Some More News - SMN: The Devastating Impact of 'Fear of Crime' Politics

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Hi! In today's episode, we honor 4/20, the weed day, by discussing the history of 'fear of crime' politics and its impact on our society. Probably negative impact, if I had to guess! Please sign the petition to stop the April 27th execution of Melissa Lucio - https://innocenceproject.org/petitions/stop-execution-of-innocent-melissa-lucio-texas/ Please fill out our SURVEY: HTTP://kastmedia.com/survey/ We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Right now, Trade Coffee is offering new subscribers a total of $30 off your first order plus free shipping when you go to HTTP://drinktrade.com/morenews. That's more than 40 cups of coffee for free! Athletic Greens will give you an immune-supporting FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit http://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Go to HTTP://Brooklinen.com and use promo code [MORENEWS] to get $20 off your purchase of $100 or more/ Listen to American History Tellers: Lewis and Clark on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12Z_H-2INBfV_jAap0hjabXoOgJw6YnczacRhGMXZ_vI/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All that's old is new again. All of this has happened before and all this will happen again. If you don't learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. We are going back to the future! There's no fate but what we make for ourselves! Miles Dyson! She's gonna blow him away! What is this? A show? What is going on here here did i put this backdrop up what was i talking about even it's a long time ago i don't remember uh happy 420 everybody toke up those fat bongs and light a left-handed cigarette because we are talking about...

We're dealing with a spike in violent crime. We're talking about an increase in shootings and homicides, robberies, carjackings. Grim new numbers on the weekend violence. In St. Louis, Missouri, 11 people were shot. Two of them are dead. So cities across the country are seeing a major spike in violent crime now, a scary scene earlier this week in New York City. So to shoot out in the middle of the street during broad daylight. Also violent crime spiraling out of control in New York City. A nurse visiting Manhattan died over the weekend

after a deranged homeless man slammed her to the ground in Times Square. Crime! Scary stuff. Maybe you shouldn't have gotten high for it, actually. I mean, jeez, does anybody see any deranged homeless men lurking around ready to pounce? Luckily, I've rigged a crossbow to my door so that anybody who tries to come in and violent crime me will be violent crimed themselves.

You hear me crime folk? You stay away! Oh, Mr. Cody! Okay. The crossbow might be for other things too. Come on in, Wormbo. It's unlocked. Where'd he go?

You all heard Wormbo, right? God, I am high. Okay. Here's some news. Violent crime is on the rise across America. And the right-wing media really, really wants you to know this and to be afraid. Be very afraid. And if you're not already, you will be. Just check out this segment from Fox News.

Here's the reality. We are shooting each other and killing each other at a fever pitch. Violent crime is a very big problem. April 2021, 48 percent. June 41. March 2019, 49. You know, we're still at about half of the people, but let's see what happens when the numbers come through and the stories are told and it starts to resonate where you live. Oh, wow. Maybe I'm just really high,

but Fox got way different from the last time I checked. But maybe Chris, I helped my governor brother cover up a sex scandal and also I got special and rare COVID treatment because my brother was the governor Cuomo, has a point there. I mean, with a long, weird middle name like that, how couldn't you trust him?

Maybe we should be extremely afraid that, wait, hold on. We go back to that graph real quick. Okay, wait, how high did I get? Because it really seems like that graph doesn't at all depict the rate of violent crime, but rather shows the number of American adults that believe that violent crime is a big problem. A thing that is not actually reflective

of violent crime rates and could like be biased and influenced by news segments meant to scare people about crime. But more importantly, hey, hey, the X axis on that graph is backwards. You realize that, don't you CNN? I feel like it's your job to know that. So it's weird that I have to point that out to you.

And so while it appears to illustrate a rise in concern over violent crime over time, what it actually shows is a fall in concern over violent crime over the time period displayed. And again, I'm just so high, but I'm almost certain that's not how time works because. And again, I'm just so high, but I'm almost certain that's not how time works because you know, breaking news, time moves like a spider web made of strands of rivers and then inside it blows up

like a balloon and then those rivers are also made of spider webs that flow into each other. Okay, I wrote that when I was high two, I'm sorry. Forward, time moves forward. CNN lied is my point. Is there a time spider though? Is that like a thing I should be concerned? Next episode.

Settle down, Cody. I guess if you are worried about how people's opinion of crime being a big problem is less than it is now, you can at least rest assured that law enforcement, massive corporations, the media, and politicians will make sure to do everything in their power to stop the crime that people are less worried about. Maybe they'll rent a Batman, or failing that,

they'll at least continue to stoke those unfounded fears that people don't have as much. When you look at those train tracks and that trash, you say this is not a third world country, but it is. Now the dangerous consequences of left wing crime policies are on full display tonight as an Apple store in Santa Rosa, California was ransacked on Wednesday. Rays and crimes caught on camera show exactly why American cities are under siege. Check out what happened at a Walgreens in San Francisco.

This is a man in broad daylight looting a store and just filling up a garbage bag. Then he just casually rides his bike out of the store and onto the street. Walgreens alone has closed 17 stores in the city just because of this rampant theft. Train robberies and lawlessness on the streets. Well, ain't that a bag of nails. Do I need to break out my shooting iron to protect my crossbow that I use to protect my weed, which I use to protect my brain from being not high? In the case of the recent string of train robberies

in Los Angeles, Union Pacific Railroad has claimed with little evidence that these robberies are being carried out by organized crime and has blamed the theft on the newly elected progressive district attorney, George Gascon's soft on crime policies. That's right. No one's soft on crime like Gascon. As a result, they're calling for harsher penalties to serve as a strong deterrence

against train robbers. Yet what Union Pacific neglected to emphasize is that recent supply chain challenges have caused train cars to sit idle for significant periods of time, making them particularly vulnerable to theft and that the company recently laid off an undisclosed number of their security staff right before these thefts began. And yet politicians like Gavin Newsom,

who are incapable of and or unwilling to withstand the political pressure from the ensuing media onslaught, respond by proposing increased police budgets to protect businesses like Union Pacific, which just so happens to be reporting record profits. So like, I guess I'm not trying to victim blame this giant train company, I guess,

but it seems like they decreased their security and left their shit on the tracks and people stole from them. If I left my prized collection of garden gnomes in the middle of the road, I can't exactly complain when some other gnome pervert steals them all. There are dozens of us out there. And so it's almost like the public is spending

their tax dollars to subsidize the security costs for a private corporation in order to protect their profits. And now it is exactly that. And in the case of the great Walgreens shoplifting crisis of the 2020s, supposedly going on in San Francisco right now, Walgreens is blaming their store closures on rampant theft and local law enforcement is blaming Prop 47,

