As Thomas Sowell describes the changes in his book, The Vision of the Anointed: The old view was to put criminals in prison. The new view, held by, for example, Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark, Supreme Court justice William Brennan, and DC circuit judge David Bazelon, was to avoid sending criminals to prison and instead spend all our resources focusing on the “root causes” of crime. In the august words of Judge Bazelon, “poverty is the root cause of crime.”2
The basic idea that liberal judges and politicians began to push on the country in the 1960s was that society should be nice to criminals so they would repay us with law-abiding behavior. As Attorney General Clark said: “The theory of rehabilitation is based on the belief that healthy, rational people will not injure others, that they will understand that the individual and his society are best served by conduct that does not inflict injury.”3 Of course, if that were true, they wouldn’t have committed crimes in the first place.
Despite being completely insane, the reformers won out. Their policies were put into place and the stage was set to test two fundamentally opposed views of public policy and human nature. As Sowell writes:
All that was needed was empirical evidence.
THE RESULTS: Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder rates suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961. Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen’s chances of becoming a victim of a major violent crime tripled.4
Based on their having no understanding of human nature, the smart set turned American cities into petri dishes for crime and degenerate behavior without punishment. Thousands of Americans died, were raped and disfigured in criminal acts entirely made possible by the Warren court, the ACLU, liberal professors and activists, whose single-minded policy objective was to return criminals to the street.
In response to liberals demanding that we stop sending criminals to prison, normal people asked, “Why would that work?” But they were dismissed as unenlightened. Liberals had built a perfect system that had to be inflexibly imposed on the country. They got angry and sarcastic when anyone pointed out it wasn’t going to work.
Sowell describes a former New York City police commissioner objecting to lenient Supreme Court rulings on criminal law at a 1965 judicial conference. He was “immediately met with ridicule by a law professor who asked, ‘I wonder what rights we’d have left if we always yielded to the police hysteria.’”5
One of the first places to try out these advanced ideas in criminology was New York City, in the person of liberal celebrity, Mayor John Lindsay. Lindsay was the Obama of his day. For simply announcing his 1965 mayoral candidacy, Lindsay made the cover of Look, Newsweek and Life magazines. A New York Times editorial on his candidacy titled “A Man Who Can Be Mayor” hailed Lindsay’s “good judgment,” calling him “youthful, intelligent, energetic, liberal,” “diligent,” “courageous” and “conscientious.”6 When his victory was announced on election night, the Times’s deputy managing editor Abe Rosenthal and metropolitan desk editor Arthur Gelb embraced, cheering “We’ve won!” 7
While it’s difficult to capture the totality of the destruction wrought by Lindsay’s administration, his New York Times obituary is a start: a doubling of the welfare rolls; constant strikes by transit workers, teachers and sanitation workers; skyrocketing crime rates; a tripling of the city’s debt; epic racial conflicts; demoralized police; and nonstop race riots.8 The Times might have added: “He screwed up by taking our advice.”
In a crowded field, Lindsay’s greatest damage to the city was shackling the police. Civilian complaints against the police dropped, but citizens being mugged shot through the roof. Between 1962 and 1967, robberies quintupled. Although it may have seemed as if the crime rate couldn’t climb much higher, robberies doubled again from 1967 to 1972.9 The left’s official position was that crime was inevitable as long as there were inequities and if you really wanted to do something about crime, you’d support the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.
After a while, the police learned to coexist with the new regime, soon discovering that not doing their jobs had its plus side. Life was better, they had fewer headaches and their work was a lot easier. Crime went through the roof, but guess what? There were no civilian complaints! Instead of great year—we solved 129 crimes! it became great year—we had only 12 complaints! The murder rate was higher than Mexico City’s, but the police were heroes because no criminals were complaining about them.
There aren’t a lot of ways the government can make things better, but the sixties and seventies proved that there are a lot of ways government can make things worse. It took decades to roll back the horrors imposed on the country by activist judges, beginning in the sixties. The battle was hindered by Johnson- and Carter-appointed judges honeycombing the judiciary for many decades to come. Some of these lunatics still walk among us today.
Meanwhile, the empirical evidence kept pouring in.
A 1982 Rand study of prison inmates in Michigan, Texas and California, found that each one committed a mean of between 187 and 287 nondrug crimes per year while out on the street.10 A decade later, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that criminals with at least three convictions for a violent felony committed about 160 crimes per year.11 By keeping career criminals in prison, the 1992 ATF study concluded, society would save $323,000 per year in actual monetary costs, not including physical and psychological damage to the victims of crime.
In 1994, the Los Angeles Times conservatively calculated the cost to taxpayers of a single quick gang shoot-out in which no one died, but a twelve-year-old girl was struck and paralyzed. Among the excluded costs were: Legal aid attorneys (the defendants hired private attorneys), jurors’ time away from work, missed work by the injured girl’s family, and the paralyzed girl’s limited employment prospects. The shooting, in broad daylight in front of many witnesses, didn’t require a lot of investigative time or court costs. One shooter pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, saving the costs of a trial, and the other was convicted after a quick five-day trial.
