Podcast appearances and mentions of James Q Wilson

In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) is joined by Mikey Dickerson to discuss the complex realities behind government software projects. Mikey shares insights from leading the healthcare.gov rescue effort and founding the United States Digital Service, explaining how procurement processes create requirements through committee decision-making without market-based feedback loops. They explore how government systems handle software development differently than industry, with Mikey noting that the issues are less about individual competence and more about systemic incentives that reward risk aversion. The conversation covers the challenges of "modernization" efforts, the loss of organizational management knowledge over decades, and reflection on when and how technologists might effectively contribute to public service. –Full transcript available here: –Sponsor:  MercuryThis episode is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech trusted by 200K+ companies — from first milestones to running complex systems. Mercury offers banking that truly understands startups and scales with them. Start today at Mercury.com Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.–Recommended in this episode: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/fixing-government-technology-with-mikey-dickerson/Bureaucracy by James Q. Wilson: https://www.amazon.com/Bureaucracy-Government-Agencies-Basic-Classics/dp/0465007856 Movie: The Pentagon Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars Mikey Dickerson's company Layer Aleph: https://layeraleph.com/ Marina Nitze's article, I tried to fix government tech for years: https://reason.com/2025/02/13/i-tried-to-fix-government-tech-for-years-im-fed-up/Complex Systems with Dan Davies https://open.spotify.com/episode/5QKxzgumJXSQuaWCmYAoM9?si=uQWgAx1iSzGm5iCUBWei8A Complex Systems with Dave Guarino https://open.spotify.com/episode/0UlTIRosmjtvpcdHQ7t2tK?si=MlUqO3uWRie1E_GRQ5D7jg –Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(00:24) Government software procurement(06:02) Fighter planes and requirements(08:37) Software development cycles(11:37) Deadline challenges(12:18) California vaccine scheduling(16:15) Pandemic priorities(17:27) Sponsor: Mercury(18:40) Government employee competence(22:30) Government pay scales(25:56) IRS modernization reports(27:48) System modernization plans(34:33) Healthcare.gov lessons(40:29) Feedback loops in civil service(44:09) Legislative expertise(46:49) Applied mathematics(47:57) Loss of knowledge(49:28) Tour of duty recommendation(53:06) Wrap

