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What do you do with a convicted criminal who has no inclination to be part of "white" society? Getting an education and working in our free enterprise "system" is the answer. How do you make people do that? I work part-time at a community college full of kids working (lousy) full-time jobs while carrying a course load. Where did they get the incentive to succeed? How can we instill it in others? I have no answers.
Irony.
Second, we need to stop using the power of government to keep kids in a public school system that doesn't provide them with the education they need to be successful. Again, public schooling is only the most prominent example of a government intervention intended to help everyone but which ends up benefiting those groups best at securing political influence (and the poorest citizens aren't in this category).
If the terrible injustice and inequality we see today were to persist after a major scaling-back of the government programs that I think contribute to the problem today, then I admit, I would be somewhat stumped as to the next move. But we're not there yet, and before we start to bemoan the fundamental injustice of the universe and ponder what we can do to make right what God has made wrong, let's see what happens when the institutions we have supposedly created to solve that problem stop making it worse.
This is a great discussion and once the comments get going on Cato Unbound I'll definitely put up a piece on my site on it.
For now, I'll just suggest a way to get your head around Loury's point is to realize that the unintended effects of de facto segregation are far more regular and far-reaching than just prison populations.
I'm moving to the East Bay, CA, and have been looking at various neighborhoods. Basically, high levels of "white" people correlate with high ground whereas ethnic diversity directly correlates with low ground, which in the Bay Area means propensity for liquefaction during an earthquake. Essentially, a big quake would have a far greater effect on poor, diverse areas than wealthy, homogeneously white areas. This is pretty much exactly what happened in New Orleans during Katrina except the neighborhoods were flooded by a hurricane instead of turned into sinkholes by an earthquake like they would be in CA.
The Bay Area and New Orleans are just two of the more pressing examples because of the propensity for their respective natural disasters, but virtually every major city in the US has a correlation between "higher ground" and being rich and white.
In other words, we set ourselves up for a repeat of Katrina in every city where none of the white neighborhoods want to even let in displaced minorities, let alone help them. This sort of tension just isn't good for the well being of a state no matter how you look at it. But it's a regular effect of de facto segregation unregulated.
Virginia Postrel wrote a much more articulate explanation of this dichotomy, and lays out perhaps one of the best supporting arguments for the Red State Blue State divide I've heard so far. Well worth a read. Here's a quote:
"Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.
The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing. Instead of inviting newcomers, this approach rewards longtime residents with big capital gains and the political clout to block projects they don’t like. "
Whole thing well worth a read ... only two pages.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing
Another 50% of convicts were on drugs or alcohol at the time of crime. This suggests that we could massively reduce the crime rate by opening up more heavily subsidized urban outpatient rehab centers. Rehab is certainly cheaper than imprisonment.
Alan Bock discusses the qui bono angle to rehab therapists in this discussion:
http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/03/06/alan-bock-4/
The idea that it is segregation that keeps poor communities down is just wrong. The problem isn't separation, it's accountability. Think about Canada: despite their tragic separation from the United States and significant transactions costs they incur if they want to do business with US citizens, they seem to be doing just fine.
But what if suddenly the United States were responsible for all law enforcement and education that goes on in Canada?
I'm an American politician, and in neither scenario do I particularly care one way or the other about the welfare of Canadians. Only in the second case does my indifference make a difference. Even though we have to police them, Canadians still can't vote, so I'm going to run Canadian law enforcement in a manner that is easy for me and makes U.S. citizens happy, not Canadians. If the Canadians get out of line, I'll throw them in jail. What do I care? They have no power to take me out of my job, and it's one less pesky Canadian to worry about. When it comes time to provide public services like education, I'm going to make sure that my constituents are happy by giving them all the important education contracts. Will that provide them with the best possible education for the money? Do I care?
People all over the world manage to get by without the US Government taking care of them. It can't be true that we are the cause of the problems in the inner city simply because we don't want to be near those people. There are lots of people in the world we don't want to be near. That only hurts them when we limit their autonomy and use their perceived helplessness as an excuse to enrich ourselves and our friends at their expense.
