The Charlie Kirk Show - Debunking America's Over-Incarceration Myth with Barry Latzer

00:00:00.000 All 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.

00:00:15.000 So we asked the question, do we have an over-incarceration problem in America, like the left likes to say?

00:00:21.000 What are the solutions? 0.93

00:00:22.000 Is El Salvador showing the way?

00:00:25.000 We talk about it all.

00:00:27.000 We talk about it all, and it's fascinating.

00:00:29.000 It'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.

00:00:40.000 You guys aren't going to want to miss it.

00:00:41.000 Barry knows his stuff.

00:00:42.000 Buckle up. 0.96

00:00:43.000 Here we go.

00:00:44.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:46.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:48.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:52.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:55.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:56.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:57.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:01:27.000 We 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.

00:01:43.000 We've got Soros, district attorneys.

00:01:45.000 We'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.

00:01:59.000 The guest is Barry Latzer.

00:02:01.000 It'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.

00:02:13.000 So a fascinating conversation as we revisit crime.

00:02:17.000 I believe we have Barry.

00:02:18.000 Barry, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:21.000 Thank you so much.

00:02:22.000 I'm with you.

00:02:24.000 Fantastic.

00:02:25.000 Honored to have you with us.

00:02:27.000 I 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.

00:02:38.000 I can't remember exactly when that got passed.

00:02:41.000 But 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.

00:02:51.000 I looked at it and I thought, hey, you know, maybe we can decrease recidivism.

00:02:55.000 Maybe we can, maybe this is a good thing.

00:02:57.000 You know, maybe we can, there's some political upside to it.

00:03:00.000 I think I was being pragmatic about it.

00:03:03.000 I have a feeling you probably were looking at that with a lot of skepticism at the moment.

00:03:08.000 So let's go back to that era.

00:03:10.000 Let's start at the First Step Act.

00:03:12.000 I have a bunch of questions for you, but what was your reaction to that?

00:03:16.000 Do you cover it in the book?

00:03:17.000 And what were the lessons that we've learned from it?

00:03:21.000 Well, first thing to know is that law only applied to federal prisoners.

00:03:27.000 And federal prisoners are only 11% of the prison population.

00:03:33.000 So the first thing to realize is this is a limited impact law.

00:03:38.000 And it did provide some leniencies.

00:03:40.000 It provided some breaks for federal prisoners who really were on their way out.

00:03:46.000 That is, they were about to be paroled.

00:03:49.000 So I didn't, I couldn't get excited about the thing one way or the other, to tell you the truth.

00:03:56.000 I thought, you know, fine, you want to do some reforms, fine, this is a way to do it.

00:04:02.000 It's almost like a test case, you know, because it only applies to the federal institutions.

00:04:08.000 Have you looked at the data after the fact?

00:04:11.000 Would you call the First Step Act?

00:04:14.000 I mean, like I said, Tom Cotton wrote the forward to your book, and I remember vividly Tom Cotton just coming out against it.

00:04:20.000 He broke.

00:04:21.000 You remember you got a Republican president in the oval, and he came out against it.

00:04:27.000 I remember thinking, like, you know, what are you doing, Tom?

00:04:29.000 This is, Senator, this is not the right political move, but he did it anyway, out of principle.

00:04:33.000 So is there any read on how successful or not that's been?

00:04:38.000 Well, 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.

00:04:53.000 But nothing came of that.

00:04:54.000 And it's probably a good thing that nothing came of that.

00:04:57.000 And it's a good reminder to us that every state runs their own shop for criminal justice.

00:05:03.000 And 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. 0.98

00:05:12.000 But they didn't in this case.

00:05:14.000 They ran out of time.

00:05:15.000 Maybe they would never have done it anyway.

00:05:17.000 So I think this is a one-off.

00:05:20.000 I don't think this is going to be replicated.

00:05:22.000 And it really is a minimal impact law, to tell you the truth.

00:05:26.000 Minimal.

00:05:26.000 Fair enough.

00:05:27.000 So 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.

00:05:37.000 They saw the political upside.

00:05:39.000 You know, Trump's being, you know, they think of him as such a mean-hearted man.

00:05:42.000 And here he is actually saying, hey, we want to get people out of federal prison and we want to give them a second chance.

00:05:47.000 I want to give them a first step up in life.

00:05:49.000 But I feel like I'm emblematic of the conservative movement.

00:05:53.000 I want tough on crime.