a law which charges petty theft under $950 with a misdemeanor as opposed to a felony. This is despite at least one study showing that the proposition is not responsible for an uptick in crime. Oh yeah, those store closures we were just talking about, like literally seconds ago. It turns out that there are probably a bunch

of other reasons Walgreens decided to do that. Like the fact that the city is oversaturated with pharmacies and that the corporation had already laid out a plan in 2019 to close a bunch of stores across the nation in order to save money. Because it's kind of hard to believe that rampant theft is the reason you are closing five stores when two of those stores only had seven and three reported retail thefts in 2021. Yet this is somehow one of the things that prompted San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who was elected on a platform of police reform and had initially pushed back against the narrative promoted by Walgreens to pivot towards a policy of being more aggressive

with law enforcement. You know, this has been a problem that has persisted in this city for some time now. And the fact is, things have gotten worse over time. Fun thing about facts is that she's technically right that things have gotten worse over time. Fun thing about facts is that she's technically right that things have gotten worse over time, but only if you count over time as the few years during the pandemic and not the larger crime stats, which show that things have actually gotten better over time

and that the high violent and property crime San Francisco is experiencing right now is still lower than the crime rates between 2014 and 2019, which is a long way of saying that, no, you could argue things aren't getting worse over time. Fun how much like that CNN graph, the people telling us that crime is worse seem to be taking a lot of liberties

with the actual statistics. They just love taking liberties. But if you live in New York City, don't worry. The NYPD seems to have gotten this shoplifting crisis under control. According to the official Twitter account of the New York City Police Department, officers recently arrested 12 individuals and recovered $1,800 of stolen property, which included toiletries and medicine and diapers. So way to go, you Cottonelle warriors, working hard to keep America safe from a baby pooping.

I wonder how much money they spent to retrieve this $1,800 of stolen property. The fact that the media is more concerned about shoplifting as opposed to a society where people are so desperate that they need to steal fucking medicine and diapers pretty much tells you all you need to know media is more concerned about shoplifting, as opposed to a society where people are so desperate that they need to steal fucking medicine and diapers, pretty much tells you all you need to know about whose side they are really on. And the fact that the cops who are supposedly charged

to protect and serve would think that this tweet was a great example of them performing their duty, well, it shows you who they really are tasked with protecting and serving. It's not us. And it's not a coincidence that these unsubstantiated narratives that induce media frenzies over pretend rising crime

are taking place in two cities that have recently elected officials that came into office challenging the status quo of our criminal, let's call it justice system. These narratives are shaped by large corporations, private property owners, and the ruling class, not to mention the powerful toilet paper bear lobby. And they are typically supported, reinforced, and sometimes devised by law enforcement themselves. All of this to overwhelm

frightful politicians and cause them to relent to the political pressure exerted by this dominant alarmist storyline. And it's a little bit disingenuous for large retailers to manufacture a narrative that supports harsher penalties for petty theft when corporations like the aforementioned Walgreens simply get hit with fines after stealing millions of dollars from their employees. And that actually brings up an important question that I don't think people ask nearly enough. What exactly is crime?

I'm not philosophizing because I'm super high right now. I mean, literally, what defines a crime? We should probably explore that question, perhaps in a segment called, what is crime or something? Damn, that's good, actually. We should do like a whole thing for it. Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?

What is crime or something? What you gonna do when they come for you? Bad boys, bad boys. Perfect, better than all movies. Anyway, in a legal sense, very simply, crime is when you break the law. It's when you engage in an action or omission that is punishable by the state.

Except despite that pretty straightforward definition, there are some things the public generally thinks of as a crime and some things that we don't. For instance, we tend to think of things like robbery or shoplifting or hacking into someone's dream to influence them to dissolve their father's company when we think of crime. But we don't often think about cases when an employer

refuses to allow their workers to take meal breaks or fails to reimburse them for business expenses or doesn't pay them for overtime as a crime. But as a matter of fact and law, these are all examples of wage theft, a crime that far outweighs the scope of other forms of theft and yet is rarely prosecuted. Which is why we have a system where minor crimes

like being accused of stealing a backpack or shoplifting can come with massive penalties that ruin people's lives. And yet companies like Walgreens and Amazon who steal millions from their employees just get hit with fines that they can easily absorb, which might be a factor in why US companies vastly outspend the rest of the world on legal services or spend billions of dollars a year lobbying Congress

to implement policies that protect their profits, at least until they invent those dream crimes and then they'll just incept the president to love corporate theft or whatever. It's the same system that sentences one person to six years in prison over a voting error and yet allows another person, I won't say who, to see zero consequences for trying to steal

a presidential election and inciting a violent coup attempt. You know, because our law enforcement and criminal legal system was designed to protect the private property and specific interests of the rich and powerful and to control the activity of the working class and poor. But we'll circle back to that

because we still got to deal with this whole crime biz. And while in my San Francisco example, it does seem like their overall crime rate is down, in fairness and balance dumb or balance sub, there has indeed been a rise in violent crime over the past two years. And thankfully, we know exactly what the cause is. When you defund the police, people die.

That's right, folks. We defunded the police across America and the criminals went wild. It was like that movie, The Purge, but even worse, it was every day, it was like a forever purge. Probably, I don't know, I've only seen Inception, except wait a minute. While a number of cities did reduce their spending on police

or at least claimed to, in the immediate aftermath of the summer of protests following the public lynching of George Floyd and so many others at the hands of police, a bunch of those cities are now reversing course and restoring that very funding to their police departments amidst increased political pressure due to the continued rise of violent crime in their cities.

But the thing is, the rate of violent crime is rising across the nation regardless of local policies. And there is no evidence that efforts to defund the police are the cause of this increase. According to the Guardian, research has shown that cities that increased police budgets were just as likely to see a rise in murders as cities that reduced them.

So heck and G and shit on me, if it wasn't defunding the police, then what was it? Was there like anything that happened in the last few years that we can point to? You know what? Let's take a quick break so I can ponder this for a minute. You know, cut to some ads or like a picture of a dog or whatever, I don't care which.

No wait, I do. Cut to the dog! Hey folks, it's Cody, America's party animal. As you all know, I party all day and all night. My blood is confetti and my spit is a sparkling wine. But it's hard being a party animal, which is why I drink lots of coffee. And to ensure my coffee is party coffee, I use Trade Coffee.

