On last week’s livestream I assembled a virtual roundtable on incarceration, crime, deterrence, and community. Two texts provided the framework for the discussion. The first is Paul Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman’s Fordham Urban Law Review article, “Don’t Black Lives Matter? Confronting the Problem of Disproportionate Black Victimization.” Robinson and Seaman shift the by-now conventional theoretical and analytic framing of the problem of “black crime” to focus on victims rather than perpetrators. As they see it, concern with racial justice too often focuses on black perpetrators. Measures that attempt to ameliorate what progressive racial justice advocates see as historical disproportions in arrests, sentencing, and incarceration do little or worse for the victims of crime.
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And the vast majority of the victims of black criminals are also black. This, Robinson and Seaman argue, is the true racial injustice. As they put it, “The real systemic racism in America’s criminal justice system is not its treatment of Black offenders but its chronic under-provision of justice system resources to Black victims.” Improving police clearance rates for serious crimes (like robbery and murder), they say, will effectively improve the deterrent value of the criminal justice system, making the commission of crimes riskier and more costly, and leading to less crime, safer neighborhoods, and fewer victims. Not incidentally, it will also make black neighborhoods safer by removing the small minority of violent criminals who victimize the large majority of law-abiding people. In the first hour, I have Jeffrey Seaman on to discuss his and Robinson’s work.
In the second hour, we’re joined by Robert Sampson, author of the new book, Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans. Robert’s book emerges from a massive, three-decade longitudinal study of a thousand subjects spanning multiple age cohorts living on Chicago’s South Side. Robert’s research suggests that communal social bonds provide a better deterrent from crime than policing and other formally punitive methods. The more crime is regarded within the community as truly dishonorable and deviant, the steeper the social costs to violating the law, the less often people will opt to commit crime. Improving the social conditions in which children are reared and develop, Robert says, provides a more effective method of lowering crime than more and harsher policing and sentencing.
I moderate a very civil—but potentially consequential—debate between Jeffrey and Robert, with the impromptu assistance of political scientist Ben Peterson, who recently appeared on the show to discuss his forthcoming book, Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order. Which path offers a better chance for lower crime and improved outcomes: doubling down on policing for serious offenses or investing more in strengthening social bonds? Clearly both are necessary, but even a slight emphasis in one direction or the other could provide dramatically different results, measured in human flourishing or languishing, in happiness or misery, in greater freedom or more fear, pain, and prison.
