, I think that probably means that we need significant executive leadership at a fairly central level, a mayor’s office, a governor’s office, the White House, really needs to take on the project of reducing racial inequality in order to coordinate reforms across what can be 1000s of criminal justice agencies.
Josh Hoe
At the same time, you say that we’re at a troubling moment in this country where the idea of systemic anything, much less systemic discrimination, seems to be one of the things that state governments are trying to suggest doesn’t exist. Also, in many cases, attempting to pass legislation that suggests even talking about systemic discrimination is something we maybe shouldn’t engage in. I know that you’re dealing with more of the data and things like that, maybe not the larger political questions, but there is some tension between the notion of this report and the kind of political reality we’re in right now. So I’m sure you’ve had some thoughts about that.
Bruce Western
I mean, at some level, I think, and this was certainly our intention in writing the report. The report is a description of what structural racism looks like. And it is not just a bias in individual cases, shown by line officers, whether they be police doing highway patrol or a parole officer making a decision about revocation for a technical violation. Structural racism means that there are a whole variety of social systems, often very long-standing with deep historical roots that work according to a similar fundamental logic, that tends to generate a deep and persistent racial inequality. So what does this look like? In practice, it means patterns of housing segregation, racial segregation, by residence, that tends to concentrate poverty within particular neighborhoods, and a whole variety of social problems can cluster around spatially concentrated conditions of poverty. Among those social problems include problems of serious violence and other crime. There’s a public policy response, and criminalization and punishment have become [the] dominant modes of response. Arrest and incarceration themselves can have negative social consequences, which contribute to ongoing patterns of inequality and poverty, and so on. So this is a social structure with deep historical roots. You could remove any one line officer who may be racially biased, but the structure remains standing. So as an empirical matter, just putting the politics to one side for a moment, as an empirical matter, that’s how we understand what structural racism is, it’s the long-standing interlocking social systems that don’t depend on the bias of any one person. And that has big implications for policy responses that should be coordinated, that should go beyond the system itself. We’re in a political context now, as you say, the reality of structural racism, the empirical reality of structural racism, which we took two years to try and document in a systematic way, is being denied. And I think our contribution to the public conversation for the National Academy of Sciences is trying to bring science and evidence and rationality into the debate. That’s what we’re trying to bring to the public conversation. And then clearly, we’re in a time where there are many other ways of engaging the public conversation.
Josh Hoe
I feel like I’ve got to ask the follow-up to some extent. From my perspective and probably from yours as well, you know, as having read, you know, for decades, things about why there is an actual systemic, if you’re talking about housing, if you’re talking about prisons, if you’re talking about, you know, poverty programs, whatever you’re talking about, we can probably the two of us can come up with a pretty plausible and very well defended data-based argument for why there’s a step systemic problem. That doesn’t necessarily seem to be carrying the day, unfortunately. Is there more we need to do aside from just say, here’s the data, because I think, at least I have the tendency to just do that? I think, you know, maybe a little bit more than that. I try to put, you know, a little spin on it in terms of the messaging but . . .
Bruce Western
Yeah, so there’s like a key question, right?
Josh Hoe
I say this in an environment where I just yesterday was reading a 135-page bill that is essentially going to reinstate truth in sentencing or create truth in sentencing in a state that’s never had it. And then a bunch of other terrible things, too. So you know, maybe I’m uniquely cynical today.
Bruce Western
We’re definitely in a political moment of backlash with that, definitely in that moment; we are seeing sort of flashbacks of the 1990s in our politics, right now. So to answer this question, I’m sort of going to take off my National Academy of Sciences Chair hat. And before I’m done, I’ve got to acknowledge, I hope I can acknowledge all of the other people who’ve worked on this, including my co-chair, Khalil Muhammad, who was fantastic. But so now I’m sort of speaking outside of the scope of the report. And, I want to bring in some other work that I’ve been doing around the Square One Project. And I think – and this is a narrative change project that we’re working on at the Columbia Justice Lab – and in the view of Square One, as you say, the data will only get you so far. And what I’m thinking about a lot is surfacing values, the value basis of a political conversation. What are the foundational values that we can rally around as we try to imagine how communities can be safe and thriving, which I think, is ultimately what we want? And, I think, from the point of view of Square One, the kinds of values that are really important to that conversation, values of human dignity. I’ll put it in these terms. Now, I know that this language can rub some people the wrong way across the political spectrum, but also values of social justice, which means there should be a fair distribution of rights, resources, and responsibilities. And if we can agree on those fundamental values, which don’t sacrifice accountability, and it doesn’t sacrifice the urgency that’s created by interpersonal harm and violence. If we can agree on those values, then that’s the basis for conversation in which we can productively disagree, and maybe we don’t agree on those values. So let’s talk about the values then and what we think [are] the ethical imperatives that should guide the development of safe and thriving communities. I think, to me, in a very, very polarized political atmosphere, a conversation about values in conjunction with the data might offer a way forward, not for everyone, but at least for 50 or 60%, or something, and which I think is the basis for a public policy. What do you think?