Maybe in some abstract sense, yes, but in a very literal physical sense, it really is true. The ghettos face not just social isolation but very literal physical isolation as well, with poor access to transit, and a population that in many cases can't afford cars. That puts many opportunities out of their reach, not in some metaphoric sense, but in the very literal "two hour bus ride, and the bus stops at 5:30" sense.
Bryant: Stop right where you are! You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people!
[Deckard stops at the door]
Deckard: No choice, huh?
Bryant: [smiles] No choice, pal.
This marginalization by the broader culture is why all of those groups have collapsed into deeply disfunctional cultures from which none of them have ever managed to extricate themselves.
Excellent post.
Can we simply let out drug users? Or must we fix society first?
2. Maybe Glenn unpacks this more in the essay - but saying "we have structured the space in our urban environment..." distracts me from his conclusion. Far from being structured - the urban space is emergent not designed. I don't think it is very helpful to paint over complex emergent phenomena with great big anthropomorphising 'we's and 'they's. It's compelling prose but it hides more than it describes.
I also agree that much of the blame for ghettoization can be laid at the feet of government action. But those effects are often unintended or at least contrary to the purported intention.
All I'm trying to say is that saying 'we have structured...' as well as the continued use of great big whopping 'we's and 'they's is useful in painting a morality play but not so useful in describing reality.
Without getting into any of those wicked caricatures, I must say that legalizing drugs would solve many more problems than it would cause.
More broadly, I think Loury is a little off the mark in how he pins the blame on racism. Not that racism isn't involved -- it clearly is. But I think it's more of a supporting than a leading role. We have some badly designed and poorly justified policies, particularly in the areas of drugs, education, and welfare. These policies aren't necessarily racist in intent (though to some extent they may owe their historical origins to racism). People who support these policies now don't do so on racist grounds, per se. But ignorance of, and indifference to, the plight of the people who suffer most from these policies is part of what allows them to persist.
Or to put it more simply: Because it's mostly black people getting thrown in prison because of the drug war, white people have less incentive to stop the drug war. Because black people are disproportionately harmed by the monopoly public school system, white people have less incentive to break the monopoly.
I wish Loury had focused more on policies, less on attitudes. The attitudes matter, but they are enabled by a particular set of policies that make it easier for people to indulge their residual racism.
This is why state sanctioned monopolies and "drug wars" are bad. In markets, not everybody has to show, explicitly, that they care for, say, the (hypothetical) fact that Indian Americans do or do not have access to Netflix, the mall, etc. It isn't usually a problem. And there is little reason, historically, empirically or theoretically, to think that the more important things in life wouldn't also be made available to more people, more often sans state interference.
So it's not really clear to me how you can prevent segregation even if it would have a beneficial effect to have people of radically different socio-economic tiers living amongst each other.
As a result, it seems like we should focus on what everyone else has been pointing out: ending drug prohibition, getting out of public schooling, etc.
This isn't entirely true. In the 1960s and 1970s the government worked hard to destroy moderately dysfunctional ghettos and replace them with planned urban environments. The problem is that the replacements ended up creating much worse community situations than the ones they destroyed.
Scattered site public housing is worlds better than building giant towers and stuffing poor people in them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-c...
Bobcat, Lott seems like a shady character (and he said my comments were kooky, which shows how crazy he is!) but he did apparently have a significant impact on empirical social science regarding two-tailed tests and he's written a lot on crime.
I would have liked more data and rigor in Loury's essay and less "moral outrage" (certainly not "self-righteous"!). In claiming we are more punitive by any measure (which he limits to dollars and size) shouldn't we take into account the number of crimes which may (though not likely) be punished just as severely elsewhere? He gives no evidence about other countries in his claim that the U.S is an outlier with regard to demographic profile. If we actually were a demographic outlier in that more of our population were young males that would cut against his case, although I really don't know what he was getting at with the international comparison. He has lots about figures about how bad things are for black male high-school dropouts, but is so focused on the police and penal system given dropouts that he pays little attention to the school system and the question of why there are so many dropouts.