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and let Trade find you a coffee you'll love. Once again, that's drinktrade.com slash more news and let trade find you a coffee you'll love. Once again, that's drinktrade.com slash more news for $30 off. Tell them America's party animal sent you. They'll know what that means, maybe. Oh, we love a good birthday, don't we, folks? Why, just yesterday was the birthday of my imaginary friend Brumby. He's an industrial welder with the face of a porcelain baby doll. And wouldn't you know, it's also the 8th birthday of Brooklinen,

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There you are. I was wondering where you went. Did you enjoy the dog? Okay, so where were we before you rudely left without telling me where you went? Oh, yeah. So crime is rising across America. Except the thing is, even though the media has often framed the last two years as a rise in crime,

that's not entirely accurate. Crime overall has essentially continued its decades long decline. What has actually been happening is a rise in violent crime and more specifically, a rise in gun related homicides. But don't worry, this video is not about gun control on account of that subject being deemed exhausting and gunny. But the fact is that the last two years

have seen record gun sales and gosh, I wonder why. Maybe everyone got scared when they learned about all those new mutants walking around or the seemingly inevitable levy invasion. Oh wait, second gosh. I just remembered that other thing that has been going on over the past couple of years. Apparently we had a global pandemic or something like that. It was kind of a big deal actually, in case you forgot, which I apparently did.

And it's still very much happening in case you forgot, which I apparently did. And it's still very much happening, in case you need to remember. Like third gosh, do you recall the early days of the pandemic? You couldn't buy soap or toilet paper or stylish paper gowns. And it felt like we were on our way to a Mad Max style dystopia.

So a lot of people bought guns for the very first time in their lives. And for some inexplicable reason, more guns tend to correlate with more gun-related crimes. That's weird. Look it up and why that is. And like, there are plenty of sources that explain how the pandemic is the likely cause

of rising rates of violent crime over the past two years. But probably the most compelling one starts with the word no and ends with the word shit. See footnote labeled duh. Freaking of course the stress, the starts with the word no and ends with the word shit. See footnote labeled duh. Freaking of course the stress, the strain, the fear, the loss, the isolation, the economic insecurity of the pandemic are the very conditions that lead to violence.

Conditions that by the way are even more severe in our criminal legal system, but more on that later. Because not only did the pandemic lead to a historic rise in gun sales, but COVID disrupted the work of community-based violence prevention programs, both physically and economically, programs that had shown success in reducing violent crime.

So, you know, that could be a factor. It could also be the fact that people have been cooped up with their domestic abusers, or it could be that watching a never-ending stream of police murders and shootings has understandably caused many people to distrust law enforcement and take conflict resolution into their own hands.

Or, you know, it could also be the fact that the economic and health consequences of the pandemic have disproportionately fallen onto communities that were already suffering from violent crime due to the strains of concentrated poverty created and perpetuated by systemic racism and decades of racist policies. Communities that we once commonly referred to as the ghetto. And the fact is that white society is deeply implicated

in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it. And white society condones it. And perhaps compounding that stress onto already vulnerable communities is like, there's a word. What's the word?

Titillating? What? No, the word is bad. Jesus, title monkey, drink a coffee or something. Also really bad that like a lot of people died, like a million people. And it's been fucking terrifying for many. And when people are scared, they tend to make bad decisions. That's why you should never look at car loans

while in a haunted house. But the truth is that the cause is associated with both the rise in crime and the reduction in crime is a hotly disputed issue and an imprecise science. We can make some educated guesses, but anyone pointing a firm finger probably is trying to sell you something, like a haunted car loan.

For instance, we don't fully know why crime has fallen so much since the 1990s. Theories include a decline in alcohol consumption, reduced levels of lead and gasoline, legalized abortion preventing would-be criminals from being born, the economic boom of the 90s, and the theory that there are just fewer young people than there used to be,

and most crimes are committed by young people. And maybe it's none or all of those things. And then there is of course the argument that more police on the streets and harsher penalties are responsible for the decline in crime. But one issue with that assertion is that incarceration rates were rising for years before crime started going down,

and crime was rising during periods of increasing police budgets. And the current consensus from criminologists is that these policies have had, at best, a small effect on the decline in crime over time. That isn't to say that some studies don't show that more police reduce crime. According to one pretty extensive study,

every new cop on the street prevents between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides, meaning that you'd need like 10 to 17 new cops to prevent one murder per year. Their presence also technically reduces certain types of crime like carjacking, because people don't tend to do those crimes literally in front of a cop. That study found that arrests for crimes like burglary don't go up, but arrests for other types

of crime go up significantly when you add these extra officers. Meaning that they aren't stopping crimes so much as preventing certain types of crime from being committed by just standing there. And by standing there, they end up increasing arrests for things like liquor violation and drug possession, also known as nonviolent crimes

that shouldn't ruin a person's life for committing. This would also cost millions annually just to prevent that one murder. And so generally doesn't seem all that effective. While it's anecdotal, just look at the fact that New York City added over 700 more cops to patrol their transit systems this year, mere months before a mass shooting attack occurred

on the subway to which of fucking course, the New York Times immediately framed as shooting in subway station, heightened simmering fears about public safety before quietly changing it. And of fucking course again, while the NYPD counterterrorism unit was busy terrorizing homeless people,

the shooter was caught by some guy named Zach. But my point is that no police presence matters if someone simply doesn't care about getting caught. So ultimately, this data doesn't really show a huge improvement when you add cops. In fact, the study itself goes on to note, critically though, the average effects described above mask important variation in the quality

of policing across cities. In cities with relatively large black populations, the returns to investments in police manpower are smaller and perhaps non-existent for black civilians. Likewise, larger police forces lead to a greater number of arrests for quality of life offenses, in particular for black civilians, without the reduction index crime arrests that we observe elsewhere. In other words, these policies of more policing or harsher sentences also come with an array of catastrophic consequences for society and have been enacted at the expense

of other less tragic policies that could have been much more effective at making our community safer. Because, and I don't want anyone to call me a fucking bitch for saying this, but there are some things that we do know about the conditions that influence the level of crime in our society. But much like other foreshadows and clues riddled throughout this mysterious episode,

we will get back to that, or will we? Yes, we will. For now, it's worth noting that while there has been a rise in violent crime, it is still well below its peak in the early 1990s, despite the fact that polls show 56% of the population believes it's higher. And crime overall is much lower today than it was back then.

Now, I don't wanna minimize the impact that crime and particularly violent crime can have on individuals, their families and communities. It can be devastating. But the fact is that our political and policy response to crime can be even worse. Something more scary than crime itself is the impact of the fear of crime.

Because when media narratives about crime take hold, American history has shown us that it activates a certain kind of fight or flight mode in the political body. Politicians oscillate between leaning into these narratives and aggressively exploiting them for political gain or reluctantly relenting to them due to public pressure and for, well, political gain.

But either way, the result has mostly been the same. We, the titillating people of these United States, are presented with an extremely limited range of options when it comes to the policies created to address concerns over public safety. Typically, the options are to keep things the way they are or hire more police, give them more power, and allow our system to inflict harsher penalties

for criminal offenders. And if you don't want either of those options, well, then we'll just abandon you altogether, how about? You don't want our help? Fine, we'll see how well you do then, huh? Good luck in your John Carpenter hellscape of tsunami surfing. And speaking of arguably regretful things from the 90s,

let's take a quick trip back in time. But first, deepest apologies for the carpenter slander. Okay, time travel go now! The year is 1993. America has its first black president. All the cool kids have pagers and jencos and are pretending that they understand how to play the game mist.