Still, the bare minimum costs came to well over $1 million—$1.7 million in 2010 dollars.12
Putting criminals in prison to prevent more crimes like that is a fantastic bargain for society. But for decades, America suffered under the delusional fantasies of liberal judges, mayors and attorneys general committed to the idea that punishing criminals was outmoded.
In 1970, not a single prison was under a court order. By 1990, more than five hundred municipalities had their prison systems being run by judges.13 As a result, by 1993, the average time served for violent felonies, including murder and rape, was three and a half years.14
In 1994, Princeton professor John Dilulio looked at the consequences of a prison cap put on the Philadelphia prison population by a Carter-appointed judge, Norma Shapiro. In a single eighteen-month period, 9,732 prisoners released pursuant to Judge Shapiro’s order were re-arrested for committing new crimes, including 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.15
It goes without saying that most of the victims were not well-heeled residents of Philadelphia’s Main Line. In the country at large, blacks were becoming the victims of crime more than ever before. In 1992, black youths were nine times more likely to be murdered than white youths. Liberals lied, black kids died.
Despite pious assurances that locking up criminals wouldn’t work, the prison-building boom that started to come online in the 1990s—as well as the gradual replacement of Democrat-appointed judges with Reagan and Bush judges—had an amazing effect on suppressing crime. Maybe by liberals’ definition it didn’t “work” because putting criminals in prison didn’t help them become valued members of society. But it did keep them from killing people.
Much like doctors bleeding their patients, today we look back and say: “There was a time when people believed that?” These were judges, university professors and politicians imposing theories they had dreame
d up at some all-night bull session at Harvard, ignoring policemen screaming at them, “It doesn’t seem like a good idea here on the ground!”
Tut, tut, you must be one of those unsophisticated rubes worried about property values.
Even liberal historian Sean Wilentz has since said that liberal Democrats’ reaction to criticism of their policies was “always to blame the people who were resisting for being narrow-minded or racist, not up to their own enlightened idea of the way Americans ought to be. There was a contempt, there was an elitism.”16
Whenever we pause to think about great Americans, we should also pause to remember there were rotten Americans, too, such as John Lindsay, Justice William Brennan, Ramsey Clark, Norma Shapiro and countless other liberal activists, who, in life, never stopped getting their butts kissed. In death, they deserve to have their graves desecrated.
With a few shining exceptions (Jesse and Al), blacks have long been among the leading proponents of a strong police presence in their neighborhoods. No less an authority than Martin Luther King complained of the absence of police in poor black neighborhoods, saying crime was “the nightmare of the slum family” that had turned the ghettos into criminal “sanctuaries.”17
In 1964, a Harlem riot raged for two days in response to a white police officer’s shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell. And yet, a New York Times poll in the wake of the riot showed Harlem residents ranked crime as a more important issue than police brutality.18
Two years later, in 1966, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins took a confidential survey of Harlem residents’ opinions about police brutality. Fifty-seven percent said there was “none at all” or they were “not sure”; 31 percent said there was “a little” police brutality and only 12 percent said there was “a lot.”19 In 1968, the Harlem branch of the NAACP was calling for mandatory five-year sentences against muggers, ten-year sentences for drug pushers and thirty-year sentences for murderers.
But no one cared what blacks wanted. Liberal zealots were on the march. There were dissenting voices to the left’s celebration of black criminals, but they were dismissed. When blacks rioted in Baltimore following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew invited more than a hundred black leaders to a meeting and gave an eloquent speech about rising black militancy. If more political leaders had had Agnew’s moral authority as a civil rights champion to give a speech like this, the country, especially blacks, could have advanced in that moment by leaps and bounds.
Agnew began by noting that everyone in the room was a leader and contrasted them with “the ready-mix, instantaneous,” “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting” “caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down”20 type of leaders. Those, he noted, had not been invited to the meeting.
Then he said:
It is deplorable and a sign of sickness in our society that the lunatic fringes of the black and white communities speak with wide publicity while we, the moderates, remain continuously mute. I cannot believe that the only alternative to white racism is black racism. Somewhere the objectives of the civil rights movement have been obscured in a surge of emotional oversimplification.…And I say that the road we have trodden is built with the sweat of the Roy Wilkinses and the Whitney Youngs—with the spiritual leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King—and not with violence.
Tell me one constructive achievement that has flowed from the madness of the twin priests of violence, Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. They do not build—they demolish. They are agents of destruction and they will surely destroy us if we do not repudiate them and their philosophies—along with the white racists such as Joseph Carroll and Connie Lynch—the American Nazi Party, the John Birchers, and their fellow travelers.