I did like his Millian point about acknowledging the costs to criminals, and I try to remember that point myself. His point about the harm to the broader networks was also well made by Tim Harford in the Logic of Life.
I am skeptical of his argument about the historical legacy of slavery, as I am with similar ones about colonialism. What ideal liberal state with a diverse population does not also have racial/ethnic disparities in incarceration, poverty, academic success? Why do northern liberal states have LARGER racial disparities in incarceration than former confederate ones (I'll admit though that the latter have more criminal white populations)?
Lastly, I think Will might be able to do a good job on his collectivism vs individualism. Why are they "us" merely by dint of being born in America? I can see an argument that as a polity we have created the conditions that result in mass incarceration and have hence tripped Colin Powell's Pottery Barn Rule, but if his concern is moral philosophy (and it is) he should explain why we do not have a similar responsibility toward others who merely happened to be born outside the legal borders of the United States.
I quote from the Initial intro:
"Great inequality is the scourge of modern societies. We provide the evidence on each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage births, and child well-being. For all eleven of these health and social problems, outcomes are very substantially worse in more unequal societies"
It seems strange to blame racism on these problems when the erasists have been in charge.
How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one..but it really has to want to change.
He says:
I am amazed that someone can write that, and yet still remain so blind himself to the rudiments of justice - that the poor do not deserve to be murdered or raped or robbed any more than the rich. The victims of crime don't even get the briefest mention of sympathy from Dr Loury.
I should say that I do agree that we should treat criminals with some sympathy and basics of humanity, and consider the costs to society of their punishment. But not at the price of forgetting about their victims.
This incredible mental block Dr Loury apparently has makes me wonder what things I am being so foolish about myself.
The point is, if all we're doing is holding individuals responsible for their wrongful acts, why do we have the highest incarceration rate among developed countries by such a huge margin?
Among the answers that Loury proposes, I think the least controversial is that we are focused on punitive, rather than instrumental measures. What end is served by taking the perpetrator of a victimless or even a non-violent but victimed crime, throwing him in a hellhole for several years, and then denying him decent employment opportunities for much if not all of his life after release? Is it possible that such a person might be more, rather than less, likely to commit further and more violent crimes as an ex-con?
Sure, you can say that "justice" demands that people be punished, but one of Loury's key points is that excessive or counter-productive punishment is a punishment not born by the criminal alone, but, in fact, by everyone. You can never buy any of the goods or services the convict might have produced had he had reasonable employment opportunities after release. Any time an opportunity for rehabilitation is forgone in the name of "just" punishment, you will be forced to live in a society with one more criminal in it than there would have been otherwise.
enacted draconian laws against the use, possession, and sale of numerous "drugs" . This
policy was designed to restrict activities among young minorities. To insure the success of these
punitive measures gov't agencies (the CIA, e.g.) imported and distributed drugs in center cities across the country. People were locked up for minor infractions so that prison populations swelled. A network of
private for-profit jails were built and thrived on lucrative government contracts. These measures insured that
a large percentage of young blacks and latinos were taken off the streets. This is clearly a policy of political
repression well known in regimes like fascist Germany, the USSR, and China. The U.S. has now joined
this infamous claque.
Well, no. We can quit incarcerating non-violent drug offenders, which, as several folks have pointed out, is a practice that creates more criminals and destroys communities. We can also do something about the hard problems, particularly de facto residential and school segregation.
Loury's main point is philosophical, and it's that societal trends (such as the patterns of dysfunction and civic exclusion that result in an 8:1 incarceration ratio of blacks to whites) can constitute an injustice, even if each individual action that went into the trend was pretty much blameless. We can talk about social injustice, or collective injustice, or a collective responsibility for the problem of crime and incarceration. Loury, as a liberal, finds this natural and pretty easy to justify. I'm some kind of a libertarian (liberaltarian?) so I accept it grudgingly -- I think it's true, but it's troubling that it's true, because it puts a dent in the notion of individual responsibility.