Today's guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein's show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city's leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I've included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I've somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It's caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they're called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don't like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City's first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins's approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an arrest, process at the local precinct, search him in front of a desk officer, print him, and then they would have to get a radio car off patrol to drive you down to central booking at 100 Centre Street [New York City Criminal Court]. Then they would fingerprint him. They didn't have the live scan fingerprints machine, it was all ink. It had to be faxed up to Albany and the FBI to see if it hit on any warrant federally and for positive identification of the person. Sometimes it took 12 hours to have the prints come back and the perp would be remanded until that time. Then you'd have to wait for the prosecutor to get their act together and to review all the paperwork. You couldn't consider bail unless the prints came back either positive or negative and then you would have that initial arraignment and the cop could then go home. There are a lot of moving parts, and they moved at a glacial pace.The system often doesn't work 24/7. A lot of this has changed, but some of it was having to wait until 9 am for people to show up to go to work, because it's not a single system. The courts, the jails, and policing all march to their own drummer, and that created a level of inefficiency.So much of the nitty-gritty of what cops actually do is boring, behind-the-scenes stuff: How do we speed up the paperwork? Can we group prisoners together? Can we do some of this at the police station instead of taking it downtown? Is all of this necessary? Can we cooperate with the various prosecutors? There are five different prosecutors in New York City, one for each borough.There's not a great incentive to streamline this. Cops enjoyed the overtime. That's one of the reasons they would make arrests. So during this time, if a cop makes an arrest for drug dealing, that cop is gone and no cop was there to replace him. If it's a minor arrest, there's a good chance in the long run charges will be dropped anyway. And you're taking cops off the street. In that sense, it's lose-lose. But, you have to think, “What's the alternative?”Bob Davin is a fascinating guy. There's a famous picture from 1981 by Martha Cooper of two cops on a subway train. It's graffitied up and they're in their leather jackets and look like cops from the ‘70s. Martha Cooper graciously gave me permission to use the picture, but she said, "You have to indemnify me because I don't have a release form. I don't know who the cops are." I said, "Martha, I do know who the cop is, because he's in my book and he loves the picture.” Bob Davin is the cop on the right.Davin says that things started to get more efficient. They had hub sites in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, so precincts in the north of Manhattan could bring their prisoners there, and you wouldn't have to take a car out of service to go back to Central Booking and deal with traffic. They started collecting prisoners and bringing them en masse on a small school bus, and that would cut into overtime. Then moving to electronic scan fingerprints drastically saves time waiting for those to come back.These improvements were made, but some of them involve collective bargaining with unions, to limit overtime and arrests that are made for the pure purpose of overtime. You want cops making arrests for the right reason and not simply to make money. But boy, there was a lot of money made in arrests.In 1991, you have the infamous Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. Racial tensions kick off. It's a nightmare for the mayor, there's this sense that he has lost control. The following year, you have this infamous police protest at City Hall where it becomes clear the relationship between the cops and the mayor has totally evaporated. How does all that play into the mayoral race between Dinkins and Giuliani?It was unintentional, but a lot of the blame for Crown Heights falls on the police department. The part of the story that is better known is that there was a procession for a Hasidic rabbi that was led by a police car. He would go to his wife's grave, and he got a little three-car motorcade. At some point, the police look at this and go "Why are we doing this? We're going to change it." The man who made the deal said ‘I"m retiring in a couple weeks, can we just leave it till then? Because I gave him my word." They're like, "Alright, whatever."This motor car procession is then involved in a car crash, and a young child named Gavin Cato is killed, and another girl is severely injured. The volunteer, Jewish-run ambulance shows up and decides they don't have the equipment: they call for a professional city ambulance. Once that ambulance is on the way, they take the mildly-injured Jewish people to the hospital. The rumor starts that the Jewish ambulance abandoned the black children to die.This isn't the first incident. There's long been strife over property and who the landlord is. But this was the spark that set off riots. A young Jewish man was randomly attacked on the street and was killed.As an aside, he also shouldn't have died, but at the hospital they missed internal bleeding.Meanwhile, the police department has no real leadership at the time. One chief is going to retire, another is on vacation, a third doesn't know what he's doing, and basically everyone is afraid to do anything. So police do nothing. They pull back, and you have three days of very anti-Semitic riots. Crowds chanting "Kill the Jews" and marching on the Lubavitch Hasidic Headquarters. Al Sharpton shows up. The riots are blamed on Dinkins, which is partly fair, but a lot of that's on the NYPD. Finally, the mayor and the police commissioner go to see what's going on and they get attacked. It's the only time in New York City history that there's ever been an emergency call from the police commissioner's car. People are throwing rocks at it.It took three days to realise this, but that's when they say “We have to do something here,” and they gather a group of officers who later become many of Bratton's main chiefs at the time [Bill Bratton was Commissioner of the NYPD from 1994-1996, under Giuliani]: Mike Julian, Louis Anemone, Ray Kelly, and [John] Timoney. They end the unrest in a day. They allow people to march, they get the police department to set rules. It still goes on for a bit, but no one gets hurt after that, and that's it.It was a huge, national story at the time, but a lot of the details were not covered. Reporters were taken from their car and beaten and stripped. The significance was downplayed at the time, especially by the New York Times, I would say.That's followed by the Washington Heights riots, which is a different story. A drug dealer was shot and killed by cops. There were rumors, which were proven to be false, that he was executed and unarmed. Then there were three days of rioting there. It wasn't quite as severe, but 53 cops were hurt, 120 stores were set on fire, and Mayor Dinkins paid for the victim's family to go to the Dominican Republic for the funeral. The police perspective again was, “You're picking the wrong side here.”Then there's the so-called Police Riot at City Hall. Nominally, it was about the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and setting up an accountability mechanism to control cops. But really it was just an anti-Dinkins protest. It was drunken and unruly. The cops stormed the steps of City Hall. I have the account of one of the cops who was on the top of those steps looking at this mob of cops storming to him, and he's getting worried he's going to be killed in a crush. There were racist chants from off-duty cops in the crowd. It did not reflect well on police officers. But it showed this hatred of David Dinkins, who was seen as siding with criminals and being anti-police. The irony is that Dinkins is the one who ends up hiring all the cops that Giuliani gets credit for.In the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program?Yes. That was because a white tourist, Brian Watkins, was killed in a subway station protecting his parents who were getting robbed. That led to the famous headline [in the New York Post] of “Dave, do something! Crime-ravaged city cries out for help.” He, with City Council President Peter Vallone, Sr., drafted and pushed through this massive hiring of police officers, “Safe Streets, Safe City.”The hiring wasn't fast-tracked. It might be because Dinkins's people didn't really want more cops. But it was a Dinkins push that got a massive hiring of cops. When the first huge class of police officers graduated, Bill Bratton was there and not David Dinkins.Some interviewees in your book talk about how there's physically not enough room in the police academies at this time, so they have to run classes 24/7. You cycle cohorts in and out of the same classroom, because there are too many new cops for the facilities.You have thousands of cops going through it at once. Everyone describes it as quite a chaotic scene. But it would have been hard to do what the NYPD did without those cops. Ray Kelly, who was police commissioner under Dinkins at the end [from 1992 to 1994] before he became police commissioner for 12 years under Bloomberg [from 2002 to 2013] probably could have done something with those cops too, but he never had the chance, because the mayoral leadership at the time was much more limiting in what they wanted cops to do.Crime starts declining slowly in the first few years of the ‘90s under Dinkins, and then in ‘93 Giuliani wins a squeaker of a mayoral election against Dinkins.One of the major issues was the then-notorious “squeegee men” of New York City. These were guys who would go to cars stopped at bridges and tunnel entrances and would rub a squeegee over the windshield asking for money. It was unpleasant, intimidating, and unwanted, and it was seen as one of those things that were just inevitable. Like graffiti on the subway in the ‘80s. Nothing we can do about it because these poor people don't have jobs or housing or whatever.The irony is that Bratton and Giuliani were happy to take credit for that, and it was an issue in the mayoral campaign, but it was solved under David Dinkins and Ray Kelly and Mike Julian with the help of George Kelling [who, with James Wilson, came up with broken windows theory]. But they never got credit for it. One wonders if, had they done that just a few months earlier, it would have shifted the entire campaign and we'd have a different course of history in New York City.It's a great example of a couple of things that several people in your book talk about. One is that disorder is often caused by a very small set of individuals. There's only like 70 squeegee men, yet everybody sees them, because they're posted up at the main tunnel and bridge entrances to Manhattan. And getting them off the streets solves the problem entirely.Another emphasis in the book is how perceptions of crime are central. You quote Jack Maple, the father of Compstat, as saying, “A murder on the subway counts as a multiple murder up on the street, because everybody feels like that's their subway.” The particular locations of crimes really affect public perception.Absolutely. Perception is reality for a lot of these things, because most people aren't victimized by crime. But when people perceive that no one is in control they feel less safe. It's not that this perception is false, it just might not be directly related to an actual criminal act.The other thing I try to show is that it's not just saying, “We've got to get rid of squeegee men. How do you do it?” They had tried before, but this is why you need smart cops and good leadership, because it's a problem-solving technique, and the way to get rid of graffiti is different to the way you get rid of squeegee men.This book is in opposition to those who just say, “We can't police our way out of this problem.” No, we can. We can't police our way out of every problem. But if you define the problem as, we don't want people at intersections with squeegees, of course we can police our way out of the problem, using legal constitutional tools. You need the political will. And then the hard work starts, because you have to figure out how to actually do it.Will you describe how they tackle the squeegee men problem?Mike Julian was behind it. They hired George Kelling, who's known for broken windows. They said, “These people are here to make money. So to just go there and make a few arrests isn't going to solve the problem.” First of all, he had to figure out what legal authority [to use], and he used Traffic Reg 44 [which prohibits pedestrians from soliciting vehicle occupants]. He talked to Norm Siegel of the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] about this, who did not want this crackdown to happen. But Norman said, “Okay, this is the law, I can't fight that one. You're doing it legally. It's all in the books.” And So that took away that opposition.But the relentless part of it is key. First they filmed people. Then, when it came to enforcement, they warned people. Then they cited people, and anybody that was left they arrested. They did not have to arrest many people, because the key is they did this every four hours. It was that that changed behavior, because even a simple arrest isn't going to necessarily deter someone if it's a productive way to make money. But being out there every four hours for a couple of weeks or months was enough to get people to do something else. What that something else is, we still don't know, but we solved the squeegee problem.So in 93, Giuliani is elected by something like 50,000 votes overall. Just as an aside, in Prince of the City, Fred Siegel describes something I had no idea about. There's a Puerto Rican Democratic Councilman who flips and supports Giuliani. Mayor Eric Adams, who at the time was the head of a nonprofit for black men in law enforcement, calls him a race traitor for doing that and for being married to a white woman. There was a remarkable level of racial vitriol in that race that I totally missed.10 years ago when I started this, I asked if I could interview then-Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, and he said yes, and the interview kept getting rescheduled, and I said, “Eh, I don't need him.” It's a regret of mine. I should have pursued that, but coulda, woulda, shoulda.Giuliani is elected, and he campaigns very explicitly on a reducing crime and disorder platform. And he hires Bill Bratton. Tell me about Bratton coming on board as NYPD commissioner.Bratton grew up in Boston, was a police officer there, became head of the New York City Transit Police when that was a separate police department. Right before he becomes NYPD Commissioner, he's back in Boston, as the Chief of Police there, and there is a movement among certain people to get Bratton the NYC job. They succeed in that, and Bratton is a very confident man. He very much took a broken windows approach and said, “We are going to focus on crime.” He has a right-hand man by the name of Jack Maple who he knows from the Transit Police. Maple is just a lieutenant in transit, and Bratton makes him the de facto number two man in the police department.Jack Maple passed away in 2001 and I didn't know what I was going to do, because it's hard to interview a man who's no longer alive. Chris Mitchell co-wrote Jack Maple's autobiography called Crime Fighter and he graciously gave me all the micro-cassettes of the original interviews he conducted with Maple around 1998. Everyone has a Jack Maple story. He's probably the most important character in Back from the Brink.Jack Maple comes in, no one really knows who he is, no one respects him because he was just a lieutenant in Transit. He goes around and asks a basic question — this is 1994 — he says, “How many people were shot in New York City in 1993?” And nobody knows. That is the state of crime-fighting in New York City before this era. There might have been 7,000 people shot in New York City in 1990 and we just don't know, even to this day.One citation from your book: in 1993, an average of 16 people were shot every day. Which is just remarkable.And remember, shootings have been declining for two or three years before that! But nobody knew, because they weren't keeping track of shootings, because it's not one of the FBI Uniform Crime Report [which tracks crime data nationally] index crimes. But wouldn't you be curious? It took Jack Maple to be curious, so he made people count, and it was findable, but you had to go through every aggravated assault and see if a gun was involved. You had to go through every murder from the previous year and see if it was a shooting. He did this. So we only have shooting data in New York City going back to 1993. It's just a simple process of caring.The super-short version of Back from the Brink is it was a change in mission statement: “We're going to care about crime.” Because they hadn't before. They cared about corruption, racial unrest, brutality, and scandal. They cared about the clearance rate for robbery a bit. You were supposed to make three arrests for every ten robberies. It didn't matter so much that you were stopping a pattern or arresting the right person, as long as you had three arrests for every ten reported crimes, that was fine.This is a story about people who cared. They're from this city — Bratton wasn't, but most of the rest are. They understood the trauma of violence and the fact that people with families were afraid to go outside, and nobody in the power structure seemed to care. So they made the NYPD care about this. Suddenly, the mid-level police executives, the precinct commanders, had to care. and the meetings weren't about keeping overtime down, instead they were about ”What are you doing to stop this shooting?”Tell listeners a little bit more about Jack Maple, because he's a remarkable character, and folks may not know what a kook he was.I think he was a little less kooky than he liked to present. His public persona was wearing a snazzy cat and spats and dressing like a fictional cartoon detective from his own mind, but he's a working-class guy from Queens who becomes a transit cop.When Bratton takes over, he writes a letter up the chain of command saying this is what we should do. Bratton read it and said, “This guy is smart.” Listening to 80 hours of Jack Maple, everyone correctly says he was a smart guy, but he had a very working-class demeanor and took to the elite lifestyle. He loved hanging out and getting fancy drinks at the Plaza Hotel. He was the idea man of the NYPD. Everyone has a Jack Maple imitation. “You're talking to the Jackster,” he'd say. He had smart people working under him who were supportive of this. But it was very much trying to figure out as they went along, because the city doesn't stop nor does it sleep.He was a bulls***er, but he's the one who came up with the basic outline of the strategy of crime reduction in New York City. He famously wrote it on a napkin at Elaine's, and it said, “First, we need to gather accurate and timely intelligence.” And that was, in essence, CompStat. “Then, we need to deploy our cops to where they need to be.” That was a big thing. He found out that cops weren't working: specialized units weren't working weekends and nights when the actual crime was happening. They had their excuses, but basically they wanted a cushy schedule. He changed that. Then, of course, you have to figure out what you're doing, what the effective tactics are. Then, constant follow up and assessment.You can't give up. You can't say “Problem solved.” A lot of people say it wasn't so much if your plan didn't work, you just needed a Plan B. It was the idea that throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What are you going to do?” that became notoriously unacceptable under Chief Anemone's stern demeanor at CompStat. These were not pleasant meetings. Those are the meetings that both propagated policies that work and held officers accountable. There was some humiliation going on, so CompStat was feared.Lots of folks hear CompStat and think about better tracking of crime locations and incidents. But as you flesh out, the meat on the bones of CompStat was this relentless follow-up. You'd have these weekly meetings early in the morning with all the precinct heads. There were relentless asks from the bosses, “What's going on in your district or in your precinct? Can you explain why this is happening? What are you doing to get these numbers down?” And follow-ups the following week or month. It was constant.CompStat is often thought of as high-tech computer stuff. It wasn't. There was nothing that couldn't have been done with old overhead projectors. It's just that no one had done it before. Billy Gorta says it's a glorified accountability system at a time when nobody knew anything about computers. Everyone now has access to crime maps on a computer. It was about actually gathering accurate, timely data.Bratton was very concerned that these numbers had to be right. It was getting everyone in the same room and saying, “This is what our focus is going to be now.” And getting people to care about crime victims, especially when those crime victims might be unsympathetic because of their demeanor, criminal activity, or a long arrest record. “We're going to care about every shooting, we're going to care about every murder.”Part of it was cracking down on illegal guns. There were hundreds of tactics. The federal prosecutors also played a key role. It was getting this cooperation. Once it started working and Giuliani made it a major part of claiming success as mayor, suddenly everyone wanted to be part of this, and you had other city agencies trying to figure it out. So it was a very positive feedback loop, once it was seen as a success.When Bratton came on the job, he said, “I'm going to bring down crime 15%.” No police commissioner had ever said that before. In the history of policing before 1994, no police commissioner ever promised a double-digit reduction in crime or even talked about it. People said “That's crazy.” It was done, and then year after year. That's the type of confidence that they had. They were surprised it worked as well as it did, but they all had the sense that there's a new captain on this ship, and we're trying new things. It was an age of ideas and experiment.And it was a very short time.That's the other thing that surprised me. Giuliani fired Bratton in the middle of ‘96.It's remarkable. Bratton comes in ‘94, and August 1994 is where you see crime drop off a cliff. You have this massive beginning of the reduction that continues.That inflection point is important for historical knowledge. I don't address alternatives that other people have proposed [to explain the fall in crime] — For example, the reduction in lead [in gasoline, paint, and water pipes] or legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade [proposed by Stephen Dubner].Reasonable people can differ. Back from the Brink focuses on the police part of the equation. Today, almost nobody, except for a few academics, says that police had nothing to do with the crime drop. That August inflection is key, because there is nothing in a lagged time analysis going back 20 years that is going to say that is the magic month where things happened. Yet if you look at what happened in CompStat, that's the month they started getting individual officer data, and noticing that most cops made zero arrests, and said, “Let's get them in the game as well.” And that seemed to be the key; that's when crime fell off the table. The meetings started in April, I believe, but August is really when the massive crime drop began.To your point about the confidence that crime could be driven down double digits year over year, there's a great quote you have from Jack Maple, where he says to a fellow cop, “This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as we have absolute control, we can absolutely drive this number into the floor.”One detail I enjoyed was that Jack Maple, when he was a transit cop, would camp out under a big refrigerator box with little holes cut out for eyes and sit on the subway platform waiting for crooks.For people who are interested in Jack Maple, it is worth reading his autobiography, Crime Fighter. Mike Daly wrote New York's Finest, which uses the same tapes that I had access to, and he is much more focused on that. He's actually the godfather of Jack Maple's son, who is currently a New York City police officer. But Maple and co were confident, and it turned out they were right.As well as having changes in tactics and approach and accountability across the NYPD, you also have a series of specific location cleanups. You have a specific initiative focused on the Port Authority, which is a cesspool at the time, an initiative in Times Square, the Bryant Park cleanup, and then Giuliani also focuses on organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market, and this open-air market in Harlem.I was struck that there was both this general accountability push in the NYPD through CompStat, and a relentless focus on cleaning up individual places that were hubs of disorder.I'm not certain the crime drop would have happened without reclamation of public spaces and business improvement districts. Bryant Park's a fascinating story because Dan Biederman, who heads the Corporation, said, “People just thought it was like a lost cause, this park can't be saved. The city is in a spiral of decline.” He uses Jane Jacobs' “eyes on the street” theory and then George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's broken windows theory. The park has money — not city money, but from local property owners — and it reopens in 1991 to great acclaim and is still a fabulous place to be. It showed for the first time that public space was worth saving and could be saved. New York City at the time needed that lesson. It's interesting that today, Bryant Park has no permanent police presence and less crime. Back in the ‘80s, Bryant Park had an active police presence and a lot more crime.The first class I ever taught when I started at John Jay College in 2004, I was talking about broken windows. A student in the class named Jeff Marshall, who is in my book, told me about Operation Alternatives at the Port Authority. He had been a Port Authority police officer at the time, and I had not heard of this. People are just unaware of this part of history. It very much has lessons for today, because in policing often there's nothing new under the sun. It's just repackaged, dusted off, and done again. The issue was, how do we make the Port Authority safe for passengers? How do we both help and get rid of people living in the bus terminal? It's a semi-public space, so it makes it difficult. There was a social services element about it, that was Operational Alternatives. A lot of people took advantage of that and got help. But the flip side was, you don't have to take services, but you can't stay here.I interviewed the manager of the bus terminal. He was so proud of what he did. He's a bureaucrat, a high-ranking one, but a port authority manager. He came from the George Washington Bridge, which he loved. And he wonders, what the hell am I going to do with this bus terminal? But the Port Authority cared, because they're a huge organization and that's the only thing with their name on it — They also control JFK Airport and bridges and tunnels and all the airports, but people call the bus terminal Port Authority.They gave him almost unlimited money and power and said, “Fix it please, do what you've got to do,” and he did. It was environmental design, giving police overtime so they'd be part of this, a big part of it was having a social service element so it wasn't just kicking people out with nowhere to go.Some of it was also setting up rules. This also helped Bratton in the subway, because this happened at the same time. The court ruled that you can enforce certain rules in the semi-public spaces. It was not clear until this moment whether it was constitutional or not. To be specific, you have a constitutional right to beg on the street, but you do not have a constitutional right to beg on the subway. That came down to a court decision. Had that not happened, I don't know if in the long run the crime drop would have happened.That court decision comes down to the specific point that it's not a free-speech right on the subway to panhandle, because people can't leave, because you've got them trapped in that space.You can't cross the street to get away from it. But it also recognized that it wasn't pure begging, that there was a gray area between aggressive begging and extortion and robbery.You note that in the early 1990s, one-third of subway commuters said they consciously avoided certain stations because of safety, and two thirds felt coerced to give money by aggressive panhandling.The folks in your book talk a lot about the 80/20 rule applying all over the place. That something like 20% of the people you catch are committing 80% of the crimes.There's a similar dynamic that you talk about on the subways, both in the book and in your commentary over the past couple years about disorder in New York. You say approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness are at risk for street homelessness, and these people cycle through the cities, streets, subways, jails, and hospitals.What lessons from the ‘90s can be applied today for both helping those people and stopping them being a threat to others?Before the ‘80s and Reagan budget cuts there had been a psychiatric system that could help people. That largely got defunded. [Deinstitutionalization began in New York State earlier, in the 1960s.] We did not solve the problem of mental health or homelessness in the ‘90s, but we solved the problem of behavior. George Kelling [of broken windows theory] emphasized this repeatedly, and people would ignore it. We are not criminalizing homelessness or poverty. We're focusing on behavior that we are trying to change. People who willfully ignore that distinction almost assume that poor people are naturally disorderly or criminal, or that all homeless people are twitching and threatening other people. Even people with mental illness can behave in a public space.Times have changed a bit. I think there are different drugs now that make things arguably a bit worse. I am not a mental health expert, but we do need more involuntary commitment, not just for our sake, but for theirs, people who need help. I pass people daily, often the same person, basically decomposing on a subway stop in the cold. They are offered help by social services, and they say no. They should not be allowed to make that choice because they're literally dying on the street in front of us. Basic humanity demands that we be a little more aggressive in forcing people who are not making rational decisions, because now you have to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. That standard does need to change. But there also need to be mental health beds available for people in this condition.I don't know what the solution is to homelessness or mental health. But I do know the solution to public disorder on the subway and that's, regardless of your mental state or housing status, enforcing legal, constitutional rules, policing behavior. It does not involve locking everybody up. It involves drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It's amazing how much people will comply with those rules.That presents the idea that someone's in charge, it's not a free-for-all. You get that virtuous loop, which New York had achieved in 2014–2016, when crime was at an all-time low in the city. Then the politicians decided public order wasn't worth preserving anymore. These are political choices.I had a similar version of this conversation with a friend who was shocked that there were zero murders on the subway in 2017 and that that number was stable: you had one or two a year for several years in the mid-2010s.It was five or fewer a year from 1997 to 2019, and often one or two. Then you have zero in 2017. There were [ten in 2022]. It coincides perfectly with an order from [Mayor] de Blasio's office and the homeless czar [Director of Homeless Services Steven] Banks [which] told police to stop enforcing subway rules against loitering. The subways became — once again — a de facto homeless shelter. Getting rule-violating homeless people out of the subway in the late ‘80s was such a difficult and major accomplishment at the time, and to be fair it's not as bad as it was.The alternative was that homeless outreach was supposed to offer people services. When they decline, which 95% of people do, you're to leave them be. I would argue again, I don't think that's a more humane stance to take. But it's not just about them, it's about subway riders.There's one story that I think was relevant for you to tell. You were attacked this fall on a subway platform by a guy threatening to kill you. It turns out he's had a number of run-ins with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us where that guy is now?I believe he's in prison now. The only reason I know who it is is because I said, one day I'm going to see his picture in the New York Post because he's going to hurt somebody. Am I 100 percent certain it's Michael Blount who attacked me? No, but I'm willing to call him out by name because I believe it is. He was out of prison for raping a child, and he slashed his ex-girlfriend and pushed her on the subway tracks. And then was on the lam for a while. I look at him and the shape of his face, his height, age, build, complexion, and I go, that's got to be him.I wasn't hurt, but he gave me a sucker punch trying to knock me out and then chased me a bit threatening to kill me, and I believe he wanted to. It's the only time I ever was confronted by a person who I really believe wanted to kill me, and this includes policing in the Eastern District in Baltimore. It was an attempted misdemeanor assault in the long run. But I knew it wasn't about me. It was him. I assume he's going to stay in prison longer for what he did to his ex-girlfriend. But I never thought it would happen to me. I was lucky the punch didn't connect.Peter Moskos's new book is Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.My reading listEssays:Johnny Hirschauer's reporting, including “A Failed 'Solution' to 'America's Mental Health Crisis',“ “Return to the Roots,” and “The Last Institutions.” “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. ​“It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem,” Charles Lehman.Books:Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy.​Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Fred Siegel.​ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos.​Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones.​Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

