How much more “reform” can the criminal-justice system take? As Rafael A. Mangual observes, the United States experienced 21,000 murders in 2020, the most in over a quarter century.

And not just any quarter century. The era that began in the 1990s and continued well into the 2010s saw revolutionary improvements in policing. It led to domestic prosperity and tranquility previously unknown in modern times. A snapshot: In New York City, murders plunged from a monstrous 2,245 in 1990 to just 289 in 2018. Mind you, there were about a million and a half more people (about 8.7 million) living in the Big Apple in 2018 than in 1990 — yet murders had diminished to just 3.31 per 100,000 people, the lowest level in a half century.

This trend line is reversing, drastically. There is no mystery about why.

Mangual spells it out nevertheless in his scintillating new book, Criminal (In)Justice. The explanation is the “decarceration” and “depolicing” policy agenda. “Decarceration” refers to the mass release of criminals from custody — both pretrial and post-conviction — as well as the adoption of charging and plea-bargaining practices that prevent criminals from being prosecuted in the first place. “Depolicing” includes strategies to eliminate police departments entirely by defunding them (i.e., zeroing out their budgets) or to transform them into something unrecognizable as law-enforcement agencies (i.e., maintain the shell of a police department but shift big portions of its budget from public safety to other priorities).

This agenda has become dominant in America’s cities, particularly those controlled by the Democratic Party (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and many others), that have elected self-styled progressive prosecutors. The agenda is also a force on Capitol Hill, and not just among Democrats — some libertarian Republicans have been drawn to aspects of the decarceration agenda. So decarceration and depolicing are not exclusively a progressive project, although they ascended steadily for years in the left-leaning academy and popular culture, advanced markedly in the Obama era, and became predominant following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — which, along with other controversial incidents, fueled a narrative of police “hunting down” black men. (As Mangual shows, this narrative is fiction; the number of killings by police is vanishingly small and they are overwhelmingly justified.)

That is probably enough said about politics. Mangual, a lawyer who heads up research in policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, has written a book about policy, not politics. This is not a “conservative” work; it is a well-developed argument in favor of law enforcement. It emphasizes that municipal failures to provide effective policing redound to the detriment of, mainly, African-American and Hispanic communities that — as a matter of their shares of the overall population — are disproportionately harmed by crime. Criminal (In)Justice is fueled by data, not polemic.

That is what makes it so valuable. The central takeaway is the hyper-concentration of crime. We are badgered into thinking about crime as a racial and ethnic phenomenon. Some of this is natural (I learned in 20 years as a prosecutor that there weren’t a lot of guys named “McCarthy” in the Mafia, or named “Mangual” in the Westies — Manhattan’s infamous Irish gang memorialized in the 1990 film State of Grace). But today, we think about crime in these terms because progressive devotees of “disparate impact” theory claim that the disproportionate number of blacks who are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated is explained by systemic racism. Skeptics counter that it is actually explained by cultural factors that promote lawlessness: As a class, African Americans — in particular, young black males — simply offend at significantly higher rates than other groups.

Mangual is more granular and thus more accurate than these competing camps. A solid majority of crime is committed in small slices of urban areas. Yes, these dystopian enclaves are overwhelmingly populated by blacks and other minorities. That, however, does not make them representative of black or minority Americans broadly. Take Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, about a third of whose residents are black. Chicago is notorious for murder — topping New York City, which has three times the population. Per 100,000 people, the overall U.S. murder rate is 5.0, while Chicago’s is a whopping 18.2. But it’s not all of Chicago. Ten identifiable communities, with just 423,000 residents, accounted for over half the murders in 2019 — a “staggering” rate of 61.7 per 100,000. By contrast, 28 Chicago communities saw either one murder or none that year. In a big city, walking a few blocks, or riding the subway less than five minutes, can be like traveling to a different planet, crime-wise.

Criminals are not just stacked in identifiable enclaves. They also have recidivism in common. Lots of it. In 2015 and 2016, for example, 90 percent of homicide arrestees in Chicago had at least one prior arrest, 50 percent at least one prior violent-crime arrest, and 40 percent a prior gun arrest. On average, a murder arrestee had twelve priors, and 20 percent of those arrested for homicide or shooting offenses had more than 20 priors. On top of that, Mangual elaborates, we must bear in mind that most crime goes unreported, and a vast amount of what’s reported goes unsolved, never resulting in arrests or incarceration.

In sum, crime is largely being committed by determined sociopaths, who tend to exacerbate their misanthropy with substance abuse. The challenge is finite (but growing), and with respect to it, we are under-policing and under-incarcerating. Mangual demonstrates that the prisons are not filled with nonviolent drug offenders. They teem with violent criminals who, because of progressive practices, commit many crimes (including while on bail or probation) before they are finally imprisoned. Given the recidivism rates, incarcerating them prevents millions of crimes that would otherwise occur. Yet, because of decarceration, hundreds of thousands of criminals have been released — the latest statistics indicate that the incarcerated population is down about 300,000 from 2020, when it was 2.1 million. Even that amount, as I’ve previously noted in NR (“Fictions of the ‘Carceral State,’” October 4, 2021), reflected an incarceration rate down significantly since 2008.

Mangual dismantles the common “root causes” arguments offered against policing and imprisonment. Poverty, unemployment, and income inequality do not drive crime; their rates actually increased during the generation of proactive policing and plummeting crime that began in the mid-Nineties. Whatever the merits of the War on Drugs as policy, it is not a prime driver of incarceration. Violent crime — murder, rape, robbery, and assault — is responsible for most state-prison sentences (88 percent of prisoners are incarcerated in the state systems). Just 14.1 percent of state prisoners are in custody primarily for narcotics offenses, and the vast majority of these are felony trafficking crimes, not misdemeanor possession. Plus, as Mangual shows, criminals don’t specialize: Today’s drug offender is tomorrow’s burglar, and the next day’s violent assailant.

There are and always will be police abuses. As Mangual acknowledges, we should do what makes sense to improve professionalism. Similarly, we should encourage prison programs that prove empirically that they can depress recidivism. But the fact that these are salutary goals does not mean every idea for achieving them is worthy, and many have the effect of paralyzing the police and releasing unreformed predators. The trenchant lesson of Mangual’s book, one that policy-makers must assimilate if we are to stanch the resurgence of violent crime, is that depolicing and decarceration lead to massively more crime. And the main victims are the minority communities that can least afford the tragic, life-destroying consequences.