00:05:54.000 I feel like we've looked back at the lessons that the country learned out of the 60s and 70s and 80s.

00:06:00.000 They got tough on crime in the 90s.

00:06:02.000 We had the three strike laws.

00:06:04.000 You had the reforming of the police departments in the inner cities of Los Angeles and New York.

00:06:09.000 And it's like we've completely forgotten all of those lessons.

00:06:12.000 We had this inner city boom of investment flooding into our inner cities.

00:06:18.000 And then we've forgotten these lessons under, I don't know why.

00:06:21.000 So build out the premise of your book.

00:06:23.000 We've got about four minutes in this segment.

00:06:25.000 We got the whole hour.

00:06:26.000 So take your time.

00:06:27.000 Okay, fine.

00:06:28.000 Okay, so you're right.

00:06:31.000 The 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.

00:06:51.000 By the way, I write about this in my previous book, While We're Plugging Books, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America.

00:06:58.000 So now we go into the mid-90s, and what's happening?

00:07:03.000 The crime wave is finally abating.

00:07:06.000 And why is it abating?

00:07:08.000 For one reason, of course, we got tougher.

00:07:11.000 As you said, absolutely.

00:07:13.000 The system toughened up.

00:07:15.000 In the late 60s, early 70s, the system was very weak.

00:07:19.000 And that turned out to be a big incentive to more crime.

00:07:23.000 Big surprise, right?

00:07:25.000 If you weaken the system too much, you get more crime.

00:07:28.000 If you strengthen the system, you can reduce crime.

00:07:32.000 That's what happened in the mid-90s.

00:07:34.000 And I'll remind your viewers or auditors, the tough crime bill, 1994, pushed, of course, by the Democrats, pushed by President Bill Clinton.

00:07:48.000 And who shepherded it through the Senate?

00:07:50.000 Joe Biden.

00:07:51.000 Joe Biden.

00:07:52.000 Senator Joe Biden.

00:07:53.000 Okay, he doesn't want to remember that anymore.

00:07:57.000 But the fact is he supported it.

00:07:59.000 The Democrats supported it.

00:08:00.000 Why?

00:08:01.000 Because crime had been bad for over 25 years, very high rates, and people didn't forget that.

00:08:10.000 It's true that crime was going down starting in the mid-90s.

00:08:14.000 The crack epidemic ended.

00:08:16.000 Crime started to recede.

00:08:18.000 That is true, but nobody knew how long it would last, you see.

00:08:23.000 Nobody knew if this was going to be like the early 80s, where it goes down and then cycles back up again.

00:08:30.000 No one knew the answer to that.

00:08:32.000 So it was natural for people to get tough on crime.

00:08:35.000 Now, 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.

00:08:50.000 And they argue enough of this toughening up.

00:08:54.000 It's time to soften the system.

00:08:57.000 It's time to reduce the impact of imprisonment.

00:09:02.000 And they, of course, launch their essentially decarceration movement, their movement to remove people from prisons, both state and federal.

00:09:13.000 And really, that leads us to where we are today.

00:09:17.000 What's happened since?

00:09:19.000 In fact, incarceration rates have gone down.

00:09:22.000 Crime 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.

00:09:42.000 And we have a big crime spike.

00:09:44.000 Now we're heading into 2023.

00:09:47.000 We're into 2023.

00:09:49.000 Will crime continue to spike?

00:09:51.000 I don't think so.

00:09:52.000 I think it's going to diminish.

00:09:54.000 We already have some preliminary data that says it will diminish.

00:09:59.000 But of course, the progressives are still pushing very hard.

00:10:03.000 And some of the district attorneys take this same tack.

00:10:08.000 They're pushing very hard to reduce prison and jail populations.

00:10:14.000 This is a big mistake.

00:10:17.000 And I think that's why the senator opposed this sort of thing.

00:10:23.000 That's why Cotton opposes this kind of leniency.

00:10:28.000 But I mean, you look at what's going on at the border with 700,000 illegals that are about to come over.

00:10:33.000 We've already had millions.

00:10:35.000 We don't know who these people are, where they come from. 1.00

00:10:37.000 We've already seen illegal immigrants commit mass murder down in Texas this past weekend. 0.59

00:10:44.000 So I'm going to challenge the assumption that crime is going to go down, but I want to hear your thoughts on why you have that opinion.

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00:11:32.000 Barry, I have a pretty basic question for you.