He reminded them that white people of Maryland had “clearly repudiated racism in the 1966 election” (when he had defeated Democratic segregationist George Mahoney) and said that “the overwhelming majority of Maryland’s Negro citizens—responsible, hardworking, decent people” were “horrified” by the recent events and would be “unjustly victimized by a hardening of attitudes in the responsible, decent white community.” Agnew called on the black leaders “as Americans, to speak out against the violence and hatred of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. Otherwise, he said prophetically, “the heaviest losers will be the Negro citizens of America.”21
Unfortunately, most white politicians reacted like Leonard Bernstein greeting the Black Panthers. They cooed over the violence and arson of black criminals, even justified it as an understandable reaction. What about the majority of blacks who weren’t rioting? Did they feel Martin Luther King’s assassination less poignantly?
As long as they had a free hall pass, black leaders tended to respond by condoning the violence, too. In response to the destructive Baltimore riots, Homer Favor of the Urban Studies Institute at Morgan State University said: “I feel unclean that I didn’t burn down a building.”22 And that’s how we ended up with many happy decades of peace and prosperity in bustling black neighborhoods from Baltimore to Newark, Detroit and Oakland.
Agnew was passé; radical white lawyers like William Kunstler and Clark Kissinger got the fawning press notices. For Kissinger, black criminals were just foot soldiers in his larger war against America, which he described as an “oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves.” (This was later turned into a sermon by Reverend Jeremiah Wright.)
Contrast that with the words of the great African American mathematician and writer Kelly Miller, born in 1863, who astutely observed that the “capitalist has but one dominating motive, the production and sale of goods. The race or color of the producer counts but little.” The capitalist, he continued, “gives to every man the unhindered right to work according to his ability and skill. In this proposition the capitalist and the Negro are as one.” 23
Naturally, Kissinger was a big defender of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, promoting the “call to justice” initiative which proposed a nationwide “Mumia Awareness Week.” He was joined in this effort by Robert Meeropol, another prototypical black man, who is the son of executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.24 Illustrating the importance of Mumia to the black community, he was defended by a star-studded list of other white liberals—Norman Mailer, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, Dean Ornish, Kerry Kennedy Mike Farrell, William Styron, Alec Baldwin, David Byrne, Nadine Strossen, Trudie Styler, Joanne Woodward and Peter Yarrow.
Charles Garry, the lawyer for the Black Panters and Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, was another great example of a white liberal playing with black lives to advance his own self-image as a rebel without regard to the consequences for blacks. His help with the settlement in Guyana ended in a disaster for black people that was just a little more direct than liberals’ standard methods.
Liberals put on shows trying to out bad-ass one another, but twenty years after the Harlem NAACP had been trying to tell us that blacks cared more about crime than understanding the criminal, things had only gotten worse. And black New Yorkers still cared more about crime than understanding the criminal.
After several decades of the media’s nonstop drumbeat about racism everywhere in America (except in the nation’s newsrooms), in December 1984, Bernhard (Bernie) Goetz shot four black men who were trying to mug him on the subway. Terror surged throughout Manhattan’s smart set, but everyone else gave a celebratory whoop.
The youths, Darrell Cabey, nineteen, Troy Canty, nineteen, James Ramseur, eighteen, and Barry Allen, nineteen, told the police they were merely panhandling and had simply asked Goetz for five dollars. “We wasn’t planning on robbing him,” Allen said. “We had no intention of robbing him…He had no reason to be scared.”25 Members of the press, who had apparently hermetically sealed themselves off from any contact with New York City’s streets and subways that decade, believed them.
&n
bsp; Then, about a year later, one of the victims admitted to Jimmy Breslin, one of the columnists who had fallen for it, that, in fact, they “were goin’ to rob him. They thought he looked like easy bait.”26
Journalists might have surmised that had they not been brain-dead liberals. Together, Goetz’s victims already had nineteen arrests and two convictions among them. Canty and Ramseur had served time in Rikers Island jail. Canty had been arrested four times since he was sixteen for criminal possession of stolen property, petty larceny, possession of burglar tools and criminal mischief. Cabey had been arrested for holding up three men with a shotgun, taking their money and jewelry and was charged with robbery, use of a firearm and possession of stolen property.
Allen had been arrested for attempted assault and a couple of larcenies for stealing money from video machines. He was on probation. Less than a year after the Goetz encounter, Allen was arrested for mugging an acquaintance in the elevator of their own apartment building.27
Ramseur had been arrested four times for petty larceny, criminal trespass, fare-beating, smoking marijuana in the subway and possession of marijuana. Five months after encountering Goetz, Ramseur viciously beat, raped, sodomized and robbed a young pregnant woman on the roof of his public-housing complex. He was in prison, serving a twenty-five-year sentence for this by the time of Goetz’s trial.28
They had been carrying screwdrivers the night they mugged Goetz because, as they admitted, they were on their way to steal money from machines at a video arcade.
Within sixteen months of the subway shooting, the only Goetz victim who was not in prison or under court supervision for committing other crimes, was the one who was paralyzed by the shooting, Darrell Cabey. The earlier armed robbery charges against Cabey were dismissed as a result of his condition.29