Beware of law-and-order liberalism
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Two weeks ago, a preppy mob allegedly staged a brutal attack against two men in Center City because they were gay. This is a reminder that homophobia persists despite the recent social revolution in favor of everyone's rights to love, make love to, and to be who they are.
The main political response to the attack, however, has been a loud call to expand Pennsylvania's hate-crime laws to cover sexual orientation. The problem is that these laws typically are used to lengthen prison sentences. Whether it is drugs or violence, we have tried our best to police, arrest and incarcerate our way out of almost every problem. As a result, the United States is already the most incarcerated nation on earth (at least on record) and has very little to show for it, save for an archipelago of human misery.
"There are no data to support the idea ... that hate-crime laws actually deter violence against the named identities," says Ann Pellegrini, director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University and co-author of the book "You Can Tell Just by Looking" and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. Pellegrini says that collecting hate-crime data is important, but that simply sending people to prison for longer fails to address one problem and exacerbates another.
"If we want to change people's attitudes that needs to take place in educational" and religious institutions "not through harsher penalties," she says.
Anti-gay bigotry runs deeper than the angry rhetoric of fundamentalist religious nuts, asshole jocks or people violently lashing out to make sense of the anxiety of being closeted. The hatred stems from our culture's most mainstream strictures around gender, sexuality and power.
Many civil libertarians oppose hate-crime laws because they criminalize not only the violent act but also the thought behind it. I agree. But my biggest concern is that I don't want to grow our prison population, especially for a purpose that is not socially useful. Attacking someone because they are gay or black is wrong — but our prisons are bursting at the seams because of harsh sentences not only for small-time drug dealers but also for people who commit serious violent crimes. The question is whether the lock-'em-up, law-and-order mindset prevalent across the political spectrum makes us a safer and more just society. It doesn't. But many liberals seem just as oblivious as conservatives.
Take District Attorney Seth Williams, who is leading the charge to create a two-year mandatory minimum sentence for illegal gun possession. Like hate-crime legislation, the measure sounds tough, but doesn't seem to accomplish much.
"Mandatory penalty laws have not been credibly shown to have measurable deterrent effects for any save minor crimes, such as speeding or illegal parking, or for short-term effects that quickly waste away," writes University of Minnesota law professor Michael Tonry in the 2009 study "The Mostly Unintended Effects of Mandatory Penalties: Two Centuries of Consistent Findings."
Instead of preventing violence, they ensure that more people in the city's poorest neighborhoods — the same ones who suffer most from gun violence — get locked up for longer. Republican state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, who went from being a tough-on-crime zealot to a prison-reform evangelist, last year explained to me why he opposes mandatory minimums.
"We thought we would get really tough on crime, and reduce violent crime and have lower recidivism and things like that. Well, just the opposite happened. ... All we did was fill our prisons up and violent crime continued to go up," he said.
Violent crime has in recent years finally declined. But scholars fervently debate the reasons, and many factors are believed to be at play. A recent study by the National Research Council found that "the magnitude of the crime reduction [caused by incarceration] remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large."
"Sending a message" is not sound public policy, and expanding our prison system is no pathway to a more just and humane society.
