Stuntzian crime reforms
The Crosstown Concourse project in Memphis has made headlines for several years as an innovative “vertical urban village”: It restored an historic landmark, represented a $200 million-plus investment in a neighborhood revitalization effort, and reaped numerous architectural and design awards.
It was in the news again this week, but only as a local reference point for a deadly drive-by shooting.
The Memphis Police Department released a video that captured two sedans driving on North Watkins Street, which runs right in front of the Concourse. In the video, blips of light appear as the sedans get sideby-side. Those flashes were gunfire, and all six people riding in the victim vehicle were shot. Two of them, both only 18, died.
The crime’s proximity to the Crosstown Concourse prompted media perspectives lamenting the irony, and frustrating futility, of massive money spent in an area that still can’t shake its violent tendencies.
Here in Arkansas, violent crime is spiking. In 2016, we had the most aggravated assaults ever, and the highest-ever forcible-rape rate. The state’s overall violent crime rate is nearly 40 percent higher than the national rate.
Little Rock can take some solace that it’s not Memphis, but only barely.
The most recent Business Insider compilation of FBI violent crime data from the first six months of 2017 ranked Memphis second-worst in the nation, and Little Rock fourth.
Criminal violence is racially disparate, as is incarceration, and that disparity distracts attention from proper analysis and potential solutions.
The Memphis police showcased another intractable disparity at a news conference following the fatal shooting: the “no snitch” mentality that is much more prevalent in high-crime urban areas than in suburban, small town or rural locales.
“Somebody knows who did this, and we need them to step up and say something,” MPD spokesman Louis Brownlee said.
It’s true that fear of gang retaliation can suppress witness statements, but there are deeper systemic dynamics at work that defy the simple positions staked out by most Americans along partisan and ideological lines. Even a cursory examination of crime in America points to numerous and seemingly inexplicable inequities.
Too many conservatives dismiss racial disparities in prison populations, and too many liberals overemphasize them. Hardly anybody stops to scholarly analyze the how and why of such unequal situations, and one of the most cogent voices to do so has been silent for seven years.
Yet the words and ideas of William Stuntz not only survive, but ring truer with each passing season of stubborn violent crime reports.
Stuntz was a rarity—an evangelical Christian and a Harvard law professor who openly identified himself as a conservative Republican. However, his championing of the cause of remedying skewed minority incarceration rates lined up more with liberal Democrats, though his out-of-the-box thinking on solutions transcended any party affiliation. Stuntz challenged conventional ideas by adroitly analyzing shifts in data, paradigms and behavior in our criminal justice system from Reconstruction through the early 21st century.
His summary conclusion? We have a criminal system which has lost its focus on “justice,” not because it’s what anyone chose but because of a wide range of factors over many decades.
He blamed a “decline in local democracy” for much of the unequal results in prosecution and sentencing. While local governance in the earlyto-mid-20th century had its abuses, it also had its strengths, and chief among them was a “surprisingly egalitarian” justice system.
“In our time, centralized democratic power seems associated with discrimination and severity,” he wrote. “In the past, local democratic control of criminal justice appears to have produced equality and lenity.”
In a provocative vein of thought, Stuntz asserted that the expanded constitutional protections of the 1960s were counterproductive. For starters, the federal Constitution was never designed to produce efficient state criminal justice systems. Supreme Court justices also lack experience and expertise in criminal procedural matters, and inflexible rulings often impede equality as social circumstances change over time.
“The various trial rights the Constitution guarantees apply only to defendants who take their cases to trial,” Stuntz noted, and 95 percent of felony cases wind up plea-bargained. By making investigations and prosecutions more costly, the court inadvertently created a market for cheaper alternatives in which procedure prevailed, but at the cost of equal justice.
“If federal law makes the justice system more discriminatory,” Stuntz argued, “federal dollars appear to make it less so.”
Drug laws, many of which are crafted as proxy crimes, wind up being what violent criminals plead down to in urban areas. But in smaller jurisdictions still, as in earlier times, convictions are achieved at face value for the violent crimes committed.
When Stuntz studied the effect of police presence in correlation with imprisonment, he found that “[p]olice officers and prison cells are substitutes, alternative means by which governments spend money to battle crime.”
The mix is awry. Urban areas have the lowest concentration of police-to-population, but the highest crime rates and the lowest clearance rates. Rather than spending for more prison beds, federal funds added to local PDs could reduce incarceration rates.
Next week, more on Stuntz and his remedial concepts as potentially applied today.