Lower the Crime Rate
Image courtesy of ucf.edu
Crime is born out of poverty and the miseries of capitalism. An index of oppression can’t be ignored by socialists.
by BENJAMIN FOGEL
In early 2012, the literary journal n+1 plunged headfirst into the Occupy Wall Street era with a six-thousand-word article entitled “Raise the Crime Rate.” Written by Christopher Glazek, the essay attracted modest attention at the time but would go on to become an influential provocation.
The editorial was a bold call for a progressive movement to radically switch gears from prioritizing “health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives” to instead abolishing the US prison system. Glazek backs this up by describing the unacceptable barbarism of prison life in America, shocking readers with horrific examples of the mass rape, beatings, and solitary confinement endemic to incarceration.
Glazek’s argument is that the relatively low level of crime in America from the late 1990s on was achieved by simply displacing that crime from civil society to the unfree shadow world of the seven million Americans who live under the direct control or surveillance of the correctional system.
Where other leftists from the past and present have argued that it’s exactly a democratic socialist politics of redistribution, health care, and jobs that could radically reduce poverty and thus crime and violence, Glazek sees such prescriptions as a distraction, citing the high unemployment of our era as being entirely compatible with our falling crime rate. As he put it, “Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem — progressives have been harping on this point for centuries.”
In fact, the editorial argues that socialist prescriptions aren’t just insufficient solutions to ending the nightmare, they’re diversions. “We must be ready to sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda,” Glazek said, “on the altar of criminal justice.” By divorcing the roots of crime from material conditions, he repeats the conservative trope about crime being the product of social or cultural pathologies.
Things are so dire, in Glazek’s telling, that he explicitly calls for a radical expansion of the death penalty as a way to bring down the incarceration rate: “A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo.” He also implores progressives to give up on gun control: “you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take away the community’s ability to defend itself.”
Refusing to stop there, Glazek makes an unequivocally libertarian argument for a new, private-sector-based criminal justice system that would be achieved by simply letting all the inmates out and forcing “the free market” to clean up the mess, what he approvingly refers to as “a deregulation of criminal punishment” and “letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed.” Or, you can merely arm yourself and protect your own. This isn’t too different than arguments coming from the militia movement in America or the chainsaw-wielding Colombian paramilitaries that arrive in a village promising to restore order.
“In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster,” Glazek says. “For petty crime, it would be a boon.”
No mention is made in this story of the high level of enduring poverty in America amid great wealth, nor of the high level of violence when compared to the rest of the developed world — yes, even in our “low-crime” era. Readers are led to believe that Americans constructed this nightmare out of either cruelty or an insufficient tolerance for public violence. There is something strikingly parochial about this telling of history: crime is portrayed as a uniquely American phenomenon that can’t be explained by material conditions.
For Glazek, it’s much simpler than that: “it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis.”
A decade since the n+1 essay, there are signs that crime is once again rising. Last year, 21,570 people were murdered in the United States — the largest single-year surge in the country’s history, and an increase of 4,901 killings from 2019. Last year also saw the highest number of gun deaths in history. The overwhelming majority of these deaths were concentrated in America’s poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. It’s not surprising that commentators are speculating about whether we’re set for a return to the “bad old days” of the 1980s and ’90s.
While there is no simple explanation for this rise, the political right is quick to blame the development on growing anti-police sentiment following Black Lives Matter protests. Facing increased scrutiny, they say, cops have become hesitant to intervene and actually stop crimes; as a result, criminals are gaining confidence that they can break the law with impunity. But security concerns resonated far beyond Fox News.
Americans believe that crime is getting worse. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 78 percent thought crime had increased over the course of that year, the highest number recorded since 1993. It is hard not to see the election of figures like Eric Adams as New York mayor as not, at least in part, driven by crime concerns. In the run-up to his election, one survey found that 46 percent of likely voters said crime or violence is a “main problem” in New York today.
Data shows that crime is still down significantly from 1990s levels and that some categories of crime actually decreased last year. But that doesn’t render perceptions about rising crime less politically significant — nor the fact that crime seems more concentrated than ever in poor areas. “Hey, murders are way up — but robberies are down!” are not exactly comforting words.