Josh Hoe
I’ve been struggling with this so much over the last two years. Because I feel like in 99.9% of the cases I’ve seen, we’re on the right side in terms of the data. But we’re getting absolutely clocked in terms of the policy that’s not for lack of any of us trying to explain what the problem is, or what the data says. And so you know, I mean, I always say that you need to lead with public safety. I’ve stopped saying that, that we do criminal justice reform. And I’ve started saying that whatever policy I’m working on, it’s a public safety policy. Because that does speak to values to some extent, and also hopefully highlights the importance of the data that we’re trying to . . . But beyond that, you know, I will freely admit that I’m struggling. I think that’s why I’m asking so many people this year, what they think is because, you know, I mean, you raised New York bail reform earlier, you know, I’ve been tangentially involved in messaging on that for almost three years now. And despite the fact that I am even more convinced now, after reading lots of reports, including a very recent one out of John Jay, that it has been good for public safety, we’ve overwhelmingly seemed to have lost that battle in the minds of a lot of people in the public.
Bruce Western
Yeah, I think the leading with safety approach is really important, not just in terms of messaging, actually. I think there’s good evidence that reducing racial inequality in the system, reducing an outrageously high rate of incarceration significantly, does make communities much safer, much safer, and much healthier. I mean, that is, shockingly, that is an authentic position. And, and I think it’s a good antidote to an error that’s been made in the political conversation, where the voices for change and reform and so on, have often minimized crime, actually, and sort of deflected that issue. And I think that’s a really grave error, and it really misunderstands where the urgency is coming from in the, in the public. I mean, people want a sense of safety in their lives and order and predictability and to be able to imagine a future.
Josh Hoe
It also just creates this false dichotomy where people can say, you know, you’ve seen the Willie Horton-esque ads, that this person has been for reform, therefore, they’re against public safety. And if you start out saying no, this is about public safety, to some extent, that throws that line of attack off, I think, and, you know, there’s a wider, as we’ll talk about in a few minutes when we get back into the report. You know, there’s definitely wider views of what public safety means than the way it’s traditionally talked about. In fact, let’s go ahead and throw the hat back on to be the chair of the report, just to get through the first part of the report. You know, there’s also in addition to, you know, multiple systems, there’s also multiple times in the system, conditions before arrest, arrest, pretrial, incarceration in jail, incarceration in prison, release probation, parole, do we see the same kinds of systemic disparities throughout all the processes in that group of ideas?
Bruce Western
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is something that we take from the research, that inequality is something that emerges from a sequence of disparities at successive stages of the system from the initial point of police contact, and there’s really tremendous new, big data research on traffic stops and searches that is really, I think, quite revolutionary for the field. And from that first point of police contact through pretrial detention, and then sentencing in the courts through to community supervision and patterns of parole revocation, you see the accumulation of disparity at each stage, and there’s evidence of bias at each stage. And sometimes disparity emerges more as a structural property of the system, the way penal codes are written, the way sentencing enhancements are written, [they are] more likely to penalize people living in urban areas, which are more likely to be people of color, more likely to penalize people in low-income communities, which are more likely to be people of color. And so, inequality is something that emerges sequentially across stages of the system, which I think is another motivation for this idea of the importance of coordinated reform, it has to be taken on as a political project at the level of a central executive, we think.
Josh Hoe
In addition to an idea of a central executive trying to run it through all the different systems, one point in the book that you and your co-author suggests is that it might be more impactful to address, or at least you suggest that addressing systemic inequality could be a multiplier for the impact of criminal justice reform in general. To some extent, again, that’s a political question, though, right?
Bruce Western
Could you unpack the question a bit for me, Josh?
Josh Hoe
Yeah, sure. I mean, there’s a portion of the book where you all talk about the need for addressing inequality, as opposed to simply doing criminal justice reform. And I think you suggest that one’s a multiplier for the other. Does that make more sense?
