Debate over Criminal Justice Delusions

Heather Mac Donald with an oped in the Wall Street Journal drawn from her longer City Journal article, “The Decriminalization Delusion,” joins the criminal justice reform debate with guns blazing.  Mac Donald blasts criminal justice reform advocates on the left and right, from the ACLU to Newt Gingrich.

For NCFCA debaters researching the federal court reform resolution, important facts and figures in both articles will be valuable for many cases, including proposed changes in mandatory minimum sentences.

In the end, Mac Donald calls for better policing as a way to slow the path to more serious crimes that she argues fill our prisons.

This view of general mismanagement of police and courts and prisons is supported, in my view, by the analysis of UCLA Professor Mark Kleinman, discussed in this 2010 Reason.tv video: “Filling Up Prisons Without Fighting Crime: Mark Kleiman on America’s Criminal Justice System.”

UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is “angry about having too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars.” The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, yet, says Kleiman, our high incarceration rate isn’t making us safer.