Go fuck a shit, you submarine maze! And the movie Groundhog Day, a story about a guy who was doomed to repeat the same tragic fate until he finally learns his lesson has become a hit. And a man from Delaware stands on the Senate floor and flaps his gums. We must take back the streets.

It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society.

The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. So I don't wanna ask what made them do this. They must be taken off the street. This is of course our current president, Joe Bobby, pushing for the passage of the infamous and controversial crime bill,

a piece of legislation that he largely wrote himself, with a little help from the police of course, that ultimately passed into law in 1994. While the bill did include some arguably good things like the Violence Against Women Act and an assault weapons ban, the law also did some, let's say opposite of good things,

whatever that word is. Joe himself unabashedly bragged about it in the aftermath of the law's passing as proof that the left wasn't soft on crime, saying this at the time. Well, let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties.

That's what's in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties, which my friend from California Senator Feinstein outlined every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what were in there to be sure. every one of them. I gave her a list today. She asked what were in there to be sure. Every one of them. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party ain't the old wing I knew. Awesome stuff, Joe. Hey, fun philosophical exercise. If you take the liberal party and replace all of their values with a pro-cop and pro-prison agenda, do you suppose that's still a liberal party? Is it a party of Theseus thing? Or are you just perhaps making up words?

I could certainly take a dump in my fish tank and call it the new toilet, but that doesn't exactly make it a common fact, does it? The absolutely terrible bill also ended higher education grants for inmates and provided incentives to states to adopt harsher mandatory minimum sentences, which accelerated the already growing

mass incarceration crisis that began under the policies of Nixon and Reagan. And while crime bill apologists will point out that the law only pertained to federal policies and therefore had limited impact on incarceration rates, the fact is that this law and the alarmism around it became a model for tough on crime policies that were adopted by state governments

throughout the country. For example, there's the California Three Strikes Law, which imposed a life sentence for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes defined as serious or violent by the California Penal Code. And so by that definition, if I, in the 90s, broke into Hulk Hogan's house twice to steal his bandanas,

that would be two instances of first degree burglary and count as two strikes. Then if 10 years later, I was caught shoplifting a copy of No Holds Barred, I could go to jail for life. I'm not saying it's good or right to deprive the Hulkster of his valuable skullet coverings or movie residuals, but just pointing out that this doesn't exactly feel

like a life in jail offense, maybe cute references to baseball, a game where people who strike out continue playing that game, are actually not cute when talking about a human life. So why? Why did we do this? Well, ever since the 1960s,

America had seen a steady rise in crime. A fact that was, of course, exploited by bad faith political actors who pushed draconian policies that did little to solve the problem, often exacerbating it. And sensationalized media narratives about crime designed to scare the fuck out of white people for ratings

continued throughout the 1990s, even when crime was starting to decline, which is why the first black first lady of the United States was compelled to say this. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids

that are called super predators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel. Mind you, this super predator narrative was not just something concocted by the twisted mind of HR to the C. The term was coined by a young Princeton professor

named John J. DiLulio, who used a single study of boys in Philadelphia to conclude that there would be an additional 30,000 young murderers, rapists, and muggers by the year 2000. And of course, the media instantly adopted this narrative and milked it like a sodden fear tit, a spooky boob, a shudder utter, a memory. But surprise, these predictions did not come to fruition.

In fact, the violent crime rate continued to fall. A generation of remorseless young monsters did not surge together and create a Voltron of crime. But what did increase was the juvenile justice population as a result of the policies implemented in response to this manufactured hysteria, which is a nice way of saying, we decided to put a bunch of kids in cages, something America loves to do apparently.

It's like our third most popular national sport now. And cases like this are why fear of crime politics is so dangerous. Because like I said, when people are scared, they are more likely to do dumb things. And in the early 1990s, the Democratic Party was really scared. It had lost five out of the last six presidential elections

and for decades had been labeled a party that was soft on crime. And since it's America we're talking about here, of course that label was created with a hearty dollop of racism. Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled,

kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime. Yeah, really scoop on that racism. Just slop it on there like a fistful of cream cheese, you honky freaks. This is a pretty infamous ad run during the 1988 presidential election between Republican candidate George H.W. Bush and Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. During the summer before the election,

Poppy Bush had latched onto the Willie Horton issue and made it a mainstay of his campaign speeches, releasing an ad attacking the Massachusetts furlough program, showing a series of prisoners walking through a revolving door. Soon after, the Willie Horton spot began running on television. And though this ad was ostensibly run

by an independent group and was quickly pulled from circulation, television newscasts were more than happy to keep it on every screen in America. But whether or not the group that ran the ad, the National Security Political Action Committee, was in fact independent, or indeed working in concert with the Bush campaign as many suspected,

their goal was the same. As Bush's campaign strategist Lee Atwater noted, "'By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder "'whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate.'" And while that's just a dick nest of horror in itself, what doesn't get talked about much is the fact that the use of furloughs for prisoners was not only widespread across the nation at the time,

but also a largely successful program. It wasn't bad, boosted prisoner morale, and rarely resulted in problems. But one of the tried and true rules of American political history is to never let facts or the truth get in the one of the tried and true rules of American political history is to never let facts or the truth get in the way of the political advantages that can be gained by leveraging racism.

And an additional advantage that the GOP had going for them was that this was also a peak era of colorblindness. Wait, Willie Horton was a black man, you say? Why, I hadn't even noticed. Everyone looks like the same gray square to me. And it certainly didn't help that when confronted with the accusation of being soft on crime at a presidential debate by one of the moderators

invoking the theoretical rape and murder of his wife, Dukakis responded with as much emotion as a calculator dressed up in a beige suit. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer? No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's deterrent. And I think there are better and more effective ways

to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state. A few things. Weird and wildly inappropriate question, my God. But also, come on, man, you're a politician. Be like, how dare you ask that question, you disgusting media, you. Fake news, may you shit sand.

I'm not saying Dukakis should have said exactly that. The shitting sand thing might be a bit odd, but at least show some version of a human adjacent emotion for the sake of gosh. And yet on the substance, this goober was absolutely right about the death penalty, that there is no evidence that it deters violent crime. And as an addendum,

the death penalty also costs a ton of money, habitually executes a whole bunch of innocent people, and also happens to be just cruel and wrong. I don't have a graphic for that last claim. It just like is cruel and wrong. Like if you believe that killing people is generally bad with the exception of maybe self-preservation or puppet homicide, well then I'm not sure why you'd think

that having our government systematically kill people they've already caught and jailed isn't also bad. But whether Dukakis lost the election because he was King Dweeb or because America just wasn't ready for his luxurious eyebrows is hard to say. Maybe it's both. But one thing we do know is that the lesson taken from this election

was that the Democrats lost yet again for being soft on crime, which is why you had the tough on crime pivot within the Democratic Party reach critical mass in the 1990s. But the 1988 election was really just the straw that broke the bushy-eyebrowed camel's back. Do camels have eyebrows?