It runs counter to the Nozickian idea that the distribution of resources in society must be just unless someone engaged in force or fraud. I think that's more of the standard libertarian view. If nobody used violence on you, you're responsible for your choices, and having a lousy draw in the economic lottery earns you no claim against the property of your fellow citizens.
(Of course, there was both force and fraud in urban housing during most of the twentieth century. Blacks who moved into white neighborhoods in Northern cities were routinely bombed. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have a great study of residential segregation that makes it clear it was no accident.)
The thing is, I'm fairly mistrustful of the idea that "we're all in this together" (if you don't have individual responsibility, you don't have individual autonomy.) But there's also an intuition that a caste system is unjust no matter how it came about; that civic exclusion is an illiberal thing.
Why do you believe that this will have an impact on crime? Given that most people commit crime against people who live near to them, wouldn't ending residential and school segregation merely mean that the victims of crime become more ethnically diverse?
While I'm all for racial equality, I'd prefer it to be in the form of everyone not being robbed, murdered or raped, rather than equal portions of each ethnic group being robbed, murdered or raped.
We can talk about social injustice, or collective injustice, or a collective responsibility for the problem of crime and incarceration.
We can talk about all sorts of things. But how does talking about your list of 3 things actually help? Let's say I'm collectively responsible for the problem of crime and incarceration. What do you expect me to do? And why do you think that thing will work?
Loury, as a liberal, finds this natural and pretty easy to justify.
I think this is a general problem for people of all political persuasions, it is easier to talk about something than to actually do something. While I am harsly critical of Dr Loury, I don't think it's fair to single out liberals as committing this fault. Indeed, I'm doing this myself - talking not doing - but at least I'm willing to admit that I don't know how to prevent crime and I don't go around self-righteously castigating society for failing to do some unspecified things to prevent crime.
just a few responses.
1. The point I was trying to make was that segregation creates conditions that promote crime. This is a fairly standard view among sociologists. Since blacks are poorer, on average, than whites, residential segregation concentrates poverty. The first result is physical degradation of an all-black neighbohood -- crumbling porches, unkept yards, etc. This makes property owners less likely to invest in that neighborhood, businesses less likely to open nearby, school quality to deteriorate. The neighborhood becomes a desert where there are currency exchanges and liquor stores, but no banks or supermarkets. When buildings are boarded up and burned, neighborhoods no longer attract stable families and become a magnet for rats, drugs, crime, and delinquency.
None of this is inevitable, of course, but it is a recognizable pattern.
Nobody just wants to spread crime around evenly. The point is to reduce crime.
2. What should we do? I don't really know, but one long-term change might be to enforce laws against housing discrimination. Realtors tend to tell blacks that no properties are available in white neighborhoods; they systematically engage in "steering," blacks to black neighborhoods and whites to white neighborhoods. That reinforces segregation.
I think we need urban school reform -- at the very least, lifting the cap on charter schools, possibly also considering vouchers. Some would say we also need a better social safety net in general, because problems of race are largely also problems of class.
3. About talking vs. doing: I think you're being a little harsh. Loury and Lott are professional policy experts. Their job is to talk. You and I are commenting on a blog because we're interested in policy. We're doing the kind of talking that citizens should do. It's not such a bad thing. I don't think anyone's being particularly self-righteous.
I said that Loury, as a liberal, finds it natural to believe in collective social responsibility, because most liberals do believe in it, and many conservatives and libertarians doubt it.
On your points - so if the sociology view is right, then presumably non-segregated neighbourhoods should see less crime than segregated ones. Can you point me to studies looking at comparing similar neighbourhoods?
