5 Ways We're Fighting Crime (And Making Everything Worse)

5

Mandatory Minimum Sentences Create Career Criminals

Mandatory minimums are fairly self-explanatory. If someone commits a crime, they get a guaranteed amount of jail time, regardless of the circumstances. For example, any American convicted of trafficking at least 28 grams of crack cocaine serves a minimum of five years. The idea is to deter potential criminals with the threat of tough sentences ... because we all know that criminals are purely rational people who thoroughly research all possible repercussions before studiously committing to a crime.

U.S. Sentencing CommissionAlso, criminals are obviously going to be aware of the arbitrary and extremely inconsistent amounts that trigger a sentence.

But it turns out that prison time makes criminals more likely to reoffend further down the line, because prison is basically school for sociopaths. The longer you spend inside, the less you learn about how to run a Dairy Queen and the more you learn about severing toes and sending them in ransom notes. Australia found that mandatory minimums were associated with increased crime rates, because if you treat people like career criminals, that's what they become.

Mandatory minimums also ruin a judge's ability to exercise discretion. Take the case of Tonya Drake, who was offered $100 to mail a package for a stranger. She agreed because she needed the money to feed her kids (and had apparently never seen any crime show ever). The package contained crack, of course, and Tonya had technically trafficked drugs. She was sentenced to a mandatory ten years for making a dumb decision in a moment of desperation. The judge said, "This woman doesn't belong in prison for ten years for what I understand she did. That's just crazy, but there's nothing I can do about it."

So that's where we're at. We have laws so ridiculous that they make judges feel powerless.

4

Only "Following Up" On Abuse Cases Can Make The Abuse Worse

"Second responder" programs were pioneered in the early '80s. It sounds like a snarky nickname you give to the cop who showed up late for the gunfight, but the idea is to assign a police officer and caseworker to assist victims after a report of domestic abuse. Sounds great, right? Surely abuse would stop if offenders knew that the cops might be dropping in at any moment.

3

Predictive Policing Is Terrible At Both Predicting And Policing

Minority Report was based on the idea that with enough data (and some freaky psychics), you can stop crimes before they even happen. But surely that's too crazy to try in real life, right? Yes, absolutely, but when has that ever stopped humanity? Predictive policing programs have popped up all over the United States, and one of the most popular ones is COMPAS, which provides courts with "risk scores." COMPAS looks at a person's criminal history and life circumstances, and comes up with a score that reflects how likely that person is to reoffend, like a terrible real-life RPG stat. Courts use these scores to determine bail, and sometimes sentences.

Now, we're huge nerds, so of course we love statistics. The problem is that so far, predictive policing only interprets those stats like someone who doesn't know what numbers are, but is pretty sure they hate them. A ProPublica expose on COMPAS revealed that African-Americans were "45% more likely to be assigned higher risk scores than violent offenders." In one of their examples, an 18-year-old black kid who stole a scooter was assessed as a high risk to reoffend, while an adult white repeat offender with multiple armed robbery convictions was considered a low risk. The white guy ended up going back to jail, while the "high risk" kid hasn't reoffended.

2

Juvenile Boot Camps Don't Work (Unless You Want Your Kid Dead)

What's the best way to punish a teenager? Take away their phone? Ground them? How about making them do intense, military-style physical exercises while screaming at them? Plenty of people believe in the last option, judging by the dozens of quasi-military "correctional boot camps" found across America. Teenage boot camps operate on a mixture of intimidation and discipline, and are meant for everyone from repeat violent offenders to kids who won't stop being snarky about their dad's new girlfriend. Supposedly, they "strip [young offenders] down to bare bones and build them back up," which is a diplomatic way of saying "We'll probably kill 'em."

1

Curfew Laws Are Not Only Ineffective, They're Super Racist

You know teenagers -- always smoking their jazz cigarettes and dancing their forbidden dances. We need a curfew just to be able to leave the house at night without some savage 17-year-old "crunking" us. So it's a good thing many cities have one. Over two million American teenagers were arrested for breaking curfew between 1994 and 2012, probably while trying to express their emotions through dance in an empty warehouse. The problem? Curfew laws are crazy racist. In 2011, 93 percent of people detained under New Orleans' curfew laws were African American. And in Minneapolis, 56 percent of kids charged under curfew laws were African American as opposed to 17 percent white -- even through Minneapolis is a predominately white city.