How novel! Tennessee locks up criminals, and crime drops

Something novel happens when you lock up more repeat violent offenders for longer. Believe it or not, crime begins to drop.

Many Republicans who bought into the lie of “criminal justice reform” seemed to have forgotten this lesson from the 1990s, as we enjoyed a decades-long decrease in crime. But as crime surged again in recent years following the proliferation of weak sentencing laws, the trend is swinging back in states that learned the lesson from the Koch-funded jailbreak agenda.

Like many red states run by pro-jailbreak Republicans, Tennessee’s violent crime rate increased steadily from its nadir in 2013, culminating with the appalling crime wave of 2020-2021. It was thanks to the policies of the previous decade passed by liberal Republicans that we needed to jeopardize public safety by trying to save money on incarceration. Much to the consternation of Governor Bill Lee, however, the legislature has passed several tough-on-crime measures designed to extend sentences for violent criminals.

As always, it worked magic.

A new Justice Department report shows a 14% drop in the homicide rate following an 8% increase in the incarcerated population in Tennessee last year. Preliminary numbers from the Tennessee Department of Corrections show that the incarcerated population has increased another 2% thus far in 2023.

This reverses a decade-long trend of jailbreak policies. It’s not a coincidence that the homicide rate in Tennessee went from a low of 5.2 per 100,000 in 2013 to 9.6 in 2020. It was during that time when Lee and his predecessor pushed for jailbreak and stated, “We have to be creative and innovative and disruptive and challenge the way we’ve been doing things forever.”

Although the crime wave appears to have eased in 2022 across the nation, the decline is clearly sharper in Tennessee. Given that the FBI changed its 100-year method of calculating murders starting in 2021, there are some who estimate that 4,800 homicides fell through the cracks of the FBI’s new data reporting system because major police departments did not report their data to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. So it’s unclear how much the murder rate really dropped nationally in 2022 relative to the prior two years.

Incarceration might be expensive, but it’s not as expensive as unchecked crime or the blood of innocents spilled by jailbreak policies.

Just ask retailers. Long before the current shoplifting crisis, Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, wrote in the Washington Postin 2008 that the “most conservative estimate for the cost of violent and property crimes in the United States is $17 billion a year — and that’s just direct, immediate cost. This leaves out such costs as crime victims’ struggle to be made whole.”

Fast-forward over a decade, when retail theft has been legalized essentially in blue cities, and the cost has grown exponentially. A National Retail Security Survey from 2022 estimates the cost of shoplifting to be as high as $100 billion.

The truth is that we have always had an under-incarceration problem. The entire premise of over-incarceration, the ideology that sold Trump on the inane “First Step Act,” was always bunk. The people who are in prison on drug, gang, and firearms charges deserve to be there — and for a very long time. According to an April report from the BJS, among those admitted to state prison between 2009 and 2014, 64% already had arrests before they turned 20 and 59% already had 10 or more arrests; 95% had at least two priors, and 74% had a prior arrest for a violent offense.

That is the profile of who is in our prisons. They already got their “second chance” — often many times over. Yet they are still largely under-punished. Despite the average state prisoner’s long rap sheet, according to BJS, 52% of them served less than a year’s sentence, while 60% were rearrested for a new crime within two years.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you take the baseline of current drug traffickers who have accrued many other crimes and release them early, it will generate more crime. This is why the First Step Act was so insane.

Just last week, Baltimore media reported that William Dredden, the father of a teen who accompanied his child to commit a violent shooting at a local high school, was released early by Trump’s First Step Act. As crime expert Sean Kennedy reported, Dredden had a 20-year record of over a dozen arrests but barely served time. Even when the feds nabbed him for operating an open-air drug market, he still was only sentenced to four years — preposterous given his record. Yet he was released 15 months early to participate in a violent school shooting. It’s people like this who were showcased by Trump and the left with Kim Kardashian as model citizens turning their lives around who were unfairly targeted for prison.

Of course, those few who truly are unfairly targeted — such as political opponents — are getting stiffer sentences than ever. If we are going to live under a police state, we might as well reap the benefits of tougher law enforcement on the people who really need to be locked up.