The American Soul Podcast tackles the profound connection between marriage, family stability, and national strength in this thought-provoking episode. Marriage isn't just a personal arrangement – it's the bedrock upon which our entire society stands. When marriages falter, everything built upon them weakens: families, communities, and ultimately our nation.Consider how we protect financial investments that grow over time – the savings account we've nurtured for decades becomes increasingly precious. Yet marriages, which should become more treasured with passing years, are often taken for granted. This parallels how Americans have come to treat religious freedom – as something expected rather than a privilege that countless people throughout history died to secure.Scripture provides clear guidance in 1 Timothy 3 about the qualifications for church leaders, emphasizing they must manage their households well. "If a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?" This principle extends beyond church leadership – strong households create strong communities.Troubling statistics reveal the consequences of our cultural shift away from marriage: marrieds couples comprised 71% of households in 1970 but just 47% by 2022. Meanwhile, deaths are projected to exceed births in America by 2033. The contemporary mantra "my body, my choice" epitomizes our culture's radical individualism, conditioning women to prioritize self above family and God.Justice Joseph Story's writings remind us that America's founders never intended to separate God from public life. The First Amendment wasn't designed to create "indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity." Rather, the founding generation believed Christianity should "receive encouragement from the state" as compatible with religious freedom.Strong marriages aren't just about personal fulfillment – they're about national survival. If we hope to preserve liberty for future generations, we must reclaim the foundational truths that established America's unique experiment in freedom. Join us in exploring how spiritual revival, one marriage and family at a time, might be our only path forward.Support the showThe American Soul Podcasthttps://www.buzzsprout.com/1791934/subscribe

TESTO DELL'ARTICOLO ➜ https://www.bastabugie.it/8091UOMINI, FATE L'AFFARE DELLA VOSTRA VITA: SPOSATEVI! di Brad Wilcox Dunque, è così? Il matrimonio avrebbe «zero vantaggi statistici» per gli uomini di oggi? Il matrimonio sarebbe solo un trofeo in più per gli uomini che ce l'hanno già fatta, di poca importanza intrinseca al di là di un simbolo di successo?Seguiamo il consiglio dei critici usando la testa invece del cuore per esaminare cosa dicono le scienze sociali a proposito del matrimonio e di tre aspetti importanti per la vita degli uomini: denaro, felicità e aspettativa di vita.GLI UOMINI SPOSATI SONO PIÙ RICCHIDal punto di vista economico i dati sono solidi e chiari: gli uomini in un matrimonio stabile (che si sono sposati e sono rimasti sposati) che si avviano alla pensione hanno un patrimonio familiare dieci volte più elevato rispetto ai coetanei divorziati o che non si sono mai sposati. Tenendo conto delle differenze di istruzione, razza e occupazione, il premio medio del matrimonio in termini di patrimonio familiare per gli uomini stabilmente sposati è di 290.000 dollari più elevato rispetto ai coetanei non sposati. Insomma, esattamente il contrario di «zero vantaggi statistici».Una situazione analoga si verifica con il reddito. Anche dopo aver controllato età, razza, etnia, istruzione e dimensioni del nucleo familiare, gli uomini sposati hanno un reddito familiare del 40% più elevato rispetto ai coetanei non sposati. Similmente, gli uomini sposati nel fiore degli anni hanno una probabilità del 55% più bassa di vivere in povertà.Per confutare la tesi secondo la quale il matrimonio non avrebbe economicamente benefici intrinseci, ma attirerebbe solo persone già agiate in partenza, si possono esaminare gli studi condotti su gemelli. Uno studio del 2004 condotto su gemelli monozigoti ha scoperto che il matrimonio fa aumentare il salario degli uomini: i gemelli sposati guadagnano circa il 26% in più dei gemelli non sposati. Questo succede perché, come sostengo nel mio libro Get Married: Why americans must defy the élites, forge strong families, and save civilization, le responsabilità associate al matrimonio fanno sì che gli uomini lavorino di più, in modo più intelligente e più responsabile. Sappiamo, per esempio, che gli uomini sposati lavorano per più ore e hanno meno probabilità di essere licenziati rispetto ai coetanei non sposati.GLI UOMINI SPOSATI SONO PIÙ FELICIIl denaro conta, ma vi sono cose più importanti come la felicità. In che modo per gli uomini il matrimonio è collegato alla felicità? Anche in questo caso le evidenze sono chiare: i dati mostrano che gli uomini sposati hanno circa il doppio della probabilità di essere "molto contenti" della propria vita rispetto agli uomini non sposati, e questo vale soprattutto per gli uomini sposati che sono anche padri. Secondo l'Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institute Family Survey, condotto nel 2021 da YouGov, quasi il 60% dei padri sposati sostiene che la propria vita è significativa "per la maggior parte del tempo" rispetto al 38% dei coetanei single senza figli.Per quanto riguarda in particolare la felicità, nel 2002 lo scienziato sociale James Q. Wilson ha scritto: «A parità di età le persone sposate sono più felici di quelle non sposate, non solo negli Stati Uniti, ma in almeno altri 17 Paesi in cui sono state fatte indagini simili». Wilson osserva che «sembra che vi siano buone ragioni per questa felicità», dati i notevoli benefici in termini di salute e benessere «associati al matrimonio».I critici potrebbero eccepire che ciò avviene non per merito del matrimonio, ma solo perché le persone più felici in partenza sono anche più propense a sposarsi e a rimanere sposate. Tuttavia, ancora una volta, ciò che emerge è l'influenza positiva intrinseca del matrimonio, come ha rilevato per esempio Tyler Vander Weele - professore di biostatistica alla School of Public Health di Harvard - che ha studiato a fondo la questione. Egli scrive che «gli studi longitudinali esistenti, così come gli studi trasversali, indicano che il matrimonio è associato a una maggiore soddisfazione nella vita e a una maggiore felicità dal punto di vista affettivo». VanderWeele sostiene che «matrimonio e famiglia risultano essere una porta d'accesso alla prosperità».GLI UOMINI SPOSATI HANNO UNA SALUTE MIGLIOREGli uomini single hanno molte più probabilità di ammalarsi e di morire. Il lavoro di Anne ase e Angus Deaton, economisti di Princeton, rivela che centinaia di migliaia di uomini hanno perso la vita a causa delle cosiddette "morti per disperazione": overdose, patologie correlate all'abuso di alcol, suicidio. In particolare sono gli uomini non sposati e non laureati che hanno una maggiore probabilità di morire per questi motivi.Il sociologo Philip N. Cohen, dell'Università del Maryland, che ha studiato il legame tra matrimonio e morte per disperazione, afferma che «la presenza di rischi di mortalità inferiori delle persone sposate rispetto ai single è una componente costante nella struttura gerarchica delle famiglie statunitensi». Jonathan Rothwell, principale economista della Gallup, giunge nella sua ricerca a conclusioni simili, rilevando che i modelli regionali di questi decessi sono fortemente associati alla percentuale di adulti sposati. Egli osserva che «in effetti, nella previsione delle morti per disperazione, le misurazioni relative al tasso di matrimonio sono più rilevanti dei tassi di istruzione universitaria e della componente riguardante l'età e la razza».Il matrimonio riduce il rischio di morte per suicidio sia per gli uomini che per le donne, un dato importante visto l'aumento nell'ultimo decennio dei tassi di suicidio tra gli uomini, soprattutto giovani [dal 2010 il tasso di suicidio tra gli uomini statunitensi di 25-34 anni è aumentato del 34%, ndR]. Charles Fain Lehman, dell'Institute for Family Studies, riferisce che «il tasso di suicidio tra gli adulti divorziati è più del triplo di quello degli adulti sposati, mentre il tasso di suicidio tra i single è da 1,5 a 2 volte più elevato di quello dei coniugati».Altre ricerche suggeriscono che il potere protettivo del matrimonio nei confronti del suicidio è particolarmente marcato per gli uomini. Come osservo in Get Married: «La verità è che le donne e soprattutto gli uomini che volano in solitaria hanno oggi in America molte più probabilità dei loro coetanei sposati di andare in pezzi, fino a finire prematuramente in una tomba».C'È BISOGNO DI PIÙ UOMINI SPOSATIGli uomini sposati hanno una sicurezza economica maggiore, sono più felici e meno inclini a soccombere alla morte per disperazione. Esistono fondate evidenze del fatto che alcuni dei benefici per gli uomini sposati derivino da come l'istituto del matrimonio protegge gli uomini dalla solitudine e dalla mancanza di senso e li aiuta a lavorare meglio e con maggiore successo.La buona notizia è che, dopo decenni di declino, pare che il matrimonio si stia leggermente rafforzando. Il rischio di divorzio è ora ben al di sotto del 50%. In effetti la maggior parte dei matrimoni, circa il 60%, dura. E ci sono cose che gli uomini possono fare per ridurre ulteriormente il rischio di finire in tribunale per divorziare: serate eleganti insieme, il dare la priorità a un'occupazione stabile, una pratica religiosa condivisa.Troppi uomini nella società di oggi sono alla deriva, disperati, smarriti e infelici. Il matrimonio sembra ridurre l'incidenza del malessere maschile. La società ha bisogno di più uomini sani, felici e produttivi, e la maggior parte delle donne sicuramente concorderà. La società ha bisogno di più uomini sposati.

Friends,While MAGA Republicans in the House attack and investigate what they dub Biden's “weaponized” federal government and blast Democratic mayors for being “soft on crime,” they are blatantly ignoring the crimes of their allies in plain sight.After Rep. George Santos was arrested and charged with 13 federal crimes — seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making false statements to Congress — what did Speaker Kevin McCarthy do?Nothing. In fact, he said he would not act to remove Santos.After ProPublica investigations revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose, as required by law, luxury gifts from a Republican megadonor — including expensive vacations, a rent-free house for Thomas's mother, and tuition payments for a child Thomas was “raising like a son” — what did McCarthy do?Nothing. He said he had no concerns, “not at all” about Thomas. House Republicans have made no move to push the Supreme Court toward a code of ethics.What of the former guy's innumerable transgressions?After Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg brought charges against Trump, McCarthy attacked Bragg. Since Trump was found by a jury to have sexually harassed and defamed E. Jean Carroll, McCarthy has said nothing. Nor has Florida governor Ron DeSantis commented, nor former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley or Senator Tim Scott, both of whom have launched a 2024 exploratory committees. Meanwhile, most Republican lawmakers continue to deny that Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and instigate an insurrection.***An earlier generation of conservatives worried about what it saw as a breakdown in social norms in America. They feared the loss of “guardrails” that kept people in line. They fretted about “law and order.”In a famous essay, political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George L. Kelling noted that a broken window in a poor community, left unattended, signals that no one cares if windows are broken there.Because nobody is concerned enough to enforce the norm against breaking windows, the broken window becomes an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows. As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here, because everyone else is doing it.This earlier generation of conservatives found the moral breakdown to be mainly in poor and predominantly Black and Latino communities.In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by “vandals” within ten minutes of its “abandonment.”The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby joined in. Within a few hours, the car had been destroyed.Wilson and Kelling concluded that because of the nature of community life in the Bronx — its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of “no one caring”— vandalism began much more quickly than it did in rich Palo Alto, where people had come to believe that private possessions are cared for and mischievous behavior is costly.But once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares,” lawbreaking can take root anywhere. Even at the highest reaches of America.What we are witnessing today is a breakdown of norms at the top. In a former president who still has not been held accountable for his attempted coup. In a Republican speaker of the House who refuses to hold his allies accountable for violations of law. In a recently elected member of the House who has been arrested and charged with numerous federal crimes. In a Supreme Court justice who has accepted jaw-dropping gifts without reporting them as required by law.They are breaking windows right and left. And in doing so, they are inviting more broken windows — implicitly telling America that it's okay to do whatever you want to do, even if unethical, even if illegal — because people at the highest levels of responsibility in America are doing it.As McCarthy and House Republicans focus their ire on their putative political enemies — seeking examples of lawbreaking and ethical breaches where there are none, while turning a blind eye to lawbreaking by their allies — they are normalizing lawbreaking across the land. Unless this breakage is stopped and its perpetrators held accountable, every window in America — the rule of law itself — is vulnerable.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

About Professor Skerry: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/political-science/people/faculty-directory/peter-skerry.htmlA tribute to James Q. Wilson, featuring Professor Skerry:https://youtu.be/SUUHX0WgXY4 Get full access to Unlicensed Philosophy with Chuong Nguyen at musicallyspeaking.substack.com/subscribe

