With last year’s devastating homicide spike continuing, some proponents of “progressive” criminal-justice reforms are more convinced than ever that they have the right approach. Eric Levitz, writing at New York’s Intelligencer blog, views 2020’s 30 percent year-over-year increase in murder not as a political liability but as yet another reason to support a progressive reform agenda—one that reduces the footprints of incarceration and policing.
Levitz argues that progressive policies have a track record of controlling violent crime, and that the social costs of law-and-order approaches may be too high. Neither point is persuasive. Levitz overstates the effectiveness of progressive alternatives and understates the evidence behind traditional crime control, muddling some conceptual questions in the process.
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