I'm not looking it up. They do now! But right-wing reactionaries had been meticulously melding the modern notions of race and crime for decades. As historian Joshua Zaitz has noted, in the 1970s and 1980s, Republican candidates successfully used violent crime as an issue to attract white voters.

Fused with concerns over the economy, busing, and neighborhood integration, law and order politics dislodged millions of working and middle-class white voters from their former home in the Democratic Party. But of course, this is just the tip hot of the iceberg, cold, when it comes to the tremendous pants poop America took over this fear of crime.

And anyone alive in the 90s probably knows what's about to lurch out of the shadows like Nick Fury at the end of Iron Man. But just like those Marvel films, we're gonna tease you a bit and go to some ads first. So just sit there and take in these bulbous ads. Thank you. Mmm, slurp, slurp. That's the sound of health. Things are just better when you consume them through straws, so why not also do that with your daily nutrition? Wouldn't it be cool to have all

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Again, I don't use them. Even though they are great, straws are great. And to make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune-supporting free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com slash more news today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com slash more news to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. You've probably heard the names Lewis and Clark. Also true is that you probably went to an American school. So I don't know, maybe you don't know everything about their expedition. Luckily, we can now absorb information

through the magic of podcasts. It's like the future or something. Wowee, oh, the lights and the space. Okay, that's why I'm here to tell you about American History Tellers by Wondry and their brand new season covering the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. You know the two, they did stuff in the 1800s,

including but not limited to setting out on a mission to find an all water route to the Pacific Ocean. I'm sure they did that for a reason, and now I can find out what that reason is. American history tellers will take you on a journey through mountain ranges and harrowing rapids and jerk bears to uncover an expedition that was about far more than exploration and science, but also leadership and luck and about

who truly owns the American Northwest. Is it me? Do I own the West? I'll have to listen to find out. How do I do that? I ask myself. Well, I can listen to American History Tellers, Lewis and Clark on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app. It's a podcast. You love those, right? You love them. You love podcasts. Listen to them with your ears.

Oh, yeah, that was a lot of weed. Hi, I have skin. So we are back from those veiny ads. And we're talking about a series of manufactured crime scares that have existed since the days of crimped hair. We've jumped around a bit through the 80s and 90s, but we sort of skipped the detail.

See, just like the Willie Horton ads or the impending threat of super predators in the 80s and 90s, but we sort of skipped a detail. See, just like the Willie Horton ads or the impending threat of super predators in the 90s, the early 80s came with its own manufactured hysteria, a dangerous and destructive delirium that would devastate the lives of millions of people for years to come. And I'm not just talking about shoulder pads. A pregnant woman smokes crack cocaine.

Her intense high lasts only a few seconds, but it can leave her unborn child with a lifetime of trouble. Medical experts say that in Miami, 10 crack babies are born every day. Statistics are nearly the same or worse in many major cities. It is a looming financial crisis at big city hospitals, a bill that is expected to top $300 million by 1991, a bill that you and I will have to pay. During the 1980s and 90s, the media, politicians, and health experts

were freaking the fuck out about so-called crack babies. According to the prevailing narrative, the children who were exposed to crack cocaine while in their mother's womb would be condemned to lives of severe mental and physical disabilities, and even worse, all of us would have to pay for them, the absolute horror. And so considering this was obviously

a public health crisis, politicians responded by dramatically expanding access to healthcare and implemented programs to help people struggling with drug addiction. Right? In the most aggressive prosecution yet, two women in central Florida have been charged, not just with child abuse,

but with delivery of a controlled substance to a minor, their infant children. If convicted, the women face 30 years in jail and drug testing by the state for the rest of their childbearing years. See, to me, while drugs are involved, this isn't a drug case. To me, it's a child abuse case. Oh, how interesting. Lee, terrible. Pretty fucking wild that a nonviolent public health concern like drug use so quickly became insidiously conflated with a violent crime like child abuse. Seems like something we shouldn't ever do,

but put a pin in that notion for the moment, because the thing is, it turns out that the moral panic about crack babies was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. In fact, subsequent studies since then have consistently concluded that prenatal exposure to crack cocaine,

which happens when a woman smokes crack cocaine while pregnant, has little or no effect on the long-term development of a child. I mean, you probably like still shouldn't do it, but the fact that the crack baby myth was built on bullshit has not stopped this fable from persisting to this day. It certainly didn't stop lawmakers at the time

from implementing harsh penalties for crack cocaine possession, which was of course richly ironic because meanwhile, our government was at best looking the other way when it came to the trafficking of crack cocaine into our cities and at worst, actively participating in the drug trade. And this is of course,

the part where we talk about the war on drugs, the aforementioned Nick Fury of America's crime panic, because you can't talk about crime without the old wad. And just for goof abouts and snicker pusses, let's allow the guy who started the whole thing to have the honor of introducing the topic. I am glad that in this administration, we have increased the amount of money for handling

the problem of dangerous drugs sevenfold. It will be $600 million this year. More money will be needed in the future. I want to say, however, that despite our budget problems, to the extent money can help in meeting the problem of dangerous drugs, it will be available. This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs. Now, there is a whole lot to say about the war on drugs. There are many, many books that have been written about this topic that you should read

if that's your kink, which I mean, okay, everyone's got their thing, I guess. But let me provide you with a brief synopsis. The war on drugs has been, what's the word? Oh yeah, titillating. Wait, fuck no, the word is bad. A failure from the start and super racist and well, just really, really bad. Declared by Nixon and then expanded

by both Reagan and Clinton, the brutal tactics and policies that were deployed in this campaign have been a major contributor to the massive rise in our prison population over the decades and ultimately landed us USA number one in both the total prison population and incarceration rate per capita.

Over the decades, the war on drugs has justified harsher penalties for nonviolent crimes, increased police surveillance, made getting high scary, and has exacerbated the militarization of the police. It also rationalized the increased use of a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize property as long as they believe that the assets in question

were somehow connected to criminal activity. They don't even need to prove it. In fact, on an annual basis, police sometimes take more stuff from American citizens than burglars do. And this particular policy was championed by none other than our current president, Joe Bryan. That guy again.