Among many notable things, Glenn Loury has been the first African American economics professor to get tenure at Harvard, an author and essayist, a firebrand on race issues from both the left and the right, and, in one dark chapter of his life, a cocaine addict who led a secret life on the streets.Now in his 70s and a professor at Brown University, Loury leads a semi-retired life, publishing video conversations with fellow academics and intellectuals for an audience of tens of thousands on his Substack, an endeavor that includes a long-running dialogue with the Columbia University linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter. In covering some fraught territory—such as “The Unified Field Theory of Non-Whiteness,” “Living by the Race Card,” and “Turning the Tide on Affirmative Action”—Loury sometimes attracts intense criticism. When University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax came on his show and made controversial remarks about Asian immigrants, he copped an earful. When he challenged recent anti-Trump comments made by Sam Harris, he upset a bunch of Harris stans (“I didn't quite get right what he had said,” Loury says in our conversation. “My apologies, Sam, if you hear this, because I do like you”).But Loury has a long history of being an outsider and is unafraid to take principled positions that get him in trouble with his peers. He has an almost constitutional resistance to conformity. One thing he prides himself on, though, is having tough discussions on big topics, even with those who disagree with him. “I'm proud to be able to say that I can have cordial and productive conversations with them,” he says, “and I intend to do more of that.”We have video!Quotes from the conversationOn productive disagreementI've tried to have people on the [Glenn Loury show] who challenge me... Had Cornel West on the show and we had a wonderful conversation. I've had Briahna Joy Gray on the show. I've had Richard Wolff, the Marxist economist, on the show. These are people that come at the issues that I'm concerned about rather differently than I do, but I'm proud to be able to say that I can have cordial and productive conversations with them and I intend to do more of that.On being hard to pin downDuring the 2020 election season, I had a formula, which was I'm going to vote for Biden, but you shouldn't believe me because, if I were going to vote for Trump, I would never tell you. So if you ask me who I'm going to vote for, there's no information in my response. On discussing TrumpOne of my points that I've been making over and over again in conversation with John McWhorter, who very forthrightly as a good New Yorker denounces Trump at every opportunity – he's a moron, he's an idiot, whatever – is that, hey, man, 45% of the population thinks the guy should be President. I mean, maybe we ought to think about why they think that. On watching what he saysI'm managing my brand, I must confess, by carefully selecting how it is that I react to the Trump phenomenon so as to be able to maintain plausible deniability.On independent thinkingI could report to you that I hate to be bullied. Don't tell me what to think and don't tell me what to say. You want to call me a name? Call me a name. But if you want to change my mind, you had better make an argument and it had better be a good one.On Sam HarrisSam Harris made a comment about suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story and then I made a comment about Sam Harris. John McWhorter and I kicked that around. I took exception to what I understood Sam to say, but I didn't quite get right what he had said. My apologies, Sam, if you hear this because I do like you.On how the internet is affecting cultureMaybe I'm going to say pessimistic because we are so polarized. I mean, to the point where large numbers of people question the outcome of elections. And that goes in both directions, by the way. Trump lost the most recent election for President and he's an election denier – and his followers to the extent that they don't acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden's election – but believe me, that's not over. There will be other elections. There will be different outcomes... On the other hand, it is possible to have a conversation with just about anybody instantly and to send it out to millions of people. And that's really pretty cool. I don't blame the medium for the fact that it can abet partisan polarization and division because it can also facilitate a different kind of discourse.On making the best case for the other sideI try to do that a little bit with the so-called steel-manning function in my own podcasts. When I hear an argument, I try to imagine and then articulate what I think the best case for the other side is. Ideally, if I do that well, the listener, if they tune in in the middle of the podcast, won't know what side I actually hold. To the extent that I can succeed at that, I'm hopefully modeling a kind of intellectual openness and a kind of, if you will, epistemic modesty. This may be what I think, but I'm not sure it's right. What's the best case for the other side? That kind of thing.On his partnership John McWhorterI have great respect and admiration for John. I mean, we have this rapport. It's kind of a shtick now. It's kind of an act that we perform every other week, and I look forward to it.On the state of race relations in the USI think the idea that the United States of America is a white supremacist, racist nation founded on slavery and genocide... That idea in the 21st century is wrong.On holding unpopular positionsI'm worried about the victims of crimes, not only about the way we treat people who commit it... Have I lost friends? Yes, I've lost friends. And I've gained new friends.On changing his mindI've, over the course of my life, taken this position and taken that position and so on. And it's not a pendulum swinging back and forth. That's the wrong metaphor. I'm deepening and making more subtle and more nuanced the sensibilities that I bring to these questions... I don't know how this all ends. And it does end. I'm painfully aware of the fact that we are all mortal. But I like to think that I'm on a higher plane today than I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago.On his double life while at HarvardI was a cocaine addict. Did stuff like that. I had a mistress stashed away that had blew up in my face when we got into fight that became public and she accused me of battery, which was not what happened... I was this bad boy with a nightlife and a kind of reckless disregard for the normal constraints. I thought I was Superman. I thought I was the baddest cat on the block.On finding religion and recoveringI went through the valley of the shadow of death and came out on the other side.On writing a memoirFor me, it's very obvious that you must disclose discrediting information about yourself in order to win the confidence of the reader such that, when you get to the part where you want to glorify yourself, you have the reader's credibility. So even if my goal is to toot my own horn, at the end of the day when they turn the last page of the book and I want them to think Glenn is really a wonderful guy, what a human being, what a life, to get there, we have to go through the valley of the shadow of death.On being a contrarian I call myself a contrarian. I say I don't like bandwagons. Am I being a contrarian for contrarian's sake? Am I refusing to acknowledge things that are true simply because most people think them to be true and I have to therefore be on the other side? Do I get a certain amount of self-aggrandizement and satisfaction from sneering at the popular opinion and taking the slings and arrows that come from that? Probably.Show notes* Glenn Loury on Substack and Twitter* Old-school video blog publication, Bloggingheads.tv, where it all started for Glenn * [10.00] Amy Wax saying controversial things on The Glenn Show* [12.00] Criticizing Sam Harris* [15.00] Talking about Trump* [17.50] Disagreeing with his own family* [20.45] Having people on the show who challenge him* [23.20] Not blaming the internet * [25.00] Hate Inc, by Matt Taibbi (paperback)* [27.00] Woke Racism, by John McWhorter* [28.45] Glenn's tribute to John McWhorter* [31.45] State of race conversations in the U.S.* [34.00] “Unspeakable Truths About Racial Inequality in America,” by Glenn Loury, Quillette* [38.00] Glenn's intellectual obituary to James Q. Wilson, from 2012* [41.35] Old Glenn/New Glenn* [50.00] Substack writers mentioned: Robert Wright, Matt Taibbi, Nikita Petrov, John McWhorter, Emily Oster, Alex Berenson* Bari Weiss interview with Glenn Loury, Honestly podcastThe Active Voice is a new podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hanne Winarsky, with audio engineering by Seven Morris, content production by Hannah Ray, and production support from Bailey Richardson. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.Postscript  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com

The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association. During this episode, Russ Burgos discusses the importance of defining terms–like information itself. He offers a way of thinking about information in supply/demand and behavioral economics terminology. Russ recaps his “Seven A's of Information Success” and then projects these concepts into global influence efficacy. Research Questions: Russ offers several questions worthy of additional research: Is information a domain, an environment, or a thing? What do we mean by information?  Can information effects be isolated? Ad agents frequently define success with “ad recall;” yet, ad recall is an imperfect measure. For example, it is very possible to have great ad recall without behavioral change. Investigate and differentiate market penetration and market effect? Where is persuasion theory today? How does information processing work inside a person's heads and how is it affected by culture or education? Resources: Cognitive Crucible Podcast Episodes Mentioned #49 Matt Armstrong on the Smith-Mundt Act The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World by Richard Poplak Dr. Russell Burgos bio Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette by Keith Wailoo Russ's Information Doctrine Tweet Russ' Seven A's of Information Success: Acquisition Attendance Assessment Acceptance Approval Application Adaptation Prince Spaghetti Boston Anthony Commercial (YouTube) Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game; a case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 129–134. Howard Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds Philip Corr and Anke Plagnol, Behavioral Economics: The Basics Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions Link to full show notes and resources https://information-professionals.org/episode/cognitive-crucible-episode-115 Guest Bio:  Russell Burgos is an Associate Professor in the Joint Special Operations Master of Arts program at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He joined NDU after more than 12 years as a professor at UCLA, the University of Southern California, Claremont McKenna College, and Pepperdine University. In addition to extensive experience teaching core courses in American and international politics, globalization, Great Power competition, and political theory, Dr. Burgos has designed and taught seminar courses on U.S. national security, homeland security, globalization and international security, American foreign relations, the economics of globalization, the Iraq War, Middle East politics, and US foreign and military policy in the Persian Gulf. At UCLA, Dr. Burgos was also employed as a research assistant to the late political scientist James Q. Wilson and to former UCLA Chancellor Al Carnesale, for whom he conducted research on arms control and weapons and technology proliferation. In addition to his classroom experience, Dr. Burgos directed a Department of Defense-funded Track II military diplomacy program for senior Middle East military and government agency officials, designing and executing two multi-day conferences each year to encourage dialog, share perspectives on current and emerging security challenges, and support U.S. confidence-building measures. With access to a wide network of think-tank subject matter experts and senior active duty and retired officers from the US and NATO allies, the program included presentations, small-group discussions, and tabletop exercises focusing on issues of regional concern, including the military balance, emerging technology and warfare, the effects of political changes on regional stability and security, border control, lawfare, military operations in urban terrain, anti-piracy and counter-terrorism operations, and pandemic disease response. Dr. Burgos has written articles and book chapters on national security policy, US Middle East policy, strategy and policy in the Persian Gulf, the effects of Special Operations Forces on regional and global stability, the teaching of international politics, and academic techniques and best practices for Professional Military Education students. He is a former Signal and Psychological Operations officer, an active wargamer, presents frequently at professional conferences, has appeared on radio, television, and podcasts and before community and service organizations in the U.S. and abroad to offer expert commentary on U.S. national security policy and strategy, and has served as a military technology and military history consultant for television and film productions. About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain. For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org. Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, 1) IPA earns from qualifying purchases, 2) IPA gets commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Pete Peterson, Dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, on the effect of parents getting involved in schoolboard meetings, the foundation laid by James Q. Wilson in policy education, and Glenn Loury's views on race in America.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Back in the sixties Ronald Reagan liked to quip, “A liberal’s idea of being tough on crime is giving longer suspended sentences.” Today’s liberals don’t even bother with lenient sentences; instead, in our current “defund the police, empty the prisons” mania, they don’t even bother charging many crimes or applying significant bail, as we saw in Wisconsin a few days ago. This week Steve and Lucretia decided to go back to the classics on this issue: James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Heather Mac Donald, and . . . Aristotle (because of course everything needs to go back to Aristotle whenever you can), though Lucretia offers a zesty side dish of modern social contract theory. (Short version: When it comes to crime, “Government—you had one job!”) The main theme is that we’re repeating all of the mistakes of the 1960s that led to soaring crime, and which was—eventually—corrected with great difficulty. The core of the problem is the left’s sentimental progressive belief, derived from Rousseau and other sources, in the perfectibility of human nature and social institutions, along with its patronizing race-consciousness. Conservatives know better: the root cause of crime is criminals. Increase the incentives for crime (the result of leniency) and you will get more of it. Like everything else in life, incentives matter. Will the cycle of self-correction repeat itself? Here Churchill’s observation comes into play: “America will always do the right thing—after exhausting every other possibility.” We’re still in the “exhaust every other possibility” phrase of the matter, but there are early signs the tide is slowly turning. Refund the police! In the spirit of the holiday, Steve gives thanks for no supply-chain interruptions of Laphroaig imports, and Lucretia gives thanks for her new puppy (left).

On today's Ruminant, a predictably sleep-deprived Jonah is haunted by distant memories of his time in Prague and the alluring restaurants that refused his custom. Thankfully, he's able to process the pain by embarking on a lengthy rant about democracy, capitalism, and the charming brilliance of Irving Kristol. There's also a disquisition on the philosophy of hit TV shows and the legacy of The Wire, which will delight Breaking Bad partisans. Tune in to find out if Jonah has adjusted to life as an empty nester, but stick around to see if he can get through the whole episode without mentioning third parties. Show Notes: - The Remnant with Michael Brendan Dougherty - The Wednesday G-File - Jonah and Steve Hayes on The Dispatch's two-year anniversary - “Opposing views” - Jonah's love of Breaking Bad - Conservatism and The Wire - Biden's living on a prayer - Scott Lincicome on America's ports problem - The Morning Dispatch - The birth of The Remnant - Broken windows - James Q. Wilson: “Capitalism and Morality” - The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - The Remnant with Graeme Wood - Irving Kristol: “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness” - The Remnant with George Will - The Remnant with Megan McCardle - The Remnant with Charles Murray See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this ID the Future from the vault, Discovery Institute's John West discusses his book Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Most conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin's theory, yet a number of thinkers on the right, such as George Will, James Q. Wilson, and Larry Arnhart, have mounted a vigorous defense of Darwinism. West […]

On this ID the Future from the vault, Discovery Institute's John West discusses his book Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Most conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin's theory, yet a number of thinkers on the right, such as George Will, James Q. Wilson, and Larry Arnhart, have mounted a vigorous defense of Darwinism. West shows that the attempts to reconcile conservatism and Darwinian biology ultimately misunderstand both. Source

Charles Fain Lehman joins Brian Anderson to discuss why police departments are losing officers, flawed arguments for progressive criminal-justice policies, and the enduring relevance of James Q. Wilson's work on crime. Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Charles Fain Lehman joins Brian Anderson to discuss why police departments are losing officers, a flawed arguments for progressive criminal-justice policies, and the enduring relevance of James Q. Wilson's work on crime.  

Rosa Squillacote and Milo Ward, students in the Ph.D. Program in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, share an interest in studying the New York City Police Department and policing in the U.S. Squillacote researches the limits of diversity within the NYPD and is an organizer for Mott Haven Families, an organization that aims to promote community safety through social support rather than policing. For his dissertation, Ward is analyzing political theory as it relates to policing. Specifically, he studies the political thought of James Q. Wilson, who is known for his broken windows theory of policing that the NYPD adopted in the 1990s when it sought to tamp down minor violations and restore order as a way to deter violent crimes. Squillacote and Ward join The Thought Project podcast to talk about President Joe Biden's first 100 days in office and what's ahead. What can the Biden administration do to address racial injustice? How has this issue been acknowledged in the first 100 days? What should be the next steps by the Biden administration with respect to racial justice in the second 100 days and throughout the first year of his administration? Listen in as we address these questions.