Polling shows that 86 percent of all Americans want the police to spend the same amount of time or more in their neighborhood. But whatever conservatives say, that doesn’t mean there’s a budding “Blue Lives Matter” coalition in the country. Americans also indicate that they want a different type of policing — 58 percent say that policing requires major changes, and 79 percent think police violence is a serious problem.
What should we have to say about crime, then, an issue that looks like it will be an important part of politics for years to come in the United States and beyond?
Anxieties about public security have fueled the rise of the far right globally, who promise to lower crime through bullets and prisons. Large groups of people can sincerely believe that their neighborhood, city, or country is becoming more dangerous, even when data points in the opposite direction. Republicans will spend much of the 2022 midterm election campaign talking about a crime wave and crime-infested, Democrat-run cities — and Democrats are already showing signs of retreating from meaningful police reforms.
Many on the Left worry that talking about crime only empowers the police to commit abuses in the name of law and order, and socialists have rightly defined themselves over the last few decades in opposition to a staggeringly unjust criminal justice system. But we don’t have to abandon opposition to mass incarceration or a critique of police to respond to crime.
The stakes are too high to allow the Right to define the politics of public safety through claiming “the only good bandit is a dead bandit” or “lock them all up” as an expression of popular will. Indeed, for decades, liberals echoed right-wing approaches to public security, introducing harsher drug laws, building prisons, and pairing worthy aims such as reducing the number of illegal guns in circulation with racist and anti-poor punitive measures. Elsewhere in the Americas, economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic triggered even more severe increases in crime: 50,033 people in Brazil and 34,515 in Mexico were murdered in 2020, many with guns that were smuggled out of the United States. Organized crime adapted quite well to pandemic conditions, not only retooling rackets but exploiting the new opportunities presented by the crisis, from fake vaccines to siphoning off some of the massive injection of liquidity that went into the global financial system. In some cases, as the state failed to provide social assistance, mafias filled the void, supplying PPE and enforcing lockdowns in the neighborhoods under their control. When the state is unable to administer public security, private security and paramilitaries close the gap, with devastating consequences for the Left, as in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
Moreover, criminal activities, from drug trafficking to extortion and illegal mining, are central to the global economy. According to the United Nations, crime generates an estimated $2.1 trillion in global annual proceeds — about 3.6 percent of the world’s GDP. The money from extortion and drug trafficking flows through the same banks that the tax cheats and oligarchs use. By conservative estimates, the trade in illicit drugs alone is worth over $600 billion a year (the United States accounts for $150 billion of this), translating into about 1 percent of the total world GDP. Mafia capitalists, after all, are still capitalists, and they tend to ally with the state, or even the United States, when facing a threat from the working class.
To make matters worse, the organizations that reap the rewards of illicit activities are the same mafias used by the state and capital to repress calls for leftist reform. From Sicily to Colombia, organized crime intimidates and murders trade unionists, peasant leaders, and socialists. The profits from crime are often reinvested in dirty wars and counterinsurgencies.
While not dismissing the ways in which the law is used to criminalize poor people of color, socialists should view crime itself as an index of oppression. Crime is born out of poverty and the miseries of capitalism. Simply put, crime is a real social problem, and those worst affected by it are the working class, in particular black and brown communities. The average victim of a crime worldwide is a worker commuting to and from their place of employment.
Tackling crime requires the Left to build a platform that dismantles both racist stereotypes about “black criminality” and the usual bromides about personal responsibility, without simply dismissing the issue as bigoted media hysteria. It also demands an analysis of what happens when the state is unable to guarantee public security, and a way of dealing with the threat posed by organized crime.
This does not mean socialists should buy into the moral panics that have driven drug wars, mass incarceration, and all those other “solutions” that have merely compounded the problem. It means we should take crime and the concerns of the working class seriously, and that anxiety regarding rising crime can be used to argue for the necessity of change. If we fail to do this, the far right and our enemies will seek to exploit real concerns over crime for their own benefit — as we have seen, with tragic results, in the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The good news is that socialists already have actual solutions to the problem. Through the radical redistribution of wealth and power, creating jobs, investing in education and housing, and providing health care and after-school activities, along with measures like taking guns off the streets, we can, in fact, reduce crime through building socialism. All our enemies can offer is repression: police and prisons.