Boy, he really seems to keep showing up, doesn't he? Dude just loves attention for awful things that led us to our current political moment while being incapable of admitting his and his party's role in it, and thus making him incapable and unwilling to do what needs to be done to fix it. And of course, the thrust of all the politics

and policies surrounding the war on drugs was a deliberate scheme to leverage the racist fears of the white population for political gain. And this is not hyperbole, because remember that guy, Lee Atwater, that I mentioned earlier, the poppy Bush strategist who championed the racist Willie Horton scheme.

Well, it just so happens that he'd been a part of this sort of thing before. During an infamous interview in 1981, while he was working in the Reagan White House, Atwater fessed up to the nature of the racist Southern strategy deployed by Nixon, using words that I'm not particularly inclined to say out loud, so I will let him do it.

You start out in 1954 by saying By 1968, you can't say, that hurts, it backfires, so you say stuff like horse busing, states lights and all that stuff. And you get so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes and all of these things you're talking about are totally economic things. And the byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than white. And subconsciously, maybe that is part of it.

I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this, is much more abstract than even the busing thing.

And a hell of a lot more abstract than... Yeah! That one word we kept bleeping out? It's the one you assume it is. And remember, after that interview, he went on to become Bush's campaign strategist. Bush saw that man and thought, now there's someone I could really use. If this isn't enough,

Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman's confession made the specific connection between the war on drugs and the political exploitation of racism even more explicit than old Michael Richards did in that clip. And so it's not a surprise that the policies that came out of the war on drugs exacerbated racial inequality and rolled back many

of the gains that had been won during the civil rights era. As an example, consider the sentencing difference between crack and powder cocaine. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a 100 to one disparity between being arrested with crack versus being arrested with cocaine. Specifically, only five grams of crack constitutes a five year mandatory minimum sentence,

while it takes a whopping 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger that same result. Just to really hammer that home, here's what a little over five grams of crack looks like, and here's what 500 grams of cocaine looks like. The latter is like an entire Aaron Sorkin screenplay worth of blow, while that measly rock of crack couldn't even write a single episode of the West Wing.

Personal photos, by the way. It's the same essential substance, same basic dangers and addiction levels, only crack was associated with black people, and powder cocaine was associated with white people. And the nature of the enforcement of drug crimes was wildly unequal, despite the fact that white people and black people use drugs at basically the same rate.

In fact, the rates of drug use are more or less equal across racial and class divides. Because you know, throughout history, human beings like to get high. And some of the cooler animals too, if I'm being fair and balanced, TMCR 420 bra. And yet in the 1970s, black people were approximately twice as likely

as white people to be arrested for drug-related offenses. By 1988, that went up to five times as likely. It's almost like, it's like the system itself is racist. And I wish there was a better term for this dynamic, but there's not. Maybe we should teach about this in schools or something. So then I would know what the word is or like how as author Michelle Alexander noted

in her book, The New Jim Crow, a survey was conducted in 1995, asking the following question. Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user and describe that person to me? The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. 95% of respondents pictured a black drug user,

while only 5% imagined other racial groups. This is all despite the studies around this showing that the vast majority of drug users are college-aged white people, meaning that when you close your eyes to envision a drug user, you should be picturing something like this. She goes on to note that the same group of respondents also perceive the typical drug trafficker as black. Also not true. In fact, white people are more likely to sell drugs, but black people are more likely to be arrested for selling drugs.

And one of the main reasons for this is that our history of systemic racism has relegated black people into inner cities, areas of concentrated poverty that have been heavily policed using similar counterinsurgency tactics that the US military uses as an occupying force in other nations.

And so perhaps the brutal policies and practices and bloodthirsty penalties enacted in response to fears over crime, real and manufactured, have been implemented to maintain the political and economic advantages of white supremacy. Perhaps not, but perhaps. But perhaps not, but perhaps. The bottom line is that a deliberate political strategy

racialized the very notion of crime itself and successfully equated the word crime with danger and violence, regardless of the type of crime and whether or not it was dangerous or violent in nature. This campaign succeeded in further cementing the image of a young black man as a dangerous, violent criminal in the imaginations of white Americans. This is how a child walking home from the store

wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and iced tea could be portrayed as a scary black man. Or how a little kid playing in the park with a toy gun could be killed within two seconds of police arriving on the scene. Or how five adolescents could be convicted of a crime they didn't commit, then have a corny real estate guy take out full page ads in four New York newspapers

to call for reinstating the death penalty for them, and then get away with refusing to apologize even after they were proven innocent. Epilogue, and then that corny real estate guy became the United States president, specifically on a platform of building a big wall to keep drug dealing, raping Mexicans away. Sequel and might again.

What I'm getting at here is that America is kind of an apartheid state. Like I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it really seems like our crime policies are designed to divide us by race and to continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies. One largely black and poor located in the central cities.

The other predominantly white and affluent located in the suburbs and in outlying areas. And I think we've known this for a while. In fact, literally the last sentence I said isn't my own words, but a direct quote from something called the Kerner Commission, as was this. "'White society' is deeply implicated in the ghetto. "'White institutions' created it.

"'White institutions' maintain it. "'And white society condones it.'" Also, actually a direct quote from this Kerner Commission report, which was created in fucking 1967. I actually changed out the word Negro for black because it would have been super weird not to. Pulled a little Nicole Hannah Jones on you all.

April fools, that's all month, right? And the reason I did this was, well, boy, what an indictment of this country that an analysis from the late 60s would be just as true, if not more true today, that I can pull quotes from this 50-plus-year-old document that sounds exactly like the kind of issues we're still dealing with today.

Before super predators and crack babies and the war on drugs, in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson formed the Kerner Commission to determine the causes of the violent racial uprisings that were taking place in America's cities at the time. But nobody, certainly not the administration, expected the commission to conclude that bad policing practices, a flawed justice system,

unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression, and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval on the streets of African-American neighborhoods in American cities, North and South, East and West. In order to address this crisis,

the commission recommended a vast expansion of our social safety net and more adequate social services, a massive jobs program program and vigorous action to end racial discrimination in hiring and discrimination for the formerly incarcerated, increased funding for disadvantaged students, and sharply increased efforts to end segregation in schools as well as an increase in low and moderate income housing

outside of ghetto areas, along with a commitment to overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation. It also included a strong condemnation of the increased militarization of the police. So in response to the findings of the commission, we enthusiastically implemented all the policies it recommended, right?