In this episode, Eric takes the lead in expounding on the book Palaces for the People written by Eric Klinenberg in 2018. Klinenberg is a sociologist at NYU who coined the term "social infrastructure" to capture the idea that shared physical places shape the way people act and the relationships people develop. He has studied how the presence of social infrastructure or the lack thereof can have direct implications on the well-being and resiliency of our local communities. His early research discovered that during the Chicago heat wave in the 90s, when controlling for neighborhood demographics, communities with more thriving public spaces fared better than those without because neighbors knew one another and kept tabs on the health of each other.Klinenberg contends that libraries, in particular, have played a valuable social infrastructure role in our local neighborhoods. Unfortunately, government budget cuts have discounted the value of these places and libraries are increasingly going by the wayside. He argues that we would be wise to invest in these places of social infrastructure, such as libraries, parks, schools, and churches because they are accessible to everyone and provide tangible resources to the community while encouraging the formation of social bonds. Investing in places like these presents an effective place-based solution for the crime, disconnection, and polarization we are experiencing in our current cultural climate. Access more Show Notes with pictures and resources related to this episode.More information about this podcast and helpful church and urbanism resources can be found on The Embedded Church website.Related ResourcesPalaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg99% Invisible Podcast interview with Eric KlinenbergDignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris ArnadeThe Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg"Learning Virtue Through Public Transit" by Sara Joy ProppeDefensible Space Theory by Oscar NewmanBroken Windows Theory by James Q. Wilson and George KellingAndrew Carnegie - a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist who made his wealth by leading the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He is one of the most prominent philanthropists in the history of U.S. and funded the building of numerous public libraries across the country.John 4 - Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the well storyFind these Key Terms on The Embedded Church website:- Social capital- Social infrastructure- Third PlaceShow CreditsHosted and Produced by Eric O. Jacobsen and Sara Joy ProppeEdited by Adam Higgins | Odd Dad Out Voice ProductionsTheme Music by Jacob ShafferArtwork by Lance Kagey | Rotator Creative

Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime - https://cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/Publicatio... Broken windows theory, academic theory proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows as a metaphor for disorder within neighborhoods. - https://www.britannica.com/topic/brok... Stay connected with LOTUS X here: + Subscribe now! Instagram: www.instagram.com/watchlotusx/ Twitter: twitter.com/watchlotusx Facebook: www.facebook.com/watchlotusx About LOTUS X : Launched by Bennie “Poeticlee” Williams III, LOTUS X is a destination in cultural content for re-birthing your purpose to live. Focused on creatively curating content that is educational in life essentials, insightful towards relationship building, guidance through spiritual awakenings, and many expressions of various art. Topics LOTUS X covers include: Spirituality, marriage, climate change, civics, manhood, brotherhood, and many more.

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson's book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan's article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on... Source

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on the history […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/arbitrary-capricious/non-presidential-administration/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Arbitrary & Capricious in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson's book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan's article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on... Source

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on the history […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/arbitrary-capricious/the-tools-of-administrative-management/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Arbitrary & Capricious in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson's book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan's article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on... Source

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on the history […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/arbitrary-capricious/bureaucracy-and-presidential-administration-keynote-remarks-by-jonathan-rauch/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Arbitrary & Capricious in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson's book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan's article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on... Source

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on the history […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/arbitrary-capricious/presidential-administration-and-bureaucracy/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Arbitrary & Capricious in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

125: Earning Freedom with Michael Santos Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term I’m reading from chapter six of Earning Freedom: Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term, by Michael Santos. In this reading, we’re covering chapter Six: 1992-1995 Months 62-84: Chapter Six: 1992-1995 ******* The air brakes sigh as the bus stops in front of the administration building of FCI McKean. As I look through chain-link fences separated by razor wire, I remember my first close look at a prison, back in 1987, when the DEA escorted me through the gates of MCC Miami. McKean has that same non-threatening feel of an office park. Without the impenetrably high concrete walls and gun towers of Atlanta, McKean looks almost welcoming, at least from the outside. I suppose the years have institutionalized me. While hobbling off the bus I inhale the scent of evergreen trees. McKean is set in the midst of northwestern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Forest. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in such a natural setting, double, razor-wire topped fences notwithstanding. The cool mountain air makes me shiver, but I soak up the sight of trees, spring flowers, and distant rolling hills as I shuffle along in line with 22 other prisoners toward the processing area. It’s early afternoon by the time guards snap my photograph, fingerprint me, issue my bedroll and ID card. Rather than following the wide concrete walkways through manicured lawns toward my housing unit, I detour into the education department for a look and to introduce myself to the supervisor of education. I find Ms. Barto’s office and knock. “May I speak with you for a minute?” She looks at my blue canvas shoes, my elastic-waist khaki pants, my dingy white t-shirt with 2XL written in black felt-tip marker on the upper left chest, and the bed roll I carry under my arm. “Looks like you just pulled in.” “Yes. I just got here.” From Bruce’s description of her I knew to expect a sight different from Mr. Chandler. Ms. Barto is in her mid-30s, slender, with chestnut hair, gleaming white teeth, and blue eyes that sparkle. She has a welcoming smile that many prisoners, I’m sure, confuse with an invitation to flirt. “Haven’t you reported to your housing unit yet?” “Before going there, I wanted to introduce myself and ask if you might have a job for me. My name is Michael Santos. I’m just transferring from USP Atlanta. You may remember my mentor, Dr. Bruce McPherson, who visited you and a few inmates here about a month ago?” “Oh, you’re Dr. McPherson’s friend. He mentioned that you were going to try transferring here. I’m surprised you made it, and so quickly.” “I was lucky, I guess. I wanted to talk with you about an educational program I’m involved in, and I hope you’ll help me with some special requirements.” “You’re in correspondence school, right?” She remembers Bruce talking about me. “I’m nearly finished with a program at Hofstra University. To complete it I’ll need to make arrangements here so Hofstra’s library can send the books I need to read. Besides those arrangements, I’m hoping you might have a job available that will provide access to a word processor.” With Bruce having paved the way before I arrived, Ms. Barto extends all the support I need, and there are no delays settling in at McKean. She assigns me to a job of tutoring other prisoners on their self-paced studies to learn word processing skills. She authorizes my use of the computer for school and coordinates with the mailroom to accept packages from Hofstra’s library. With Bruce’s advance preparations and my clearly documented record of achievement, I have a seamless transition into Dream McKean. ******* Compared to the penitentiary, McKean is a dream. Although a handful of prisoners on the compound serve life sentences, the tension at McKean isn’t as pervasive or palpable as it was at USP Atlanta. Professional, intelligent leadership is the reason behind the tranquility. Warden Dennis Luther doesn’t cling to the simplistic notion that prisons should exist solely to isolate and punish. Instead of relying on policies that crush hope, and managing by threat of further punishment, Warden Luther uses a highly effective system of positive incentives. I no longer live in a cauldron ready to boil over. To leave my cell in Atlanta I had to wait for specific times and pass through eight separate checkpoints, metal detectors, and searches just to get to the weight pile. By contrast, the doors don’t lock at McKean and our liberty to walk freely encourages a responsible independence, thus lessening the tension all the way around. McKean has a token economy where prisoners can earn points individually and collectively. We redeem the points for privileges and rewards that ease our time. The progressive system vests the population with incentives to exercise self-control. By keeping rooms and housing units clean, prisoners earn the privilege of more access to television and the phones. Those who accumulate enough points earn the privilege of having a portable television and VCR in their rooms. By minimizing disciplinary infractions, prisoners can participate in family picnics, order food and goods from local businesses, and wear personal rather than institutional clothing. No one wants problems that can lead to the loss of privileges or lockdowns. The system works exceptionally well, eliminating problems like gangs and violence. The rigid bureaucracy of Atlanta stands in stark opposition to McKean. Ideas for my master’s thesis begin to form as I study Luther’s management style. Eagerly, I write a letter explaining my intentions to him. He’s not only supportive but invites me to his office and makes himself available as an interview subject. ******* “I’m here to see Warden Luther,” I explain to the guard who eyes me suspiciously when I present myself to the control area. The guard is stationed in a locked booth, an area that is off limits to prisoners. After he makes a call and confirms that I’m authorized to visit the warden in his office, the guard–still wary–buzzes the door open and I walk in. Tall indoor plants with heavy green leaves fill the atrium-like lobby. I look up and see several skylights. Brightly colored fish swim in a large aquarium adjacent to the receptionist’s desk. She tells me to walk up the stairs. “The warden’s office will be to the left.” When I walk into the office the warden’s secretary greets me from her desk. “Have a seat Mr. Santos. Warden Luther will see you momentarily.” She smiles at me and offers to pour me a cup of coffee, as if I’m a colleague calling on a business acquaintance. I thank her but decline the coffee while picking up a magazine on the wooden table beside the chair. The trade magazine serves the prison industry and those who work in prison management. In perusing the table of contents I quickly spot an article that Warden Luther coauthored with one of my mentors, Professor John DiIulio. The phone on the secretary’s desk rings and she tells me I can walk into the warden’s office. My legs shake a little as I walk on the plush carpet. Warden Dennis Luther sits in a high-backed leather chair, at a desk of cherry wood. Behind him a large window overlooks the center of McKean’s compound. An American flag and another flag bearing the Department of Justice insignia hang from poles in the corner. Bookshelves line the wall and I see photographs of him with other Bureau of Prisons officials, including Director Kathy Hawk. “Have a seat.” Warden Luther gestures to a couch adjacent to his desk. It’s the first couch I’ve sat on since my term began. “Tell me about your thesis and how I can help,” he encourages me. “I’m at a stage where I have to propose my thesis subject to the graduate committee. I’d like to write about the incentive system and the token economy you’ve initiated here. I could make a more persuasive case if I could learn about the influences that shaped your management philosophy.” “Okay. We can start right now. What are your questions?” “Wow. I wasn’t expecting to start today, but since you’re offering, I’d like to hear about your relationship with Professor John DiIulio.” My question surprises him, and I’m sure he wonders how I know about the Princeton professor. “John DiIulio? Why would you ask about him?” “Well, while I was waiting in your outer office, I flipped through the magazine on the table. I didn’t have time to read it, but I saw that you coauthored an article with Dr. DiIulio. For the past few years I’ve had an ongoing correspondence with him and I’ve read all of his books. From what I’ve learned through our correspondence and from his books, Governing Prisons and No Escape, I’m surprised that you two would collaborate as colleagues.” He chuckles. “The truth is, John and I share more in common than you might think.” ******* After an hour with the warden I return to my room and immediately write a letter to Dr. DiIulio. I explain that I’m proposing to center my thesis on Warden Luther’s management style, contrasting his token economy with the goals of isolation and punishment that Professor James Q. Wilson promotes, and even with the strict control model that DiIulio himself extols. Dr. DiIulio surprises me with his quick response to my letter. He writes that he’s glad I’ve settled in so well at FCI McKean and that I’ve had an opportunity to learn from his friend, Warden Luther. “What if I could arrange to bring a class of Princeton students on a field trip to McKean? That way they could tour the prison and perhaps spend some time listening to you and Warden Luther describe your perspectives on confinement.” It’s an incredible offer for me, and I accept with enthusiasm. ******* On a Saturday morning, in the fall of 1994, I wake at three o’clock as a guard shines his flashlight into my single-man cell for the census count. After climbing out from under the covers and flipping on the light, I sit at my desk to read through the notes I’ve taken from Dr. DiIulio’s books. In a few hours I’ll receive an honor that I know will have meaning for the rest of my life. Although not quite equivalent to lecturing at Princeton, I’m looking forward to speaking with a group of Ivy League students, contributing to their education and to their understanding of America’s prison system. Few prisoners will ever enjoy such an honor and I bask, momentarily, in my good fortune.  I feel as if I’m charting my own course, making progress. At nine o’clock I walk to Warden Luther’s office, ready, intent on making a favorable impression while giving Dr. DiIulio and his students a different perspective on the need for prison reform. Three of us, including Warden Luther, Associate Warden Craig Apker, and I sit in a conference room. “Care for coffee or hot chocolate?” Warden Luther points to the buffet table. I walk over and pour hot chocolate from a thermos. While admiring the array of pastries on the oak table I suddenly realize it’s the first time I’ve sipped from a ceramic mug since I’ve been incarcerated. I’m used to plastic and this heavy mug dings against my teeth. The whole experience makes me grin. “Did you sleep well?” the warden asks. He’s dressed casually, in brown corduroys and a tan sweater over a shirt with a button-down Oxford collar. He looks preppy, which I guess is appropriate for a meeting with the undergrads. “I’ve been awake since three,” I admit. “This is a big day for me and I wanted to study the notes I’ve taken on Dr. DiIulio’s books.” Through the conference room window the three of us watch the charter bus come to a stop in front of the administration building. I’ve seen photographs of Dr. DiIulio before and recognize him as he steps off the bus. I’ve read everything I could about him. I know that he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, and also that he was one of the youngest professors at Princeton to receive tenure. I count fourteen students, all well dressed, and I contemplate the brilliant futures that await them. These are future leaders being groomed in one of the world’s finest universities. Some may be offspring of legislators and judges. I’m thinking of the influence they represent and I’m grateful for the privilege of speaking with them while I’m wearing the khaki uniform of a prisoner. After introductions, we sit in cushioned chairs around the highly polished wooden conference table. The students take notes as Warden Luther provides the group with details on the prison. It is a medium-security Federal Correctional Institution with a population that ranges between 1,400 and 1,800 men. He describes how he governs the prison from the perspective that prisoners are sent to prison as punishment for their crimes, rejecting the notion that he has a duty to punish them further by creating an oppressive atmosphere. “So do you think others might construe your prison as one that coddles prisoners?” one of the students asks. “What do you think, Michael? Are you being coddled?” Warden Luther deflects the student’s question to me and I’m happy to respond. “I served the first several years of my sentence in a high-security prison, an environment that really dehumanizes everyone. Although I was able to create a routine and focus on educating myself, most of the other prisoners abandoned hope. Those perceptions and attitudes stoked their hostility. That level of anger doesn’t exist here, and from that perspective, it’s better, at least for me. “Some people might believe this atmosphere coddles prisoners, but it has many advantages that should interest taxpayers.  I don’t sense a strong gang presence, I haven’t seen any bloodshed, and the prisoners work together to sustain the availability of privileges we can work toward. We’re still in prison, still living without family, without liberty. When I’m lying on a steel rack in a locked room at night, with an aching to see my mother again, or to hug my sisters, or when I’m suffering from the estrangement I feel from society, from women, I’m aware of my punishment. I’ve been living that way for more than 2,500 days already. To me it doesn’t feel like I’m being coddled.” “What kind of changes do you think Congress could make that would serve the interests of taxpayers?” Dr. DiIulio asks Warden Luther. “One change I’d recommend would be to close all minimum-security prison camps. The camps don’t serve a useful purpose. Fences don’t confine the camp prisoners, and the men aren’t a threat to society. Camp prisoners should serve their sanctions in home-confinement or under some other form of community-based sanction that would not require taxpayers to spend more than $10,000 a year to support each man we confine in a camp.” “How about you, Michael? What kind of changes would you like to see Congress make?” “Well, as a long-term prisoner, I’d like to see citizens and members of Congress rethink the concept of justice. Instead of measuring justice by the number of calendar years a person serves in prison, I’d like to see changes that would measure justice by the efforts an offender makes to redeem his crimes and reconcile with society. Reforms should encourage offenders to work toward earning freedom through merit and redemptive acts.” “How about violent offenders?” Another student interjects. “Should offenders who violently prey on society have opportunities to earn freedom?” “I’m a big believer in a person’s capacity to change, to lead a productive and contributing life. An enlightened society such as ours ought to allow its criminal justice system to evolve. I don’t know the mechanisms citizens or leaders ought to put in place, or what challenges an individual ought to overcome to earn freedom, but I think we can come up with a system that serves society better than locking a human being in a cage for decades. Perhaps some offenders won’t express remorse, or work to atone, or do enough to earn freedom. But many will. And such a system, I’m sure, would serve the interests of society better than one limiting itself to isolating and punishing.” ******* The hours we spend together in Warden Luther’s conference room raise my spirit. When we leave I’m the tour guide, responding to student questions as we walk through the housing units, recreation areas, and prison compound. After our tour we return for a second conference that lasts another few hours. I’m energized as I finally walk them out to their bus, and I don’t mind at all when the guard at the gate leading back into the prison orders me against the wall so he can pat me down. Indifferent to the degradation and assault on my human dignity, I smile back at the group of students who watch the search. “Who’re they?” the guard asks, curious about why I’m with the group. “They’re students from Princeton.” He’s giving me a thorough search, perhaps because the group is looking on. I’m a spectacle, on display, with the guard’s hands working their way along my arms as if he’s squeezing meat into a sausage casing. “So why they coming to see you? You go to Princeton?” “No. I correspond with their professor, who has a relationship with Warden Luther.  The students came on a field trip and I was invited to participate.” “Lucky you,” he says as he clears me to walk through the gate and into the prison yard. ******* My meeting with Dr. DiIulio and his students inspires my thesis. It becomes a project that succeeds in making me feel luckier still, opening new avenues few long-term prisoners enjoy. Warden Luther authorizes me to record a video for presentation at the 1994 Annual Conference of the American Society of Criminology, and in May of 1995, Hofstra awards my Master of Arts degree. With those credentials and letters of endorsement from my growing support network, Dr. George Cole convinces his colleagues to admit me into a program at the University of Connecticut that will lead to my Ph.D. Eight years into my sentence and I’m on my way toward becoming a scholar of distinction. Or so I think.