Bruce Western
I understand more clearly now. And I think, because part of the inequality that we see in things like policing and incarceration, and so on, part of it is system-produced. But part of it is really deeply rooted in social inequalities in society, things like patterns of concentrated poverty, residential segregation, the way labor markets operate, the way housing credit markets operate, and so on. And really substantially reducing racial inequality can’t start with system reform by itself, we have to also take on the problems of concentrated poverty, and residential segregation, and the whole array of social problems that cluster around those inequalities. And this means I think that the policy levers, some of the policy levers, lie entirely outside the system. And it’s things like the health care system, the availability of fair and affordable housing, desegregation, improving schools, all of these things that are about reducing racial inequality in general, race, differences in poverty rates, educational attainment, and unemployment, things like that. Reducing racial inequalities in all of those domains will tend to reduce racial inequality in the system. I will say all of those things will also tend to reduce crime, as well. And so this is one way in which the goals of reducing crime and racial inequality in the system, they’re absolutely complimentary.
Josh Hoe
I’ll tell you, a couple of weeks ago when the DC crime thing was happening with the federal response to it, you know, one of the things that made me the most frustrated is that – I say this to people all the time and it sounds hyperbolic, but it’s really not – that If you want to reduce crime, extending sentences is probably one of the least efficient ways you could possibly reduce crime. And while everyone immediately rolls their eyes when we say stuff like this, it’s factually correct that if you’re going to list the 100 best ways to reduce crime, making sentences longer wouldn’t even be on the list most likely. Your report suggests, you know, as you were just saying, that you can both reduce incarceration and reduce criminal justice contact, and at the same time, reduce crime, that maybe those things aren’t always connected, but they can be connected. Can you explain that conclusion that came to more? Since I think this is a pretty critical point. And really, one of the things that we have to be better at messaging is that when we say we want to reduce incarceration, we’re not saying we want more crime, or that we don’t care about more crime or any of those things.
Bruce Western
I mean, the way we approached this as a committee, our starting point was with research, largely from urban sociology, [which] and was largely focused on patterns of crime. And there’s a big research literature that’s really focused on high rates of homicide, particularly in very poor communities of color. And, that research, long-standing research agenda, a huge body of evidence now, finds that for a whole variety of reasons, really spatially concentrated poverty provides very fertile conditions for high rates of violent victimization, and, and in violent offending, high rates of homicide. And by the way, the people who are at highest risk of committing the homicide, are also the people at highest risk of being victimized by homicide, and, you know, it’s young men, sort of 16 to 25, or something, something like that. And the racial disparities in homicide victimization, they’re very large, and it’s just a social tragedy, it’s real, it’s awful. And so alleviating those conditions in which poverty is so deeply concentrated in small areas, often a few blocks, overwhelmingly in communities of color, alleviating conditions of poverty in those neighborhoods can have a big effect on reducing crime rates and improving the quality of public space in those areas can be really important. So we started thinking about the problem of reducing racial inequality in the system, with an analysis of the social conditions in the neighborhoods that were experiencing the highest rates of crime. And that’s partly because the research on racial disparity was showing that racial disparities in crime is a big factor in racial disparities in incarceration; we don’t gloss over that, or minimize that. And we have to address that. But the system also produces its own inequalities. The system, when it’s very, very punitive, also contributes to social inequalities in communities. And so there’s a vicious circle that involves a whole set of social inequalities in poor neighborhoods and a very punitive criminal justice system. And so sort of unpacking the causal chain from neighborhood conditions to say racial disparities in incarceration leads us to a policy view where we’ve got to address those social conditions. That’s going to help with crime rates. But it’s also going to help a lot with disparities, the racial disparities in the prison system. And a policy response has to tackle the issue of neighborhood poverty.
Josh Hoe
I know I’ve talked about this a lot in terms of bail reform. But another important point that’s made in the report is that violence can be an outgrowth of criminal justice contact, that often, a lot of the violence can often spring out of, you know, interactions with the criminal, the many criminal justice systems. Can you talk about this a bit more?
Bruce Western
Yeah, there’s a lot to say there. One is that, you know, we should understand the system itself as a locus of violence, right.
Josh Hoe
Certainly was my experience.
Bruce Western
Arrest, incarceration, these are acts of state violence, that’s a form of violence. And, as I think you’re suggesting, as well, and you could speak to this much better than me, prisons themselves, are very violent places. And, the idea that the prison is somehow eliminating violence, when in fact, it’s just creating an incredibly violent situation behind a wall that we can’t, where we can’t see what’s happening, is no solution to the problem of violence at all.
