00:00:00.000All right, everybody, a really, really fascinating conversation with Barry Latzer, who has a new book, The Myth of Over Punishment, a defense of the American justice system and a proposal to reduce incarceration while protecting the public.
00:00:15.000So we asked the question, do we have an over-incarceration problem in America, like the left likes to say?
00:00:27.000We talk about it all, and it's fascinating.
00:00:29.000It's no more timely than now as crimes is spiking in our major cities as we have a drug problem while we're about to let 700,000 people across the border at the end of Title 42 on Thursday.
00:00:40.000You guys aren't going to want to miss it.
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00:01:27.000We have a fascinating conversation coming up, especially as we think about law and order, the crime waves that have just ravaged, especially our big cities since COVID, crime up across the board.
00:01:45.000We've got, actually, in Trump era, we had the First STEP Act that was seen by many, including Tom Cotton, who wrote the foreword to this book, as being soft on crime, which so I'm very much looking forward to this.
00:02:01.000It's a JD, PhD, The Myth of Over Punishment, a defense of the American justice system and a proposal to reduce incarceration while protecting the public.
00:02:13.000So a fascinating conversation as we revisit crime.
00:02:27.000I have to say, I think I traveled the journey of the conservative movement over the last, you know, I guess since about 2019, the First STEP Act.
00:02:38.000I can't remember exactly when that got passed.
00:02:41.000But it was sort of, you know, lambasted on the right by guys like Tom Cotton, who wrote the forward to your book, as being soft on crime.
00:02:51.000I looked at it and I thought, hey, you know, maybe we can decrease recidivism.
00:02:55.000Maybe we can, maybe this is a good thing.
00:02:57.000You know, maybe we can, there's some political upside to it.
00:03:00.000I think I was being pragmatic about it.
00:03:03.000I have a feeling you probably were looking at that with a lot of skepticism at the moment.
00:04:21.000You remember you got a Republican president in the oval, and he came out against it.
00:04:27.000I remember thinking, like, you know, what are you doing, Tom?
00:04:29.000This is, Senator, this is not the right political move, but he did it anyway, out of principle.
00:04:33.000So is there any read on how successful or not that's been?
00:04:38.000Well, at the time, I know the Democrats and many of the progressives who were not politicians were saying, okay, first step is a good name for this because next we want to expand this to the state prisoners.
00:04:54.000And it's probably a good thing that nothing came of that.
00:04:57.000And it's a good reminder to us that every state runs their own shop for criminal justice.
00:05:03.000And of course, the feds could use carrots and sticks to try and get the states to do what the latest federal administration wants them to do.
00:05:27.000So let's go back to the premise of your book, because I started with the First Step Act because I feel like many conservatives, they were drawn in by that.
00:06:31.000The context is massive crime rise, biggest violent crime rise in American history, probably, starts in the late 60s, runs through, well, first early 80s, looks like crime's going down a bit, then it goes back up, late 80s, early 90s, due to the crack cocaine epidemic.
00:06:51.000By the way, I write about this in my previous book, While We're Plugging Books, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America.
00:06:58.000So now we go into the mid-90s, and what's happening?
00:07:34.000And I'll remind your viewers or auditors, the tough crime bill, 1994, pushed, of course, by the Democrats, pushed by President Bill Clinton.
00:07:48.000And who shepherded it through the Senate?
00:08:32.000So it was natural for people to get tough on crime.
00:08:35.000Now, along come the progressives, the decarcerationists, as I call them, Michelle Alexander and her argument that this was part of a racist plot against African Americans.
00:08:50.000And they argue enough of this toughening up.
00:08:57.000It's time to reduce the impact of imprisonment.
00:09:02.000And they, of course, launch their essentially decarceration movement, their movement to remove people from prisons, both state and federal.
00:09:13.000And really, that leads us to where we are today.
00:09:19.000In fact, incarceration rates have gone down.
00:09:22.000Crime has gone down until we hit 2020, the major pandemic spike, 2021, the George Floyd protests, the police hang back, the jails start discharging people to keep them from getting COVID.
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00:11:32.000Barry, I have a pretty basic question for you.
00:11:35.000You know, I you watch sort of some of the documentary films that come out, and they sort of seem to be like a lead indicator, right?
00:11:42.000I mean, I remember five, six, seven years ago watching these on Netflix about how terrible our private prisons were and how there was just a big capitalist money-making greed scheme.
00:11:53.000And it sort of gave the moral high ground to some of these left-wing activists that were advocating for reducing the prison population.
00:12:01.000So I'm just going to ask it to you straight.
00:12:03.000And the only reason I bring that up is because I think it's an interesting model for us to follow on the right.