Podcast 124: Earning Freedom with Michael Santos Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term   I’m reading from chapter six of Earning Freedom: Conquering a 45-Year Prison Term, by Michael Santos. In this reading, we’re covering chapter Six: 1992-1995 Months 62-84   It’s Thanksgiving, 1992, just before my sixth holiday season in prison. Despite the forbidden affair I’ve been carrying on with Sarah for the past six months, today she tells me that she needs to move on with her life. She understands the risks associated with our trysts and she’s come to the conclusion that the stress would be too much to bear for another 21 years. I’ve hardened emotionally, as I’m now familiar with the concept of loss. I’ve been expecting this moment, anticipating her good-bye since our first kiss.  Grateful that it has lasted this long, I’m prepared to move forward. ******* “What’s up? Did she finally dump you?” Windward asks, sensing my despondency when I return to the cell and drop to my rack without undressing. “I told you she’s my lawyer. That’s it.” “And I told my judge that I thought it was flour I was bringin’ in. What’s that got to do with anythin’?” “Can’t you just be quiet?” “Least you can do is tell me how it went down. No sense keep denyin’ it. Ain’t no hot young lawyer gonna keep visitin’ a man in the joint ’less somethin’s going on. ‘Sides that, I smell her all over ya.” “She was trying to help with my case. That’s it. Enough, just drop it.” Lying on my rack, ignoring Windward’s irritating interrogation, I silently acknowledge that I knew Sarah would eventually disappear from my life. She was a wonderful, delicious respite from my all-male world, but now she’s gone and despondency starts to settle in like a dense fog. Thoughts of women, family, and the normal life from which I’m separated rush in, squeezing me. I have to refocus, to push thoughts of Sarah out of my mind and block all hope of finding a woman to carry this burden with me. I’m going to focus on completing five years at a time, alone. I’ve got to reach 1997. ******* The people have elected William Jefferson Clinton the 42nd president of the United States. I closely followed the political coverage throughout the year. Julie even purchased a subscription to the Washington Post for me to keep abreast of politics. Now, on a sunny day in January 1993, I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, tears filling my eyes, as I watch Justice Rehnquist swear our new president into office. “Why do you care so much who the president is when you can’t even vote?” In my sister’s world the president doesn’t play much part in day-to-day life and she doesn’t grasp why I’m optimistic with this switch from Bush to Clinton. As a federal prisoner, I live under the restrictions of the Bureau of Prisons, an agency that needs major reform. I’m hoping that President Clinton or his attorney general will appoint a new director of this agency. I’m certain the change will bring more empathy, as the president’s younger brother, Roger, served a federal prison sentence for nonviolent cocaine trafficking. Reform and liberalization of prison could well come under Clinton’s leadership. In preparation of a research report I’m working on for Hofstra I read about various progressive prison systems that President Clinton may consider. In Scandinavian countries citizens from local communities participate in panels designed to oversee and facilitate positive adjustments for offenders. Prisoners meet with “ombudsmen panels” at the beginning of their terms and together they work to establish clearly defined, individualized programs that prisoners may follow to reconcile with society and earn their freedom through merit. No similar program exists in our justice system, though under Clinton there’s hope for change.  Hope has been a mantra of Clinton’s throughout the campaign, and if he wants to restore it for people in prison, he’ll need a different kind of system. Instead of a system that encourages offenders to embrace societal values, studies combined with my experiences convince me that our system has a dramatically different mission with dramatically different outcomes.  It began to deteriorate in 1973, after Robert Martinson, a criminologist, published “Nothing Works.” It was an influential study suggesting that regardless of what programs administrators initiated, people in prison were incapable of reform. Then Professor James Q. Wilson, a mentor of Dr. DiIulio’s, published his widely quoted book, Thinking About Crime. In that book, Professor Wilson suggested that society ought to limit the functions of prisons to two goals: isolate and punish.  I’d like to see a different approach, and under President Clinton’s leadership, I’m hopeful for meaningful reforms. Either way, I’m on my own, knowing that I must succeed in spite of external forces.  The concepts of isolation, deterrence, and punishment don’t concern me. I’m making daily progress by staying physically fit and putting in long hours of study toward my master’s degree. Regardless of whether President Clinton appoints enlightened leadership to change the system or not, I’ll continue to learn and grow. Neither the system of punishment nor anything else will block me from achieving the goals that I set. Despite the rigid, punishment-based policies espoused by theorists like Martinson and DiIulio and endorsed by the BOP–policies that thwart my struggle to emerge as a capable and contributing citizen–I’m heartened to learn of leaders who embrace what I consider an enlightened system of justice. Some come from surprising places, like the United States Supreme Court. In a 1985 commencement speech entitled “Factories With Fences,” Former Chief Justice Warren Burger called for the graduating students from Pace University to reform America’s growing prison system. Instead of perpetuating a system that simply isolates and punishes, Justice Burger urged changes within the system that would encourage prisoners to work toward “earning and learning their way to freedom.” Although eight years have passed since Justice Burger delivered his speech, the Bureau of Prisons has done little to implement his vision. I don’t see any way to earn freedom. Through my work and achievements I want to become an example and a catalyst for change. I may not advance my release date, but I will contribute, and I will lead a life of relevance. I will show by example that self-discipline and education can lead a prisoner to emerge as a contributing citizen, and I will urge reforms that encourage others to do the same. ******* I’m inspired by what I’ve learned from The Future of Imprisonment, a book Dr. Norval Morris published in the 1970s. Dr. Morris wrote that prisons in an enlightened society should enable prisoners to rise to their highest levels of competence.  His thoughts resonate with me so I write him. Thinking that he’s still a law professor at Harvard, I send my letter of introduction to Cambridge. I want him to know that his work has touched my life, and I ask for his guidance going forward. Several months pass before I receive his response. Administrators at Harvard forwarded my letter, as Dr. Morris moved to become the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law at The University of Chicago. He responded graciously to my letter, offering to advise me with my studies at Hofstra and throughout the remainder of my term. “I may be of particular help to you at times,” he writes, “as I’ve known every director of the Bureau of Prisons, and the past three directors are close friends of mine. Count on my support if you run into any obstacles with your pursuit of education.” Dr. Morris’s support boosts my spirits. To have distinguished academics like Professors McPherson, DiIulio, and Morris as mentors means that I’ll have guidance from the same professionals who offer expert opinions to legislators and to the highest levels of prison administrators. The professors will have an interest in preparing me for release; I can trust in them to advocate for me if I need help. Through our letters and phone calls, Dr. Morris and I become friends. He encourages me to call him Norval and introduces me to other leading American penologists. I begin to correspond with professors from across the United States, including scholars such as Leo Carroll, Todd Clear, Francis Cullen, Timothy Flanagan, Tara Gray, and Marilyn McShane. They all support my efforts and invite me to contribute to their work. As a prisoner who studies prisons from the inside and shares what he knows with the world of academia, I’m evidently unique. Dr. George Cole, an author and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Connecticut, pledges his support.  We begin to build a close friendship. Liberation seeps incrementally into my psyche with each of these relationships. I’m less susceptible to the hopelessness that pervades the lives around me. The woman I loved left me and I serve a sentence that is still measured in decades, but I’ve created a sense of meaning and I feel as though I’m making progress, which is the key to growth. ******* Bruce and I have completed our collaboration on “Transcending the Wall” about the importance of education in transforming prisoners’ lives. He generously gives me credit as the first author but it is Bruce who coordinates publication in the scholarly, peer-reviewed Journal of Criminal Justice Education. As I told Bruce during our summer visit in 1993, our publication serves a pragmatic purpose. “I need to start thinking about transferring from this penitentiary,” I tell him during one of our visits. “Are you feeling threatened?” he asks, on alert. Bruce read about the violence at USP Atlanta in a New York Times article that cited it as one of the nation’s most dangerous high security prisons. He’s always concerned about my safety. “My schedule keeps me away from trouble, but gang activity is more intense every day. It’s violent, bloodshed every week. I think it’s time to request a transfer.” “So what’s stopping you?” “I need more information. The thing is, when a prisoner asks for a transfer there’s no telling where the BOP will send him. It’s like playing roulette. I need to transfer to the most education-friendly prison possible.” “Can Norval help you?” “He can help, and he said he would. The problem is that I don’t know where to go. If I ask for a transfer the BOP will probably send me closer to Seattle, but being closer to home isn’t as important as the preparations I need to make for when I get out.” “What do we need to do?” I always love Bruce’s steadfast support, and I especially appreciate his use of the “we,” meaning he’s always on board to help. “I need to find the best prison for educational programming, but not according to what staff members say. I need inside information from actual prisoners who serve time in the institutions.” Bruce doesn’t understand why the prisoners’ perspective is so valuable to me when I actively avoid close interactions with the penitentiary population. I try to explain. “If someone were to inquire about educational opportunities here at USP Atlanta, the staff would discuss the basic programs. They would say that teachers, classrooms, and even college programs are available. But I’m the only prisoner out of 2,500 who’s earned a degree here, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because, despite what staff members say, the atmosphere in here is oppressive and the policies in practice discourage us from pursuing an education.” “Yes, but you’ve gotten around the obstacles here. What makes you think that you won’t get around them wherever you go?” “The reason I make progress here is because I have support from Ms. Stephens, Mr. Chandler, and a few others. They let me create a schedule that allows me to avoid problems and gives me access to computers; they intervene when policies or staff members try to block me. When I get to the next prison I’m just another prisoner, and I’ll be facing obstacles there like everyone else, including from BOP staff members that may resent me for striving to become something more. Those kinds of staff members throw up insurmountable barriers. I see them every day here, but this penitentiary has become as familiar to me as the back of my hand and I know how to get around in here. I need details and the up-to-date truth from prisoners about what goes on in other prisons. With that information I can decide where to request a transfer.” Our conversation evolves into a plan. Bruce writes a letter of introduction to Sylvia McCollum, the Director of Education for the entire Bureau of Prisons. He lists his credentials as a retired professor of education from Chicago and explains that for the past several years he has been mentoring me. He includes a copy of the article we co-authored, offering to travel to Washington to meet with Ms. McCollum and discuss contributions he might make to the Bureau of Prisons as a volunteer. Had I written to Sylvia McCollum directly, it’s unlikely that my letter would’ve reached her, or that I would’ve received a response. With Bruce as my emissary, on the other hand, I knew that I would have a better chance of receiving the data I was looking to find. Bruce visited Ms. McCollum at her office in DC, at the Bureau of Prisons headquarters.  She welcomed his offer to mentor other prisoners and even congratulated me through Bruce on the progress I’ve made.  When he told her that he wanted to help others, Ms. McCollum encouraged him.  She gave him clearance to visit any federal prison he wanted and instructed those who presided over education departments to accommodate him by arranging private meetings with the prisoners who were most active in education programs. “I’m ready to begin my journey,” Bruce tells me over the phone after describing his successful meeting with Ms. McCollum. “Where should I go?” ******* The research work pays off.  With Bruce and Norval’s assistance, I successfully coordinate my transfer after learning that the best prison for education is FCI McKean. It’s wonderful news when guards inform me that I’m being transferred out of the United States Penitentiary and that I’m on my way to McKean. “Santos. 16377-004.” I respond to the guard who processes me in for transfer as he calls me forward. He shakes my wrists to ensure the handcuffs are secure and then yanks on the chain around my waist. “Whadda we got goin’ on down here?” The guard pulls my pant legs out from between my skin and the steel bracelets locked around my ankles.  “I didn’t get any socks, sir. The chains were digging into my shins.” “Gonna have to live with it. Security first.” He tightens the cuffs to ensure I don’t pull the pant legs through again. Then he clears me. I once read a novel by Wilbur Smith describing the horrific experiences of people who were locked in chains after slave traders captured them.  The slaves were forced to walk across rough terrain to the ships stealing them from Africa. The descriptions sickened me when I read the novel and I’m reminded of them as I shuffle my way onto the bus. The steel rings once again cut into my skin, but by shortening my steps I lessen the pain. My stomach churns despite three earlier trips to the bathroom. My body hasn’t moved faster than my legs could carry it since 1988, the last time I was in a vehicle. Now, in the spring of 1994, I’m sitting on an uncomfortable seat in the prison bus that is about to transport me out of USP Atlanta. Diesel fumes from the engines make me nauseous and beads of sweat form on my forehead It’s been seven years since my arrest. I’m now 30-years-old, certainly a different man, though still a prisoner with a long, steep climb into more darkness. I smile as I settle into the black vinyl seat, recalling how I engineered this transfer. With Norval’s help the administrative obstacles to the transfer were insignificant. Bruce visited five prisons and spoke with several prisoners in each. Clearly, the news about the Federal Correctional Institution in Bradford, Pennsylvania, known as FCI McKean, suggested that it would be my best choice. The prisoners at McKean refer to it as “Dream McKean,” with a progressive warden, Dennis Luther, who wholeheartedly supports educational programs. Ordinarily the documented address of release residence in my case file would’ve prohibited my transfer to McKean. The BOP confined me in the Southeast region because of my arrest in South Florida, but my release address is Seattle. “I can submit a transfer for you to FCI McKean,” my case manager told me when I asked, “but I know the Region isn’t going to approve it. You don’t have a release address for that part of the country, and I know you’ll either be sent to a prison in the West or another prison here in the Southeast.” “I don’t care about being close to home. I’ve got too much time left to serve and McKean’s the best spot to finish my education.” I persisted with the request, knowing she wanted to help. “Look, I support you and I’m going to submit you for McKean. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. Once I send the file to the regional office it’s out of my hands, and no one in that office knows anything about you.” My case manager, Ms. Forbes, had attended my graduation in 1992 and helped me make arrangements with the mailroom to receive the books I needed from the Hofstra library. She supported my efforts but was honest in telling me what she thought would happen once she put forth my file for transfer. I existed only as a number in the system, and I understood that all consideration from staff at USP Atlanta would end with my transfer request. After that conversation with my case manager I called Norval and explained the advantages that FCI McKean offered along with the challenges I would have in transferring. Norval said he knew the regional director and promised to call him on my behalf. That was two days ago. When the bus engine begins to roar, I feel ready to leave. I’ve lived through six holiday seasons amidst prisoners serving multiple life sentences in the penitentiary. Transitioning to a medium-security prison means encountering less volatility and more optimism, I hope. As I wait for the bus to roll along, my thoughts, curiously, turn to my eventual release. I submitted a petition for clemency about six months ago.  It wasn’t my intention to submit the petition until 1997, when I would’ve completed my first decade.  But after discussing my plan with Norval, he convinced me on the merits of submitting the petition at once.  “These efforts take time and work,” Norval explained, “and clemency is extremely rare, especially in this political climate. I don’t see any advantage in waiting until 1997. You’ve earned one university degree and you’re well on your way to earning a second. Draft a petition now and send it to me for review. I think you should get the process started.” With Norval’s letter of support, I proudly sent my petition to the U.S. pardon attorney in Washington. That was more than six months ago. Whenever I’ve made an inquiry on the progress, I received form letters that say my petition is under review. I have no idea what will happen, if anything. I can’t grasp the concept of 19 more years in prison. But I’m transferring from a high-security penitentiary to a medium-security FCI now, and I’m excited about the change of scenery, even if I’m still immersed in a population of more than 1,500 felons.  