Because I can think of another causal relationship - an increase in crime can cause a neighbourhood to detoriate as people become less open to their neighbours. Those who can afford to move away. Those who are left have less money for home repairs, producing crumbling porches, unkept yards, etc. And if your neighbour's house looks like a shack, what's the point of keeping your place up, the effect on your property values is reduced. Businesses install bars on their shopfronts, the place becomes more threatening, more people move away, the schools become more violent, so people withdraw their children from it, etc.
I grew up in a neighbourhood that became more crime-ridden during my childhood. I don't think the process is as simple as segregation => crime, it can be that crime => segregation.
As for not knowing what to do - aarrgghh, I hate this - I get told that I'm collectively responsible but no one appears to know what I should do. What's the point of experts writing articles going on and on about collective responsibility without pointing out the way I can discharge my share of the collective responsibility? Do they just want me to feel guilty with no other purpose?
As for urban school reform - what effect does that have on crime? I'm in favour of improving schools, the curriculum Direct Instruction has a good research base of improving learning for disadvantaged kids. But how well does that play into reducing crime?
Some would say we also need a better social safety net in general
It impresses me absolutely zero that some people would say something. You can find people who will say anything. What's the *evidence* that a better social safety net will reduce crime?
I'm a NZ citizen. The expansion of the social security net in the 1970s occurred at the same time as an expansion in crime. Correlation does not prove causation of course, I am not saying that the expansion of the social security net caused the expansion in crime, but it rather argues against a better social safety net causing a reduction in crime.
3)I think you're being a little harsh. Loury and Lott are professional policy experts. Their job is to talk. We're doing the kind of talking that citizens should do. It's not such a bad thing.
But if all we do is talk, then it's rather pointless. That's what I thought you were referring to - that Loury as a liberal prefers only talking.
As for Loury finding it natural to believe in collective social responsibility, perhaps then I would be better off reading something by someone who really struggled to believe in collective social responsiblity. Sometimes the best teachers are not the ones who are naturally good at a subject but the ones who had to learn it the hard way as they're the ones who know what problems other learners can have with the subject. Loury's article shows some massive blind spots that just scream at me that he's not someone who has really thought about his topic from another point of view (eg his failure to even mention the victims of crime). Can you recommend anyone who argues in favour of collective social responsibility for crime without naturally believing in collective social responsibility in the first place?
The closest thing to a natural experiment I can think of is Section 8 housing, which is low-income housing that's scattered throughout a city instead of concentrated in huge housing projects. If integration reduces crime, you might expect Section 8 policies to reduce crime. The Atlantic Monthly article linked upthread examines that and finds that it just spread the crime around. But it's not a perfect experiment -- first of all, Section 8 eligibility has to do with poverty, not race; second, in practice Section 8 is rarely spread evenly around a city, because some aldermen make sure to keep it out of their wards. In Chicago, where I grew up, there's Section 8 housing in mixed or black middle class South Side neighborhoods like mine, but not in the upper-class, all-white North Side or suburban neighborhoods. (Public choice, folks.)
So it's a hard problem. There are plausible feedback mechanisms both ways. It's nonlinear as all hell. Some economists have tried to model the causes and consequences of segregation using a model of a consumer's choice of a home to see how segregation affects something like home value, which in turn affects segregation. But they don't include crime in the analysis.
I think the logic behind improving schools, or reducing poverty overall, is that illiteracy and poor job prospects contribute to crime. Again, it's hard to know which way the causation goes -- but it's reasonable to think that you're not going to pursue a "career" as a gang member if you have better options.
I know there are serious costs to an extensive social safety net, which is why I said "some" favor it, but not that I favor it. I'm really not sure. (I think Loury does; I believe his main point over the years is that racial problems are really problems of economic inequality, and that the solution is more egalitarian redistribution.) If it is a solution at all, I think it would be a long term and indirect solution, aiming at making sure the next generation of kids don't get mixed up in crime to begin with.
I am here only discussing Loury's opinion on crime, as that's what he wrote about in the essay in question. If egalitarian redistribution leads to a reduction in crime he should show us the evidence.
Sincerely,
Dan Callahan