Josh Hoe
I think you made the point very well, in your book Homeward, that trauma is the cause of so much of the violence. And yet, prison just ladles on more and more trauma on people already traumatized, without a lot of any way to address it, which seems like, in some ways, a recipe for the disasters we see in the way these things go.
Bruce Western
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And one of the great sort of fictions of punitive criminal justice policy is that we can draw a bright line between the offender and the victim. And, you know, the system is somehow keeping the innocent victim safe from the guilty offender, but the reality – and there’s so much research that shows this – that people who have harmed others often have very serious histories of victimization themselves. And I also think that just as an ethical matter, violence is not any kind of ethical solution for the harms caused by people who themselves have suffered enormous victimization. And I just find that ethically unacceptable.
Josh Hoe
There was, I think, in last week’s episode of a show called The Problem with Jon Stewart, where they actually were talking about different ways to conceptualize public safety. And I think a lot of the way, a lot of what this report does is talk about that notion, that public safety is more than probably the way we describe it. Can you talk a little bit more about how we can or how we do think about public safety? And how maybe we should?
Bruce Western
Yeah, I think, as the system got very, very punitive, really through the 80s and 90s, but of course, it started before then, and incarceration rates rose to a very high level, sentences became very long. we really zeroed in on a very, very narrow idea of what it was to be safe, and what the public policy response should be. And I think safety really meant safety from stranger victimization and street crime. And that sort of sucked all of the oxygen out of the conversation of what was, particularly for poor communities and poor communities of color, specifically needed in order to be safe and thriving and flourishing. And against that very narrow idea of safety, I think we should think instead about people having order and predictability in their daily life. And that way they’re able to imagine a future for themselves and for their families and so on. People’s time horizons become longer, that model of safety that I think strengthens the ties of community and the ties of family connection as well. So what are the threats to that kind of safety? I think it includes stranger victimization in street crime. But it includes many other threats to order and predictability in daily life, as well. It includes untreated health problems, it includes unemployment and it includes family violence, that often isn’t visible to the criminal justice system at all, and I think if we take on this much broader idea of community, community safety, the policy response becomes very much broader, as well. And, you know, punishment is one very small tool in the whole array of responses that we could adopt to promote that, much richer what I think of as the kind of thick public safety rather than the thin public safety of the punitive turn.
Josh Hoe
And there’s also this kind of thin versus thick notion where people think that the only answer or the only way to generate public safety is to do more policing. Patrick Sharkey has done a lot of research on this. I know the book that this report that you’ve done, talks about it a lot. What are ways that communities and residents can be part of the actual generation of public safety?
Bruce Western
This is a big theme in the discussion of recommendations of the report. Policing only has one very specific role and an alternative paradigm for community safety, shares power much more with community residents, allowing them to much more actively be the authors of what safety could mean for them in their own communities. In part in the recommendation section of the report, we talk about the ways in which public safety can be addressed by improving the quality of public spaces. So there’s really strong evidence around things like upgrading abandoned vacant lots, the greening of public space, improving street lighting, so basic public infrastructure that improves the quality of public space contributes significantly and there’s a big evidence base that this contributed significantly to community safety. And then the other part of the report that digs into this talks about community violence interruption programs, and the so-called CVI programs are about de-escalating violence when it begins to emerge, particularly among young men who may be involved in gangs; it means connecting people to pathways to economic opportunity, and social services in the community has a big role there. Improving the quality of public space and CVI, I think, offer a way of thinking about public safety that originates within the resources of communities themselves, rather than the external authority of police.
Josh Hoe
And it was, I think, something that appealed to me quite a bit toward the end of the book or report about applying a Principle of Parsimony. We’re at this weird moment in history where both the right and the left seem engaged in using government to achieve not only safety but kind of political dominance. And there used to be at least some part of the political spectrum that believed that, you know, maybe limited government was a good idea. And this Principle of Parsimony seems like to some extent, a call back to some of that. Can you talk about that a bit?