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson's book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan's article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on... Source

On February 6, 2020, the Gray Center hosted a public policy conference on “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government.” The conference was inspired in part by James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, and Elena Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration.” The panel sessions centered around new papers the Gray Center helped to incubate on the history […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/arbitrary-capricious/bureaucracy-the-presidency-and-the-origins-of-federal-civil-service/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Arbitrary & Capricious in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

Lowell Ponte, The left’s plan to abolish prisons, 6 % of Human are Criminal Predators, Biochemical Genetic Evil Lurchs in These People!, Crazy SQUAD, Ilhan Omar, Absent a Cortex, Brainless Hell Clown, Demon-Rats, End of Civil Armerican Society, No Defense No Guns, Crazies on Loose All Over Nation, Dr Bill Deagle MD AAEM ACAM A4M, NutriMedical Report Show, www.NutriMedical.com, www.ClayandIRON.com, www.Deagle-Network.com,https://www.nutrimedical.com/product-category/epigenetic-song-of-dna-therapy/, The left’s plan to abolish prisonsLowell Ponte takes aim at AOC over desire to free criminals WND, October 10, 2019 URL: https://www.wnd.com/2019/10/lefts-plan-abolish-prisons/“Mass incarceration is our American reality,” declared socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., days ago via Twitter. “It is a system whose logic evolved from the same lineage as Jim Crow, American apartheid & slavery. That means we need to have a real conversation about decarceration & prison abolition in this country.”Ocasio-Cortez is a utopian believer in the state’s power to re-engineer human minds and hearts. She believes that “the U.S. incarcerates more than anywhere in the world” – nearly 2.3 million, just over two-thirds of 1% of our population – because we use our jails and prisons “as de facto mental hospitals, homeless shelters, & detox centers instead of … investing in … mental health, housing, edu, & rehab.”Her “prison abolition” views were echoed this month by the radicalized Student Government Assembly at New York University, which issued a statement opposing Marxocrat New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to replace the Rikers Island Prison with new, more “humane” jails.The student statement declared that “jails do not make us safe” and instead “serve only to further harm black and brown families, individuals, and communities and to perpetuate a racist and violent criminal legal system.”The statement, writes American Thinker pundit Eric Utter, also “endorsed a plan by a group called ‘No New Jails NYC’ that would mandate the $11 billion de Blasio was to invest in new jails instead be used to fund ‘housing for all,’ and other (woker) public programs.”No New Jails NYC is “committed to totally abolishing the city’s jail system by ‘disrupting every level of power’ and demands that de Blasio ‘responsibly release’ the 1,000 or so prisoners at Rikers.”Last July, under the bipartisan, idealistic “First Step Act,” the federal government released the first 2,243 of what is supposed to become a flood tide of non-violent inmates back into society. Skeptics had doubts, especially when Democrats blocked an amendment requiring those released to have only a non-violent criminal record. In fact, in this first group set free were 496 imprisoned for weapons/explosives-related crimes, 239 for sex offenses, 106 for robbery and 59 found guilty of homicide or aggravated assault.One of those released earlier this year after passage of the First Step Act was 41-year-old Joel Francisco, who had been serving a three-strikes-you’re-out life sentence for trafficking crack and powder cocaine. He had also been leader of a violent criminal gang, the Almighty Latin Kings, in Providence, Rhode Island. He reportedly was convicted in 1997 for assault with intent to murder. A warrant has just been issued for “non-violent” Francisco, who allegedly stabbed a man to death.Progressives believe that society makes people go bad and that leftist benevolence can make the most hardened recidivist criminal good. Leftist reformers renamed jails “penitentiaries,” places where criminals did “penance” and “repented.” For decades famed crime sociologist James Q. Wilson shared this idealistic people-are-inherently-good dogma.But one day Wilson awoke to reality: 3-6% of criminals are irredeemably evil. These predators see themselves as wolves and the rest of us as sheep to be sheared and preyed upon. They see parole boards as a game to lie to and con others into setting them loose again into civilized society.“Professor Wilson is not optimistic about changing the nature of man,” a fellow criminologist wrote, “and he clearly rejects the rehabilitative model as a historical failure and a hypocritical philosophy because of its inefficacy.”Repeat predatory criminals are incurable, Wilson realized. The only thing a sane society can do is lock them up and throw away the key. If jails are abolished, these freed wolves will devour us. In the left’s current heaven on Earth – socialist Venezuela – government confiscated the firearms of the law-abiding, then freed criminals and gave them these confiscated guns.In the United States, George Soros-manipulated liberal cities make it ever-easier for recidivist criminals to rob and intimidate without fearing jail time. Crime pays. The fearful law-abiding now look out through bars installed for safety over their home windows.Abolishing prisons should be a topic at the Oct. 15 Democratic presidential debate. Making his first appearance there will be egomaniacal billionaire Tom Steyer, who bought his place on stage. Ironically, Steyer made his billions by selling coal mines and a large investment in Corrections Corp. of America, a private company that operates for-profit prisons.In today’s America, the greediest and most vicious criminals have become the politically correct leftist politicians who rule and enslave us. As Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” For information regarding your data privacy, visit Acast.com/privacy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Edward L. Glaeser discusses how the proliferation of unfair laws and regulations is walling off opportunity in America's greatest cities at the Manhattan Institute’s 2019 James Q. Wilson Lecture. We like to think of American cities as incubators of opportunity, and this has often been true—but today's successful city-dwellers are making it harder for others to follow their example. In this year's Wilson Lecture, Glaeser addresses the conflict between entrenched interests and newcomers in its economic, political, geographic, and generational dimensions. Video can be found at the Manhattan Institute website. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University (where he has taught since 1992), a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of Triumph of the City.

The Republican party used to tout itself as the party of ideas. Now it seems to be the party of Donald Trump. Conservative thinker Peter Wehner explains what he thinks happened. Peter Wehner's Suggested Reading List: -Losing Ground by Charles Murray -The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom -The Naked Public Square by Richard John Neuhaus -Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pete Peterson, Dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, joins Seth to talk about his background, the idea of diversity on the college campus, and James Q. Wilson. Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jon Scruggs, and Client Joanna Duka, on the Brush and Nib case. President Trump's support among Latinos.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why the Weekly Standard is ending. James Q. Wilson and the Broken Windows Theory of policing. The success of American Greatness online.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Edward L. Glaeser addresses the challenges of convincing skeptical millennials and younger Americans about the merits of capitalism in the Manhattan Institute's 2018 James Q. Wilson lecture. Young people in the United States are moving steadily to the left. A recent Harvard University poll found that 51 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 29 don't support capitalism. The trend is visible on the ground, too. Phenomena driven largely by millennials—such as Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and, more recently, the wave of Democratic Socialist candidates for state and federal office--are all signs of an intellectual shift among the young. Video of this lecture can be found at the Manhattan Institute website. Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University (where he has taught since 1992), a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of City Journal.

No matter how the efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare turn out, I'm sorry to say that President Obama's Affordable Care Act has federalized health care forever. It has changed the conversation so that, instead of debating whether the federal government should or constitutionally may take over health care, we are instead debating how.As political scientist James Q. Wilson pointed out, once Congress has entered a field of regulation, the legitimacy of federal action is established and is rarely debated again. Sadly, in the case of Obamacare, this was accomplished by a straight party-line vote of Democrats.Surprisingly, in that same time frame, the federalization of education policy was also accomplished, but is now turning back to the states. There was such an outcry over Common Core and federal testing that teachers and parents changed the law in Washington. Unfortunately that's not likely to happen with an entitlement like healthcare, which has now—almost certainly—been federalized forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(October 26, 2016) Dr J travels to Austin, Texas to debate philosophy professor Dr. Peter Jaworski on the topic "Markets Without Limits." Are markets for surrogacy and prostitution ethical? This event was sponsored by the Texas Economics Association, the James Q. Wilson Forum, and the Austin Institute. Check out our Ruth Refuge for the Q&A session in the middle of the event.

In his tenth conversation with Bill Kristol, Harvey Mansfield recommends some important and diverting books from different genres. Mansfield discusses crime fiction, comedic novels, biographies, and political science and considers what we can learn from the best writers in these genres. Mansfield also interprets Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" as a critique of modern science. Other authors discussed include: Bill James, Agatha Christie, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse, James Q. Wilson, and Winston Churchill.

In his tenth conversation with Bill Kristol, Harvey Mansfield recommends some important and diverting books from different genres. Mansfield discusses crime fiction, comedic novels, biographies, and political science and considers what we can learn from the best writers in these genres. Mansfield also interprets Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" as a critique of modern science. Other authors discussed include: Bill James, Agatha Christie, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse, James Q. Wilson, and Winston Churchill.

In his tenth conversation with Bill Kristol, Harvey Mansfield recommends some important and diverting books from different genres. Mansfield discusses crime fiction, comedic novels, biographies, and political science and considers what we can learn from the best writers in these genres. Mansfield also interprets Jonathan Swift’s "Gulliver’s Travels" as a critique of modern science. Other authors discussed include: Bill James, Agatha Christie, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse, James Q. Wilson, and Winston Churchill.