No, of course not. Happy April Fool's month. Unfortunately and predictably, the backlash to the report was immediate. Polls showed that 53% of white Americans condemned the claim that racism had caused the riots, while 58% of black Americans agreed with the findings. And as the report ominously noted in its conclusion, one of the first witnesses to be invited

to appear before this commission was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a distinguished and perceptive scholar. Referring to the reports of earlier riot commissions, he said, I read that report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of 35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of 43, the report of the McCone commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you members of this commission, it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations

and the same inaction. But even worse than simply ignoring the findings and recommendations in the report, as a nation, we freaking sprinted in the opposite direction. Instead of accepting the notion that systemic racism had created the conditions for violence and inequality in the segregated and economically deprived inner cities that white supremacy had intentionally created

and maintained, we promoted racist ideas that continued the American tradition of pathologizing the individual behaviors of black people in order to perpetuate inequality and maintain white supremacy. Instead of expanding our social safety net and making a concerted effort to address inequality and racial discrimination, we gutted the social safety net

and pretended that the era of racial discrimination was a thing of the past. We also went in the opposite direction when it came to the commission's recommendation on policing. Here's how Jelani Cobb, author of the book, "'The Essential Kerner Commission Report' described the analysis and recommendations made by the commissions on the matter of police.

Law enforcement are called for a whole array of social concerns that actually have nothing to do with the enforcement of the law. And what this does is create just simply more points of contact between the average civilian and the average law enforcement officer with the potential of something going wrong each time, and something potentially going disastrously wrong each time. And so what they said was that there needed to be other social service organizations or outlets that could address concerns that didn't require someone with a gun to show up.

And in a very succinct way, they were encapsulating the idea that has been come to be known as defund the police now. That's right. We knew. We fucking knew what to do. And yet we didn't do it. And again, we instead did the opposite. It's kind of a thing we absolutely love to do

in this country. And this all brings us back to the present moment and serves as a harrowing harbinger of things to come because I don't need magical time traveling powers to know what's on the horizon. I mean, I'll take time traveling powers if you got them. But if the tough on crime posturing of Republicans during the confirmation hearings of Katonji Brown Jackson

is any indication, the GOP is going to make crime a top 2022 issue. And what about the Democrats? Well, if their behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 elections is any indication, conservative Democrats will blame progressives for pushing the defund the police agenda as a scapegoat for democratic losses. Hey, Democrats, maybe you should have tried

fixing American democracy while you had the chance before you started blaming progressives for your utter cowardice, is what I yell out into the terrifying and yet probable future. And thanks to the tremendous amount of weed drifting through my veins, like time rivers on a river web, I'm almost certain they can hear me.

You don't like the slogan defund the police? Fine, I don't care about whether or not you like the slogan. What I care about are the policies that you support. And I care about the role that police play in our society. If you want to increase funding for the police for the purpose of addressing the nationwide rape kit backlog, fine, super. If you want to increase funding for the police so that they all stay at home

and aren't out there harassing and killing people, also fine, but less super. Because if your issue is really that you thought the slogan was bad and not that you disagreed with the actual policies, it would be incredibly easy to adjust your messaging around the issue. Even this former cop was able to do this

when she was asked about the defund the police movement by the Lord Commissar Mean Girl. I just want to know from you, do you support defunding and removing police from American communities? And if not, why do you think there's such a hard time being differentiated right now between defunding and reforming police departments? So, Megan, I think that a big part of this conversation really is about reimagining how we do public safety in America, which I support, which is this. We have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities. You put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access to capital for small businesses, access to health care, regardless of how much money people have. That's how you achieve safe and healthy communities.

In all honesty, no notes. Well, in some honesty, probably some notes, but a pretty good answer. If only this former cop was in a position to influence the current president of the United States, Joe Buttigieg. I need like a mnemonic device for that or something. We should all agree, the answer is not to defund the police,

it's to fun the police. Fun them. Fun them. Okay, in fairness, maybe he said fun the police, like F-U-N, like dress them all up like Jack Sparrow. But I'm pretty sure that Joe, bottles in dick entice nurses, Biden, just said he wanted to give the police more money.

And see, I learned to remember your name this time, Joe, as we all should, because you have consistently been on the wrong side of criminal justice issues for your entire career. Also weird that that former cop was behind you clapping for some reason. Maybe there was a really big mosquito in there. And sure, Biden has acknowledged

that some of his past stances were mistakes and has done the bare minimum by implementing a pause on federal executions and has proposed increases in spending for violence prevention programs. So this guy may be marginally better on these issues than the fascist alternative, but unfortunately he is not the answer

to our thoughts and prayers. When you hear people like JRB tout solutions like community policing, run for the hills. Why would we want police to be more integrated into our communities? Police fucking suck, man. There's former high school bullies with badges, guns and qualified immunity.

Also, they dress stupid. Fucking armed milkmen. It is whack. I don't want them showing up at Wormbo's kids little league games. Besides, they inevitably use this expanded access to the community to, you know, spy on you. And I totally understand how all of this

can leave you feeling helpless, given our history on the issue. But as BrainScan's Edward Furlong has taught us, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves. And more recent history with regards to the criminal justice system has also shown us that things can't actually change. Because since the publishing of Michelle Alexander's book,

The New Jim Crow in 2010, a rare example of a good version of a bipartisan consensus has begun to emerge. That harsh penalties for nonviolent drug crimes are maybe not such a good thing. There is a growing recognition that the trillion dollar war on drugs for nonviolent drug crimes are maybe not such a good thing. There is a growing recognition that the trillion dollar war on drugs

has been an utter failure. As a result, 18 states have legalized marijuana and 38 states and Washington DC have legalized medical marijuana. And some reforms have been made in reducing the harsh penalties for nonviolent drug crimes. There's still a long way to go, but some progress has been made.

So make sure to celebrate 420 properly today, folks, by filling a dirt bike gas tank with high potency indica and sucking on the tailpipe. Except legally speaking, don't actually do that. But as Danielle Sered warns in her book, "'Until We Reckon,' if your goal is to end the mass incarceration crisis, simply addressing the sentencing for nonviolent crime

is not going to solve the problem. Quote, just as we cannot incarcerate our way out of violence, we cannot reform our way out of mass incarceration without taking on the question of violence. And as a quick side note, our goal should be an end to mass incarceration because while this country has only 5% of the world population, we have only 5% of the world population,

we have nearly 25% of the world's incarcerated population. That is supremely fucked up. America's a bad country. We did a bad job with that. Yet addressing our approach to violent crime is a much more difficult political challenge. But as that former cop suggested earlier, maybe we ought to start re-imagining public safety.

And it starts right there with that term, public safety. Because if public safety is truly your goal, it makes it easier to start recognizing which policies actually create more public safety. For instance, maybe using the police and the court system to inundate citizens with fines and fees for low level violations in order to fund the city government as was done in Ferguson,

is not about promoting public safety. In fact, preying on the vulnerable in this way actually makes us less safe. And if you start truly looking at things through this lens of public safety, it can be very illuminating. Consider that tweet by the NYPD we discussed earlier, boasting about their arrest of 12 individuals.