Bruce Western
Yeah, I think parsimony could be a foundational value around which the right and the left could sort of rally and, and there could be room for real work around that. And it’s interesting you made me think of a connection that I hadn’t fully thought of before. But I’ll get to that in one second. But the idea of parsimony . . . Originally, it was the sentencing principle that we should only use the absolute minimal level of punishment, to serve a public policy purpose, and in this case, community safety. And it’s become a broader sort of concept in the discussion around criminal justice policy. And we argue that the Principle of Parsimony is deeply rooted in the Constitution’s principle of limited government, that, particularly when it comes to state punishment, the government should do the absolute minimum. And we point to the Fourth Amendment and the 6th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, and the Eighth Amendment as real sources of parsimony. So protections against illegal search and seizure, jury powers, prohibition, and so on, cruel and unusual punishment. Due process in the legal system, so doesn’t sort of prejudice the interests of different social groups. So there’s a deep constitutional principle that government should be limited. And the mass incarceration, a mass incarceration era is kind of the vivid failure of the Principle of Parsimony, massive government overreach, creating this vast prison system. And the connection, so we argued that there’s a strong constitutional basis, as a way of reducing racial inequality of the system, to shrink the scope of its reach in a number of key areas. And we talk about policing and important examples of incarceration, in which the scope of the system was greatly reduced and racial inequality was greatly reduced. But the connection you made me think of is that this is entirely consistent with the idea of shifting power to communities, building capacity within communities to be the authors of their own safety. And then this is part and parcel of a parsimonious approach to community safety, and sort of empowering communities and improving their public spaces and through things like community violence interruption, providing communities with some capacity to de-escalate their own conflicts and provide opportunities to young people.
Josh Hoe
So you said that you wanted to shout out some of the other people who worked with you on the book. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about some of the work that they’ve done and some of the people that you’ve worked with.
Bruce Western
Yeah, we had such a great committee. It was hard. We met entirely over the COVID period on Zoom, we never got a chance to meet in person, unfortunately. I had a tremendous co-chair with the great historian, Khalil Gibran Muhammad. And we had tremendous historians and lawyers on the list. Elizabeth Hinton, Tracey Meares, and sociologists like Rob Sampson. Now that I’m listing names I’d like to include everyone . . . Economist Derek Neil and Steve Raphael who have done brilliant work in the area. You know, Bob Crutchfield has done work on this stuff for ages. Daryl Atkinson, he’s just doing wonderful work, was a brilliant presence on the committee and we were very lucky with who we had. And we had a tremendous National Academies staff. Yami Negussie was our study director and she was fabulous.
Josh Hoe
I always ask if there are any criminal justice-related books that you like or might recommend to our listeners, aside from the one we’ve been talking about for the last hour. So do you have any favorite books you’d like to shout out or mention?
Bruce Western
There are two books recently I’m finding very interesting. I want to mention three books quickly. So there’s this very, very interesting contribution by Angela Davis, Beth Ricci, and her colleagues, Abolition Feminism Now. I think there’s a very important contribution in this current moment we’re in. And I would recommend reading that in combination with Tommie Shelby’s new book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. I think Tommie is constructing a really important argument in that book, and we’ve got to wrestle with these issues. I also want to shout out Matt Desmond’s new book, Poverty by America, and [it’s] a book about poverty, not the criminal justice system. But I think it’s just so urgent for the moment that we’re in at the moment.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question,what did I mess up, what questions should I have asked you, but did not? Which really means is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven’t talked about?
Bruce Western
We covered so much ground, Josh, I enjoyed talking with you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we covered it all.
Josh Hoe
Great. I love to hear it. Well, it’s always really nice to talk to you. I thank you so much for taking the time, it’s a real pleasure.
Bruce Western
And thanks for your interest in the committee’s report.
Josh Hoe
Absolutely. Thanks again.
And now my take. As I’m recording this, the news has just broken that Brandon Johnson is the new Mayor of Chicago. This happened despite every single press outlet, every pundit, every Democratic strategist, demanding that Lori Lightfoot’s demise as mayor was a result of her support for criminal justice reform. It’s getting sad and absurd. New York is an argument that they make, suggesting that candidates should run away from criminal justice reform. But Lee Zeldin, the candidate who is running on the need for more tough-on-crime solutions lost, and Kathy Hochul won, in all the places where the crime was supposedly the worst. In Pennsylvania, the Democrats swept the table, all the important races, despite the right going all in against all of the candidates because they were soft on crime. And even in my own home state of Michigan, Democrats swept despite the right running soft on crime ads incessantly. Time and time again the electorate has shown they’re more sophisticated than falling for crime bad, punish more. And yet the never-ending drumbeat from the pundits and consultants is that the only way to survive electorally is for candidates to go all in on tough-on-crime. Enough already. Let’s finally stop this madness. It’s time for people to just accept that voters are smarter than the pundits give them credit for and move on. Try to find a new way to solve crime and do things that actually solve crime.
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