Click Here Or On Above Image To Reach Our ExpertsSecurity Expert Says, "Confidence In Local Police Depts. Reaches A 20yr. Low"Ronald Reagan famously stated, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” But should we apply such thinking to the police? The answer depends on whom we ask. Many liberals who otherwise defend every government program and unionized job believe that the police are increasingly abusing their power. Many conservatives who otherwise complain about unaccountable government officials consider the police department beyond reproach and say that any form of de-policing will make America less safe. Crime has decreased significantly in the past two decades, and many attribute that outcome to the proactive “broken windows” policing first advocated by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in a 1982 article. The theory goes that arresting offenders for minor crimes like loitering or drinking in public leads to a mien of order that in turn discourages major crimes. Citizens will be better off with, and thus prefer, police playing an active role in the community.Surveys today, though, show citizen confidence in the police at its lowest point in 20 years. It has dropped among Americans of all ages, education levels, incomes and races, with the decreases particularly pronounced among the young and minorities. According to a USA Today/Pew Research Center poll, only 30% of African-Americans say that they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police, and nine out of 10 say that the “police do an ‘only fair' or poor job when it comes to equal treatment and appropriate force.” Nine out of 10 Americans surveyed say that officers should be required to wear body cameras to check police violence.The past month has seen extraordinary killings, both by police officers and of police officers, in St. Paul, Baton Rouge and Dallas. All across the political spectrum, people agree that American policing is in turmoil. But different groups emphasize different aspects of the crisis. Where Black Lives Matter protesters emphasize the danger of being killed by the police, Blue Lives Matter counter-protesters emphasize the risks faced by hard-working policemen. The issues are so polarizing as to leave little room for considered thought or discussion.PRO-DTECH II FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)As an African/American security expert, I'd like to advocate taking a step back and looking at the data to begin to gain some perspective. In 2015, 41 officers were slain in the line of duty. That means the 900,000 U.S. law-enforcement officers face a victimization rate of 4.6 deaths per 100,000 officers. Any number greater than zero is a tragedy, but the average American faces a nearly identical homicide rate of 4.5 per 100,000, and the average male actually faces a homicide rate of 6.6 per 100,000. Being a police officer is thus dangerous but not as dangerous as being an average African/American male.In the same year, police killed 1,207 Americans, or 134 Americans per 100,000 officers, a rate 30 times the homicide rate overall. Police represent about 1 out of 360 members of the population, but commit 1 out of 12 of all killings in the United States. Many argue that these are justifiable, but are they necessary? In England and Germany, where the police represent a similar percentage of the population as in the U.S., they commit less than one-half of 1% of all killings. Are higher rates of violence inevitable in our country with its more heavily armed populace, or can things be done to reduce the growing tensions?CELLPHONE DETECTOR (PROFESSIONAL)(Buy/Rent/Layaway)Former policeman Norm Stamper's book “To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police” provides a first-hand account of the changes in policing over the past few decades and is a useful survey of how we got here. He started as a beat cop in San Diego in 1966 and rose to be chief of police in Seattle from 1994 to 2000. He witnessed both the more discretionary eras of policing and the advent of broken windows policing, which was first adopted in New York City in the 1990s and evolved into an aggressive form of proactive and “zero-tolerance” law enforcement that spread across the nation.PRO-DTECH III FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)Mr. Stamper joined the force out of a desire to serve the community but quickly learned that his performance would be judged on the number of tickets he wrote and arrests he made. An experienced officer told him, “You can't let compassion for others get in the way.” There were quotas to fill. “The people on my beat were, in a word, irrelevant,” Mr. Stamper writes.PRO-DTECH III FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)The war on drugs was declared in 1971—then escalated in the 1980s—and Mr. Stamper noticed police increasingly treating civilians like enemy combatants. In 1994, President Clinton passed the largest crime bill in history. It allocated $8.8 billion to hire 100,000 more police officers and $10 billion for new prisons, and it established mandatory arrests for allegations like domestic violence and mandatory life sentences for third-time drug or violent offenders—the three-strikes provision. Incarceration rates spiked nationally. The rate at which the government incarcerates Americans is now seven times what it was in 1965.“To Protect and Serve” is particularly disturbing in showing that, as antagonism toward and disregard for the public increased among policemen, it had few consequences. Officers do not report on their colleagues, and prosecutors are averse to punishing people with whom they must work closely. Mr. Stamper quotes a fellow police chief saying: “As someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I've come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit perjury every year testifying.” Instead of policemen serving the public, Mr. Stamper concludes, they end up viewing citizens as numbers or revenue sources. One important lesson from economics is that unaccountable government officials will not always act on the public's behalf.PRO-DTECH III FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)Another account of modern policing is “A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad” by Del Quentin Wilber, a newspaper reporter who spent a month alongside detectives in one of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. This attempt at a true-crime drama seems to have been meant in praise of police work, but Mr. Wilber unintentionally creates an unflattering picture. He shows us men who refer to their targets as “reptilian motherf—ers” and conduct multi-hour interrogations in the middle of the night to elicit confessions. They throw chairs against walls to intimidate suspects, lie boldly during interrogations and happily feed lines to witnesses to use in court.One detective “jokes with [another] that he could get [a suspect] to confess to anything: ‘Have any open murders that need to be closed?' ” The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution attempts to restrict search and seizure without probable cause, but judges here grant warrants without a thought: “He just immediately signed the paper and looked at me and winked and said, ‘Good luck.' ” At one point, a supervisor explains that a prisoner cannot be questioned about earlier crimes without having a lawyer present. The detective retorts: “F—ing Constitution.” In the end, the policemen excuse any mistakes they made by saying they had good intentions.WIRELESS/WIRED HIDDENCAMERA FINDER III(Buy/Rent/Layaway)A company that mistreats its customers cannot stay in business merely by saying it acted with good intentions. The police, by contrast, are a tax-funded monopoly, paid regardless of how well they serve or protect. Citizens subject to random fines or harassment cannot turn the police away if they are unhappy with their services. The Justice Department investigation of the Ferguson, Mo., police department last year provided an in-depth account of local politicians, police, prosecutors and judges using the legal system to extract resources from the public. In 2010, the city finance director even wrote to the police chief that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it's not an insignificant issue.”PRO-DTECH IV FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)In 2013, he wrote to the city manager: “I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver [a] 10% increase. He indicated they could try.” The Ferguson police department evaluated officers and gave promotions based on “citation productivity,” and prosecutors and judges worked alongside them to collect revenue. In a city with 21,000 residents, the courts issued 9,000 arrest warrants in 2013 for such minor violations as parking and traffic tickets or housing-code violations like having an overgrown lawn.When the Ferguson citizenry started mass protests against police abuses last year, they were met with the equivalent of a standing army. The news photographs of police in camouflage, body armor and helmets working in military formation with guns drawn were a wake-up call for many Americans, who wondered just how the police came be so militarized. It was all part of the spread of zero-tolerance policing in the 1990s.Wireless Camera Finder(Buy/Rent/Layaway)After the 1994 crime bill, President Clinton signed a law encouraging the transfer of billions of dollars of surplus military equipment to police departments. Mr. Stamper describes applying for military hand-me-downs of “night-viewing goggles, grenade launchers, bayonets, assault rifles, armored land vehicles, watercraft, planes and helicopters.” The Department of Homeland Security provides $1.6 billion per year in anti-terrorism grants that police departments can use to purchase military equipment. Police in Hartford, Conn., for example, recently purchased 231 assault rifles, 50 sets of night-vision goggles, a grenade launcher and a mine-resistant vehicle. As recently as the 1970s, SWAT raids were rare, but police now conduct 50,000 per year. The weapons and tactics of war are common among what Mr. Clinton promised in 1994 would be “community policing.”MAGNETIC, ELECTRIC, RADIO ANDMICROWAVE DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)The question is just what would happen if law enforcement toned down its zero-tolerance policies?One of the premier defenders of the police against critics is Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who publishes regularly in the nation's most popular newspapers, including this one. Her book “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe” organizes and builds on her articles to create a narrative that warns against adjusting police tactics or lowering incarceration rates. She takes aim at groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to “the Koch brothers [who] have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lower prison counts and less law enforcement.”Much of the book is focused on the post-Ferguson state of policing, but it also includes some of her warnings and predictions from recent years. In a chapter drawn from a 2013 article, for instance, Ms. Mac Donald worries that in the first full year after the court-mandated 30% decrease in California's prison population, the state's “crime rate climbed considerably over the national average.” And in one from 2014 she writes that the 2013 ruling that led to the elimination of “stop-and-frisk” tactics in New York has set in motion “a spike in violence.” Yet between 2008 and 2014, homicides fell by 21% in California and 34% in New York; crime in other categories was down, too. In the very year when Ms. Mac Donald suggests crime rates were climbing in California, homicide rates fell 7%. This was equally true for New York City after stop and frisk was outlawed; homicide rates were ultimately down 0.5% in 2014. It appears that keeping those extra 46,000 Californians behind bars or subjecting New Yorkers to 4.4 million warrantless searches between 2004 and 2013 was unnecessary for public safety.COUNTERSURVEILLANCE PROBE / MONITOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)More recently, Ms. Mac Donald has warned about a “Ferguson effect” that has led to a “rise in homicides and shootings in the nation's 50 largest cities.” Starting in the summer of 2014, anti-police-violence protests have prompted large reductions in aggressive policing, and Ms. Mac Donald points to increases in crime in cities including Baltimore, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Nashville. She states that we are now seeing a “surge in lawlessness” and a “nationwide crime wave.” The latest FBI data, however, compares the first six months of 2014 and 2015 and shows that violent and property crime have both decreased in dozens of large cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, New York and Philadelphia. From 2014 to 2015, violent crime did increase by 1.7% nationwide, but property crime decreased by 4.2%. Any data series will have some fluctuation, and even with a sustained downward trend upticks are likely. The homicide rate, for example, has seen rises in four of the past 15 years but has fallen by 18% over the same period. To put the 1.7% “surge in lawlessness” into perspective, 2012 saw a 1.9% increase in violent crime and a 1.5% increase in property crime when zero-tolerance policing was still the norm nationwide. And such a modest increase from one of the safest years in decades did nothing to change the fact that crime remained—and remains—close to a record national low.Ms. Mac Donald is not alone in her thinking. Gallup does an annual survey asking, “Is there more crime in your area than there was a year ago, or less?” In 14 of the past 15 years, the majority of Americans felt that crime had increased. But answering empirical questions requires looking at the numbers. A data-driven book that does not engage in alarmism is “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America” by Barry Latzer, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The long-term trends in violent crime he presents are telling: In 1900, the American homicide rate was 6 per 100,000 people. During Prohibition, it increased to 9 per 100,000 but fell to 4.5 per 100,000 by the 1950s. From the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the homicide rate spiked, reaching 11 per 100,000. In the late 1970s, it started falling, increasing slightly in the late 1980s but steadily decreasing since the 1990s to the current level of 4.5 per 100,000, among the lowest in the nation's history.PRO-DTECH FREQUENCY DETECTOR(Buy/Rent/Layaway)Should one attribute the decrease in crime to zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration? It turns out that homicide rates in Canada start at a lower level but track the changes in American homicide rates almost exactly. In the past 25 years, our northern neighbor experienced equal declines in all major crime categories despite never having ramped up its policing or incarceration rates. Those attributing all decreases in crime to increases in American law enforcement are looking in the wrong place. As Mr. Latzer carefully says, “the jury is still out”: Violent crime rates “fell off all over the nation without any clear relationship between the enormous declines in some cities and the adoption of new policing models.” Even though American and Canadian homicide rates rose in the late 1980s, the long-term downward trend clearly began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mr. Latzer concludes that the major determinants of a crime rate are likely cultural factors and economic opportunity. The employed family man is going to be less interested in crime than the unemployed and unattached.A month ago we heard predictions about the world economy's impending collapse if Britain left the European Union. Yet within a week of the Brexit vote, British stock prices reached 2016 highs, and American stock prices are at an all-time high. We can be sure that we will hear similar warnings in response to proposals for lowering incarceration rates, reducing the number of policemen, de-militarizing police departments or even privatizing much or all of what they do. Yet, as Messrs. Stamper and Latzer point out, professional police departments were only invented a century and a half ago, and in 1865 New York incarcerated fewer than 2,000 citizens at any given time, compared with upward of 80,000 today (48 per 100,000 then versus 265 per 100,000 now).Then, as now, societies were kept safe by numerous factors beyond government-sanctioned law enforcement. These range today from the most informal eyes on the street to the more formal million-plus private security guards currently employed in America. Around New York City, business improvement districts pay for security personnel to do foot patrols, so the relevant policy choice is not between government police or no security whatsoever. My own research has also found a strong negative correlation between homicide rates and economic freedom in a society. Free markets let people put their passions into business to work for others' benefit. Restrictions on business, including minimum-wage laws that keep young inner-city residents out of the labor force, are particularly harmful. We need more markets, not more government, to discourage crime. One need not assume that unionized, militarized and unpopular policemen are the only option for keeping Americans safe.RF SIGNAL DETECTOR ( FREQUENCY COUNTER)(Buy/Rent/Layaway)Your questions and comments are greatly appreciated.Monty Henry, Owner (function () { var articleId = fyre.conv.load.makeArticleId(null); fyre.conv.load({}, [{ el: 'livefyre-comments', network: "livefyre.com", siteId: "345939", articleId: articleId, signed: false, collectionMeta: { articleId: articleId, url: fyre.conv.load.makeCollectionUrl(), } }], function() {}); }());

The president of the American Enterprise Institute from 1986 to 2008, Christopher DeMuth is currently a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. In this conversation, Kristol and DeMuth discuss political thinkers including Edward C. Banfield, James Q. Wilson, and Friedrich Hayek and consider how ideas shape policy. DeMuth also relates his story of a chance meeting with then-Senator Barack Obama and their discussion about Chicago politics.

James Q. Wilson left an indelible mark on American government and civil society. In this January 2013 panel discussion at the RAND Corporation, participants who knew Wilson discuss his legacy.

LAPD Chief Charle Beck, Pepperdine University economist Angela Hawken, and UCLA political scientist Mark Peterson joined moderator Mark Kleiman, a UCLA public policy analyst, to discuss the legacy of the late political scientist and long-time Southern California resident James Q. Wilson. How did Wilson's broken windows theories change our cities? Where did his greatest influence lie? And what made him special?