00:12:07.000It's like some of these take a long lead time.
00:12:10.000Some of these are five to seven years out where you have to change the public perception and to get real change over the finish line.
00:12:19.000So let me just ask you a basic question.
00:12:23.000Do we have an over incarceration problem in America?
00:12:27.000Are there too many people in prison or jail?
00:12:33.000And here's why I say this: you have to look at the crime problem before you can answer the incarceration problem, right?
00:12:41.000If we had less crime, if we had fewer offenders, we wouldn't need as many people incarcerated.
00:12:47.000We don't have good alternatives to incarceration.
00:12:50.000I mean, I know that the progressives argue you have reform programs, rehabilitation programs.
00:12:57.000Well, let me just give you one statistic here, Andrew.
00:13:00.000When people are released from prison and we track them to see how well they fare after they're released, we find 83% are arrested for another crime after they're freed, after they're released from prison.
00:13:17.000So with that kind of number, it's hard to believe that we know how to rehabilitate people, that we know how to reintegrate people so that they could be law-abiding members of society.
00:13:30.000In that light, it seems to me that the progressives have to do some fancy footwork to persuade us that they have good alternatives to imprisonment or that they could rehabilitate within the confines of a prison.
00:15:35.000I mean, I wish we had more time in this segment.
00:15:37.000We have a nice long segment after this break, and I think we can dive into a lot of that.
00:15:41.000I mean, you know, we're not afraid on this show of saying, listen, the progressives like to say that this is a race problem, that we are locking up black men because we just, you know, white supremacy and this, you know, the oppression of this system, the systemic oppression of this white culture.
00:16:01.000The fact of the matter is, the ugly truth that the progressives do not want to acknowledge is that there is a crime problem in the black community, a crime problem in the black community that is root causing.
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00:17:29.000I want to read Barry a little bit about your bio, your CV.
00:17:34.000You've been doing this for a long time.
00:17:36.000You have a great background in this for over three and a half decades.
00:17:40.000Barry Latzer was a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, member of the master's and doctoral faculties.
00:17:48.000He taught courses on criminal justice, criminal law, procedure, state constitutional law, capital punishment, and most recently, crime history.
00:17:57.000Your writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Daily News.
00:18:04.000Yeah, interesting piece, though, that I picked up, Barry, was that you were the you were served as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn in 85 and 86, and you were the counsel to indigent criminal defendants in Manhattan.
00:18:21.000I can't help but think that that was a very interesting experience.
00:18:25.000So these were folks that couldn't afford defense, right?
00:19:03.000And then after that, I went and worked in Manhattan and I signed up on there's a list of lawyers who will serve indigent defendants, people accused of crime.
00:19:16.000And I worked on that side of the aisle, so to speak, with indigent defendants.
00:19:20.000So both of them served as great learning experiences.
00:19:24.000You know, Barry, I'm surprised it didn't, you know, oftentimes you go through an experience like that and you really connect with some of the horror stories, the personal traumas that these people have experienced that often lead to a life of crime.
00:19:40.000You know, but just based on your current writings, I mean, you've come out on the other side.
00:20:50.000I think the audience will agree we need to be tough on crime.
00:20:54.000The fact that we're being, we basically are big cities.
00:20:57.000You're seeing this in New York City with the subway protests after Jordan Neely was killed by what we refer to as a good Samaritan, a bystander that was protecting other bystanders.
00:21:09.000This former Marine Penny, alongside other gentlemen.
00:21:14.000But this person, Jordan Neely, was apparently schizophrenic or had other mental health issues.
00:21:19.000He had been arrested 42 times, including punching a grandma, a 64-year-old grandma, and then attempted kidnapping of a seven-year-old on the subway, both instances.
00:22:02.000What we got to do, if we really want to see homicides go down, is keep bad guys with guns in jail because when they're in jail, they can't be in community shooting people.
00:22:11.000So when people talk about what we're going to do different or what we should do different, what we need to do different, that's the thing that we need to do different.
00:22:18.000We need to keep violent people in jail.
00:22:20.000Right now, the average homicide suspect, the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.
00:22:33.000So here you have the black police chief of the DC Metro Police Department saying the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times before committing murder.
00:22:46.000So when you talk about sympathy for the victims, these are homicide victims.
00:22:50.000These are murder victims in their families.
00:22:52.000That man is, you know, he could be women too, but the men or women that are committing these crimes 11 times, Barry.
00:24:11.000And the argument is when a prisoner is released, released usually to parole because he hasn't served his full sentence.
00:24:20.000So if you've served, let's say, 15 years of a 20-year sentence, you do five years more in freedom on parole.