00:11:35.000 You 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?

00:11:42.000 I 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.

00:11:53.000 And it sort of gave the moral high ground to some of these left-wing activists that were advocating for reducing the prison population.

00:12:01.000 So I'm just going to ask it to you straight.

00:12:03.000 And the only reason I bring that up is because I think it's an interesting model for us to follow on the right.

00:12:07.000 It's like some of these take a long lead time.

00:12:10.000 Some 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.

00:12:19.000 So let me just ask you a basic question.

00:12:23.000 Do we have an over incarceration problem in America?

00:12:27.000 Are there too many people in prison or jail?

00:12:32.000 No, absolutely not.

00:12:33.000 And here's why I say this: you have to look at the crime problem before you can answer the incarceration problem, right?

00:12:41.000 If we had less crime, if we had fewer offenders, we wouldn't need as many people incarcerated.

00:12:47.000 We don't have good alternatives to incarceration.

00:12:50.000 I mean, I know that the progressives argue you have reform programs, rehabilitation programs.

00:12:57.000 Well, let me just give you one statistic here, Andrew.

00:13:00.000 When 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.

00:13:17.000 So 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.

00:13:30.000 In 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.

00:13:45.000 The realities are this, Andrew.

00:13:47.000 55%, almost 56% of all the people in prison have committed violent crimes, murder, rape, robbery, assault, sexual assault, etc.

00:13:59.000 Okay?

00:14:00.000 55%.

00:14:01.000 That's a substantial majority.

00:14:04.000 16% have done serious property crimes.

00:14:08.000 I'm talking about burglary, thefts, major theft, not just a pair of sneakers from the department store, although that's a crime too.

00:14:17.000 Motor vehicle theft, fraud, and other property crimes.

00:14:22.000 So how many have done drug crimes?

00:14:24.000 We often hear the progressives say, oh, well, the big mass incarceration is due to drug crimes.

00:14:31.000 Not true.

00:14:32.000 14% of the people in prison are there because of drug crimes.

00:14:37.000 And of the 14%, over 10% are there because they were trafficking.

00:14:43.000 Not just mere possession, Andrew.

00:14:45.000 Not just the kid caught on the street corner with reefer.

00:14:49.000 We're talking about selling drugs or organizing the sale of drugs.

00:14:54.000 That's 10 out of the 14%.

00:14:57.000 The final group are 12%, excuse me, what we call public order crimes.

00:15:04.000 These are people caught with guns, illegal, driving while intoxicated, usually multiple offenses, and other similar public order offenses.

00:15:14.000 So are we locking up too many people?

00:15:17.000 Which of those people would you like to see let out?

00:15:20.000 Which of those people should we give a discount to in terms of their prison sentences?

00:15:27.000 They have no good answer to that.

00:15:29.000 The decarcerationists, as I call them.

00:15:32.000 I mean, I think you make some really interesting points there.

00:15:32.000 Absolutely.

00:15:35.000 I mean, I wish we had more time in this segment.

00:15:37.000 We have a nice long segment after this break, and I think we can dive into a lot of that.

00:15:41.000 I 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. 0.97

00:16:01.000 The 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. 0.59

00:16:12.000 You want to talk about root causes. 1.00

00:16:13.000 It's fatherlessness in the home.

00:16:15.000 It's, as you said, the drug problems back in the 80s and early 90s that finally abated.

00:16:21.000 Well, guess what?

00:16:21.000 We have another drug problem that's spilling right over our borders.

00:16:27.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:17:29.000 I want to read Barry a little bit about your bio, your CV.

00:17:34.000 You've been doing this for a long time.

00:17:36.000 You have a great background in this for over three and a half decades.

00:17:40.000 Barry Latzer was a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, member of the master's and doctoral faculties.

00:17:48.000 He taught courses on criminal justice, criminal law, procedure, state constitutional law, capital punishment, and most recently, crime history.

00:17:56.000 You've been written up.

00:17:57.000 Your writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Daily News.

00:18:04.000 Yeah, 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.

00:18:21.000 I can't help but think that that was a very interesting experience.

00:18:25.000 So these were folks that couldn't afford defense, right?

00:18:30.000 And you stepped up on their behalf.

00:18:31.000 What did you, I know this is sort of a side, Barry, but I mean, does that inform kind of what you're talking about now?

00:18:36.000 I mean, or what did you learn from those people?

00:18:39.000 Sure.