Do those arrests make anyone any safer or do they just protect the interests of large corporations? Maybe enacting policies aimed to create a society where people aren't so desperate that they need to steal diapers and medicine is what would actually make us safer. Because some of the things that we do know contribute to levels of crime are income inequality,

joblessness and poverty, specifically concentrated poverty. And as an additional bonus, those corporations run by cartoon shit paper bears wouldn't have to worry about sticky fingers in their toiletries aisle. And if your true goal was creating the conditions for safe and healthy communities,

you would probably start out with many of the recommendations made in the Kerner Report more than half a century ago. And add onto that universal healthcare, free at the point of service, ooh baby, wouldn't that be neato? To like live in a world that wanted to enact policies

to lift people out of poverty, half a century old policies in some cases. But in all honesty, those corporations would rather maintain the economic leverage they have over employees to keep their pay low and continue to outsource in some cases, but in all honesty, those corporations would rather maintain the economic leverage they have over employees to keep their pay low and continue to outsource their security to the publicly funded police. It's a system that works extremely well for them.

Besides, if we actually did adequately fund and promote the basic needs of the human beings in our society, taxes might go up for these large corporations. Can't have that. Can and should and won't. And while our current system works overtime to protect the specific interests of capital, it does very little to address the needs of people

who have been more significantly harmed by crime. In particular, the survivors of violent crime. And shouldn't that be one of the major goals of our system? Seems obvious. After all, the thing that actually makes crime bad is the harm that it causes people. That's why it's a crime. It would be logical to always think of crime first

in terms of helping the victims, right? And yet we focus most of our efforts on punishing the perpetrators of crime while doing very little to repair the harm inflicted on the survivors of crime. We tend to offer them little more than locking up or executing the person who caused them harm. And sometimes that's not on the survivors of crime. We tend to offer them little more than locking up or executing the person who caused them harm. And sometimes that's not really what survivors of crime

actually need or want. In fact, there's been research showing that not only do the victims or families of victims largely get left twisting in the wind after a criminal trial, but most of them actually find less closure if the death penalty is used. This is thanks to the constant appeals process

often prolonging their grief. The idea that punishing the criminal brings closure is a completely unproven idea. And yet we love to use it as the reasoning behind a lot of harsh sentences. We prop up the victims to justify our criminal justice system, despite never actually endeavoring to help them.

Not to mention that the brutality of a prison system not aimed at reform plus the threat of execution means that no one is ever going to want to confess to a crime in a way that might bring better closure to the victims. We'd rather be wrathful than seek resolution. Cut off all the noses to spite all the faces. I'm pretty sure we just did an entire Batman about this.

And for the people who do eventually get out of prison, as most of them do, they are met with significant barriers to rejoining society in constructive ways. Barriers that we as a society have intentionally placed in their way. These factors may be why we have such high recidivism rates as informally incarcerated people turning back to crime. And so not only are we not meeting the needs of survivors,

but we are failing to hold those who cause harm accountable and making it more likely that they will continue to cause harm and endure more violence when they have supposedly paid their debt to society. It seems like a really, really bad system. In fact, whenever a restorative justice system is practiced, as in a system where the offender is held accountable by allowing the victim of the crime to confront them

along with members of the community, a system built on the idea of rehabilitation. Well, nearly every study shows that an offender is far less likely to reoffend in the future. It's kind of ironic that the same politicians that deride the nanny state are the very same ones that promote the notion of punishment as the central tenant of our criminal justice philosophy.

And while at first glance, the notion of accountability may seem like the easy way out in response to a terrible crime that has caused unspeakable harm to individuals, if you sit and think about it for a minute, there is nothing easy about sincerely taking true accountability for something like that. And there's nothing easy about endeavoring to repair that harm.

Also things that aren't easy, switching to a system built on rehabilitation. It won't happen overnight, and some of the solutions can only be solved by massive federal government intervention. But a lot of the policies surrounding the role of the police take place at the local level. And so we can and must do our part,

for both everyone's sake and for the sake of the writer of this episode's mother, who is losing sleep over the heartbreaking case of Melissa Lucio. Now, this is an old case that is gaining a lot of new attention. It happened 15 years ago in South Texas. Lucio was convicted of capital murder after the death of her daughter, Mariah Alvarez. Now, according to the DA's office, the two-year-old had signs of abuse on her body, but family members claim Mariah's death was an accident, saying she fell down the stairs. The Texas woman is now on death row, scheduled for execution on April 27th. Melissa is scheduled to be executed seven days from now, on April 27th, for the crime of

allegedly murdering her two-year-old daughter. A crime that sure seems to have not actually occurred, and in all likelihood, was a terrible accident where her daughter fell down a flight of stairs. Having maintained her innocence for 14 years after a corrupt district attorney obtained a false confession after seven hours of interrogation, Melissa Lucio does not deserve to die in our shoddy and bloodthirsty system. So please go to the link on screen

to help stop this one injustice. Also, wow, I hope you didn't actually get high to watch this video like I told you to because pretty bleak, but important stuff. Like, yes, I want you to care about this, but I also don't want you to completely lose all hope. We can have joyful things in a terrible world. For example, weed.

Also this picture of my dog. What else is good? Corn on the cob is amazing. Bugs are neat. You get the point. Or if you don't because you're too high, the point is that we need a system fundamentally built on compassion

where people are both held accountable, but rehabilitated. Where victims see justice, but are also cared for. And especially where our goal toward crime is never to frame it as an evil entity or sinister epidemic that needs to be attacked and snuffed out like the media and cops

and government loves to do, but rather as a sign of systemic failure, a symptom of a larger problem. Like if you get terrible pain farts, the answer isn't to try and punish your own ass, unless you're into that, but rather try to figure out what's causing those farts and change things on a fundamental level.

Like perhaps not eating so much corn on the cob when you're allergic to it, even though it's buttery and delicious and I want some right now. This got away from me, but I think you understand. And so maybe if we sought to prevent crime from happening in the first place by providing for people's basic needs, actually respond to the needs of survivors of crime

and pursue the strategy of accountability and rehabilitation. We might have no need for an ineffective system that instead pushes people to the brink of starvation, surveils and harasses them, habitually assaults them, seizes their property, inflicts traumatizing punishments on them that perpetuates cycles of poverty and violence and fucking kills them.

Maybe it's not just crime we should be afraid of, but rather the current system in place to allegedly address crime. And just maybe, once we all sober up, we can thrive for something better than what we have now. Oh, Mr. Cody! Ah! Dang. Got him right in the face. Don't worry, he's incapable of dying.

It's like a fun game for us. Wombo is happy to be penetrated by Mr. Cody. And now it's less fun. All right, I'm gonna pull out the arrow. Do not call it a day. All right. I'm going to pull out the arrow. Do not call it me pulling out. Wowee.

What a fun filled episode that was. Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment about what a fun filled episode this was. And we've got a patreon.com slash some more news we've got merch at a merch store there's links everywhere for you we've got a podcast called even more news and this show that you just watched as a podcast

so get out there and be yourself