00:24:28.000When that prisoner is released, I say, let's give him the bracelet, as it's called, electronic monitoring, so that we know where he goes, so that we know when he's in the vicinity of a new crime, so that he can be encouraged to meet with his parole officer, to go to a job and rehabilitate himself, to go to a drug treatment clinic and get off his drug problem.
00:24:55.000Let's encourage him to do that and discourage him from going back to prison, as so many do.
00:25:36.000You have so many cases that each parole officer couldn't possibly monitor all the people he's responsible for.
00:25:45.000The consequence of that, of course, is that each parole officer only monitors a small percentage of the parolees that he or she is responsible for.
00:25:55.000And therefore, the rest of them are really on an honor system to comply with the terms of parole.
00:26:59.000Go to your drug rehabilitation clinic at 8.30.
00:27:03.000It gives you reminders, opportunities, encouragements to do the right thing rather than just be one session with a judge who says, now get out there, son, and don't misbehave anymore.
00:27:16.000That's easily forgotten, and the pressures of the street will lead to more crime.
00:27:22.000So let's put a little counter pressure on them.
00:28:14.000This came out from Bragg's New York City again, New York City just leading the way, that nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people, according to police.
00:28:30.000So when you talk about, when we talk about the enormity of the problem, I think it feels so huge to so many of us that we just like, you know, and by the way, I think this is an interesting point as well.
00:28:40.000I mean, you've got states like Texas and New York and Florida that are roughly in California that are the populations of these states are equal to that of other countries, right?
00:28:49.000And so you throw in a conglomeration of countries all having their own crime stories.
00:28:54.000And I think mentally, you know, you do hear stories from France or Australia or whatever from time to time, but we have those populations in individual states.
00:29:04.000So we're constantly bombarded with this negativity.
00:29:07.000But the resources are there because the populations, the tax bases, the citizens are paying into these funds at a municipal level and the state level, the federal level.
00:29:19.000So when you say it's a small, relatively small population causing so much crime, it really, really is.
00:29:26.000And what we need to do is we need to get tough on these repeat offenders and not really let them out.
00:29:32.000Barry, an interesting side note here, we had some breaking news that hit during the break.
00:29:38.000And it turns out the shooter in Allen, Texas, a Hispanic male, we know that much, he was actually discharged from the army because of mental health.
00:30:03.000And it basically, it's 20 years old, to be perfectly honest, but it shows this drop in mental hospitalization in America.
00:30:11.000And then at around 1975, let's say the lines intersect and you see the prison population skyrocket in America and the mental hospitalization population dramatically decrease.
00:30:25.000You know, it strikes kind of, Barry, almost one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
00:30:30.000You know, there's all these images from an older America of these very scary, insane asylums.
00:30:37.000But it does strike you that maybe this was how we dealt with a lot of these folks in the past.
00:30:42.000You think of Jordan Neely in New York City.
00:30:45.000What role, if any, do you think increasing funding for mental hospitalization, what role is there in decreasing crime in America?
00:30:56.000When I did some research on this, I don't have the data in front of me now, Andrew, but when I did some research, I found that there were significant portion of the prison population and even more of the jail population that had significant mental problems, including psychoses of various sorts.
00:31:13.000So I think we've done our country great harm by deinstitutionalizing people who really need help.
00:31:20.000They need help in maintaining their medicines.
00:31:25.000They need help in staying off the streets and staying out of trouble.
00:31:29.000And they need help in keeping from committing crime.
00:31:33.000So I think we need to start rethinking the opening, the reopening of our hospitals for people with serious mental problems.
00:31:44.000I think it's a good criminal justice policy, but it's also, frankly, a good mental health and medical policy.
00:31:51.000It'll be expensive, but it'll be worth it.
00:31:54.000Yeah, so it seems like we have these two sort of parallel approaches.
00:32:02.000Refunding the institutionalization of the insane, the schizophrenic, the people with serious mental problems, but also imprisoning those that are repeat offenders.
00:32:14.000I mean, we go back to this New York City story where you have, you know, a third, they're arrested, 327 people arrested 6,000 times.
00:33:11.000So, Barry, I don't hear you advocating for some mass prison that can house 40,000 MS-13 gang members, but he's sending a signal to his population that the game is over.
00:33:50.000We had a big gang problem in New York.
00:33:52.000So the big cities are facing these gang problems.
00:33:56.000And when the gangs start shooting, using guns, assaulting people, it's time really to convict them and put them in prison.
00:34:05.000Because playing around with groups like that and with young men like that, and it's almost always young men, is just encouraging more crime, more disorder, more violence.
00:34:16.000And then you get these terrible cases like the man who was arrested 40 times, released, and then went on the subway and scared the devil out of people.
00:34:26.000So we need to crack down on those gangs.