00:18:40.000 I was a professor for most of my life, and I said, you know what?

00:18:45.000 I can't get all of the knowledge I need out of a book.

00:18:49.000 And I asked my chairman at the time, I want to take a leave of absence and I want to go work as a district attorney.

00:18:57.000 And I did.

00:18:58.000 And I did in Brooklyn during the crack years.

00:19:01.000 You can imagine how busy we were.

00:19:03.000 And 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.

00:19:16.000 And I worked on that side of the aisle, so to speak, with indigent defendants.

00:19:20.000 So both of them served as great learning experiences.

00:19:24.000 You 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.

00:19:40.000 You know, but just based on your current writings, I mean, you've come out on the other side.

00:19:45.000 You're tough on crime.

00:19:47.000 I mean, how did those connect at all?

00:19:49.000 Am I reaching here?

00:19:50.000 I'm just curious because you experienced some of these hardships.

00:19:53.000 It's hard not to feel bad for them.

00:19:55.000 You see the personal side of it.

00:19:57.000 But how does that inform your current tough on crime stance?

00:20:01.000 Well, I'm not a throwaway the key kind of guy, but I also saw what happened to the victims.

00:20:08.000 And when you see what happens to the victims, then you realize there's another side to this story.

00:20:13.000 And your heart should go out to the victims, too, who, after all, are innocents.

00:20:18.000 They're the ones who were victimized.

00:20:21.000 So I was very sympathetic to the victims as well.

00:20:25.000 And I thought, well, we can't only worry about the accused.

00:20:29.000 We also have to worry about the people that the accused hurt.

00:20:33.000 That's right.

00:20:33.000 And that's what informed my views.

00:20:37.000 But of course, I've done a lot of reading.

00:20:39.000 I've done a lot of research.

00:20:41.000 And that's all part of the mix, not only my personal experience.

00:20:45.000 All right.

00:20:45.000 So, Barry, I kind of want to transition a little bit.

00:20:48.000 I want to talk about solutions.

00:20:49.000 I think you and I agree.

00:20:50.000 I think the audience will agree we need to be tough on crime.

00:20:54.000 The fact that we're being, we basically are big cities.

00:20:57.000 You'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.

00:21:09.000 This former Marine Penny, alongside other gentlemen.

00:21:14.000 But this person, Jordan Neely, was apparently schizophrenic or had other mental health issues.

00:21:19.000 He 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.

00:21:30.000 So this guy was a menace to society.

00:21:31.000 He shouldn't have been there.

00:21:33.000 The real criminals in this instance are the politicians that have instituted these catch and release policies.

00:21:39.000 But I want to play a cut here.

00:21:43.000 This is from the DC police chief.

00:21:45.000 I don't have his name handy, but this is a clip Charlie posted on his Twitter a while back, and it just went viral.

00:21:52.000 It's from March.

00:21:54.000 But he talks about the average homicide suspect in the DC metro area.

00:21:58.000 Listen to this cut, 38.

00:22:01.000 Guns off the street.

00:22:02.000 What 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.

00:22:11.000 So 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.

00:22:18.000 We need to keep violent people in jail. 0.79

00:22:20.000 Right now, the average homicide suspect, the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide.

00:22:29.000 That is a problem.

00:22:31.000 That is a problem. 0.61

00:22:33.000 So 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.

00:22:46.000 So when you talk about sympathy for the victims, these are homicide victims.

00:22:50.000 These are murder victims in their families.

00:22:52.000 That man is, you know, he could be women too, but the men or women that are committing these crimes 11 times, Barry.

00:22:59.000 So what is the solution?

00:23:01.000 What is the solution?

00:23:02.000 Do we build more prisons?

00:23:03.000 Are we going to have the prison population the size of El Salvador?

00:23:06.000 Which is another interesting story I want to get with you.

00:23:08.000 Get to with you.

00:23:09.000 Okay, first of all, the figure is accurate, except, in fact, it's 11 times per state prisoner, not just the ones who commit murder.

00:23:18.000 The state prisoners average 11 arrests prior to their imprisonment.

00:23:25.000 And here's something worse, Andrew.

00:23:27.000 Once they're released, we know that 83% of them will be arrested for another crime.

00:23:33.000 83%.

00:23:35.000 That is a very high and scary figure.

00:23:38.000 So we're dealing with a relatively small population that is responsible for a great deal of our crime.

00:23:45.000 Now, how long do they serve?

00:23:47.000 And this is going to shock your audience, too.

00:23:49.000 The data show that they serve on average under three years.

00:23:54.000 Two-thirds of the prison population are released in about two and a half years.

00:24:01.000 And so they don't serve their full sentences.

00:24:04.000 Now, I'm not even arguing that they should serve their full sentences necessarily.

00:24:08.000 I have a different argument to make.

00:24:11.000 And the argument is when a prisoner is released, released usually to parole because he hasn't served his full sentence.

00:24:20.000 So if you've served, let's say, 15 years of a 20-year sentence, you do five years more in freedom on parole.

00:24:28.000 When 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.

00:24:55.000 Let's encourage him to do that and discourage him from going back to prison, as so many do.

00:25:02.000 And this will save money on prisons.

00:25:05.000 This will rehabilitate people and give them an opportunity to reintegrate with law-abiding society.

00:25:12.000 And it will protect the public at the same time.

00:25:15.000 Barry, that's my proposal.

00:25:17.000 Okay, so how does your proposal differ from what currently is the reality?

00:25:21.000 I mean, when you go on parole, if you're a parolee at this point, you don't have an ankle monitor?

00:25:26.000 Is that...

00:25:27.000 No, no, sir.

00:25:28.000 Usually they don't.

00:25:29.000 And it's an honor system for men who unfortunately have not been very honorable.

00:25:34.000 And that's our problem.

00:25:36.000 You have so many cases that each parole officer couldn't possibly monitor all the people he's responsible for.

00:25:45.000 The 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.

00:25:55.000 And therefore, the rest of them are really on an honor system to comply with the terms of parole.

00:26:02.000 And by the way, what are those terms?

00:26:04.000 Don't do drugs.

00:26:06.000 Don't do excessive alcohol.

00:26:08.000 Don't hang out with your former pals who are involved in criminal activity.

00:26:13.000 Get a job, do the job, et cetera.

00:26:17.000 They're common sense things to keep people out of trouble.

00:26:19.000 So basically, you're saying you call this incarceration.

00:26:23.000 Am I right?

00:26:24.000 Ecarceration.

00:26:25.000 So incarceration, your premise is that, hey, it's much cheaper than imprisoning somebody.

00:26:30.000 Give them an ankle bracelet.

00:26:33.000 Are there ways to game that, Barry?

00:26:35.000 Is there...

00:26:36.000 Sure.

00:26:37.000 So how do we?

00:26:37.000 There are.

00:26:38.000 There are.

00:26:38.000 Okay.

00:26:39.000 I mean, if a guy gets angry enough, he probably could chop the thing off, cut the thing off, and go and commit his crime. 0.78

00:26:39.000 So is there any... 0.78

00:26:48.000 But many will not because it gives you reminders, Andrew, okay?

00:26:53.000 It says, go meet with your parole officer at 12 o'clock.

00:26:56.000 Go to your job at 9 o'clock.

00:26:59.000 Go to your drug rehabilitation clinic at 8.30.

00:27:03.000 It 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.

00:27:16.000 That's easily forgotten, and the pressures of the street will lead to more crime.

00:27:22.000 So let's put a little counter pressure on them.

00:27:25.000 Let's put the ecarceration to use. 0.97

00:27:28.000 This is a technology we in the United States invented.

00:27:32.000 We developed this technology and yet other countries are using it, Andrew, and we're barely using it.

00:27:38.000 And by the way, the countries that are using it are some of the most progressive countries in the world.

00:27:43.000 The Scandinavian countries, France, Israel, they're all using this technology and we're being left behind.

00:27:52.000 So Barry, this would have to be done state by state, though, right?

00:27:56.000 I mean, you could do it.

00:27:57.000 Yeah, all right.

00:27:57.000 Absolutely.

00:27:58.000 So that's going to be a state and maybe even...

00:28:01.000 Maybe even county by county, Andrew.

00:28:03.000 I mean, of course, someone's got to pay for it, but it's worth it.

00:28:07.000 Cheaper than prison by.

00:28:09.000 Barry, I want to bring up another point.

00:28:11.000 This made headlines recently.

00:28:12.000 I think it's a really good point.

00:28:14.000 This 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.

00:28:29.000 So 327.

00:28:30.000 So 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.

00:28:40.000 I 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?

00:28:49.000 And so you throw in a conglomeration of countries all having their own crime stories.

00:28:54.000 And 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.

00:29:04.000 So we're constantly bombarded with this negativity.

00:29:07.000 But 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.

00:29:17.000 This is a problem that we can tackle.

00:29:19.000 So when you say it's a small, relatively small population causing so much crime, it really, really is.

00:29:26.000 And what we need to do is we need to get tough on these repeat offenders and not really let them out.

00:29:32.000 Barry, an interesting side note here, we had some breaking news that hit during the break.

00:29:38.000 And 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.

00:29:51.000 I'm going to throw up this chart.

00:29:52.000 Go ahead and throw up the graph that I sent team.

00:29:59.000 Let's see here.

00:29:59.000 There you go.

00:30:00.000 So this is an interesting graph.

00:30:03.000 And it basically, it's 20 years old, to be perfectly honest, but it shows this drop in mental hospitalization in America.

00:30:11.000 And 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.

00:30:25.000 You know, it strikes kind of, Barry, almost one flew over the cuckoo's nest. 0.87

00:30:30.000 You know, there's all these images from an older America of these very scary, insane asylums. 0.90

00:30:37.000 But it does strike you that maybe this was how we dealt with a lot of these folks in the past. 0.83

00:30:42.000 You think of Jordan Neely in New York City.

00:30:45.000 What role, if any, do you think increasing funding for mental hospitalization, what role is there in decreasing crime in America?

00:30:55.000 Yeah, I think it's significant.

00:30:56.000 When 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.

00:31:13.000 So I think we've done our country great harm by deinstitutionalizing people who really need help.

00:31:20.000 They need help in maintaining their medicines.

00:31:25.000 They need help in staying off the streets and staying out of trouble.

00:31:29.000 And they need help in keeping from committing crime.

00:31:33.000 So I think we need to start rethinking the opening, the reopening of our hospitals for people with serious mental problems.

00:31:44.000 I think it's a good criminal justice policy, but it's also, frankly, a good mental health and medical policy.

00:31:51.000 It'll be expensive, but it'll be worth it.

00:31:54.000 Yeah, so it seems like we have these two sort of parallel approaches.

00:32:02.000 Refunding the institutionalization of the insane, the schizophrenic, the people with serious mental problems, but also imprisoning those that are repeat offenders.

00:32:14.000 I 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.

00:32:23.000 I mean, it's just, it's absolutely insane.

00:32:26.000 So the question is, you go back to like three strikes, you're out. 0.54

00:32:30.000 You know, these have been widely controversial, you know, but I want to turn our eyes to El Salvador.

00:32:38.000 I'm going to play this clip, Cut 37, and this is from Naib Bukele's El Salvador.

00:32:44.000 He's got a 90% approval rating.

00:32:47.000 Homicides have dropped like a rock in that country.

00:32:50.000 37. 0.92

00:32:51.000 Yeah.

00:33:11.000 So, 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.

00:33:23.000 He's not playing around.

00:33:25.000 What message do our leaders need to send?

00:33:27.000 I mean, is there a point where you say, hey, you're in prison for life?

00:33:31.000 You do this 10 times, you're done five times?

00:33:33.000 Or what's the middle ground?

00:33:35.000 One minute.

00:33:36.000 Well, as I understand it, the El Salvador problem is a gang problem.

00:33:40.000 And we don't have to look very far to see the same gang slash criminal problem in the United States.

00:33:46.000 Look at any big city.

00:33:47.000 You see warring gangs in Chicago.

00:33:50.000 We had a big gang problem in New York.

00:33:52.000 So the big cities are facing these gang problems.

00:33:56.000 And when the gangs start shooting, using guns, assaulting people, it's time really to convict them and put them in prison.

00:34:05.000 Because 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.

00:34:16.000 And 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.

00:34:26.000 So we need to crack down on those gangs.

00:34:29.000 Great.

00:34:30.000 Well, listen, Barry, this has been a fascinating conversation.

00:34:32.000 I see a nuanced view, but I see a tough on crime view that I think is well overdue.

00:34:37.000 The myth of over punishment with Barry Latzer.

00:34:40.000 Thanks so much, Barry.

00:34:41.000 We appreciate it.

00:34:42.000 And that's all the time we have for today.

00:34:44.000 We'll see you tomorrow.

00:34:45.000 Charlie Kirk Show.

00:34:48.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 09, 2023

Debunking America's Over-Incarceration Myth with Barry Latzer

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