POLITICS: Keeping repeat offenders off NYC streets is campaign priority one

In a polished video released over the weekend, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo touched on a range of policy issues as he threw his hat officially into the New York City mayoral race. Hitting on public safety, he lamented that “the city just feels threatening” as residents live in fear of “random crime.”

To fix this, he declared: “Law enforcement must focus on the small number of recidivists who commit the large number of crimes.”

Cuomo may be taking a page from the playbook of brassy NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who has made naming-and-shaming violent recidivists — and the faulty criminal justice system that keeps freeing them — a centerpiece of her new tenure.

Tisch has gone further than a generic call to reduce reoffending: She is documenting and publishing the specific names and criminal histories of the individuals whom a decade of increasingly lax crime policies has let loose over and over again to hurt New Yorkers.

This is critical, because crime happens in the specific.

Indeed, New York “progressives” have enacted policies (some under then-Gov. Cuomo) that let dangerous men out of jail and prison by lumping all criminal offenders together into one sympathetic caricature of redemption. This approach insists that persistent felons will stop committing crimes if we replace yucky incarceration with softer in-community therapy and programming.

But it’s not true. Mostly, prison or death — not social services — stop violent reoffenders from lawbreaking.

These were the findings in my recent paper with criminologists Matt Logan and John Paul Wright. As we document, tragically, nearly all criminal rehabilitation programs have either failed or been impossible to successfully replicate.

But this critical fact has been masked by a messy, meta-analytic approach to research over the past decade, which aggregates the results of many studies into a single metric. 

While meta-analysis can be effective for other research areas, it’s been applied with disastrous sloppiness to criminal rehabilitation. Rather than defining “success” as abandoning criminality, meta-analytic reviews erroneously assume that half of offenders who do not participate in rehab programs recidivate.

Measured against this standard (and with other shoddy methodological issues) researchers then proclaimed that treatment reduces recidivism by an impressive 10% — and sometimes by an astounding 50%–60%!

But in reality, recidivism rates are a function of time: About 35% of people are rearrested within the first year and 85% rearrested over the next nine years. Adjusting for research weaknesses, the reduction in recidivism through rehab programs is negligible — with some actually increasing reoffending.

And this has been borne out in New York and anywhere reform laws forced courts to send dangerous men to rehabilitative social services rather than incarceration.

The Big Apple’s 2020 bail reform, for instance, made all misdemeanor offenses and some felonies ineligible for bail setting. This swelled the number of violent defendants who, shielded from jailtime, commit fresh crimes while their first is pending.

Indeed, 71% more violent felony defendants now have a terrifying three or more pending cases than before bail reform.

Apparently, “mandated” rehabilitation programs — like job training and therapy — do not reliably deter crime.

And this pattern is happening nationwide. California passed Proposition 47 a decade ago, forcing prosecutors to send most shoplifters and drug offenders to social services rather than incarcerate them. Since then, California’s seen a 12% rise in criminals convicted four or more times.

My own analysis showed double-digit surges in the share of drug offenders who become chronic drug reoffenders, and an over-6% rise in thieves who became chronic theft reoffenders. Removing the option of incarceration only allowed these offenders to spin further out of control.

But just as Commissioner Tisch’s statements express New Yorkers’ exhaustion with predictable reoffending, Californians have communicated frustration, too.

In November, a referendum vote rolled back parts of Proposition 47, returning courts’ abilities to incarcerate more.

Why? Because Californians who saw the same addict robbing their local CVS over and over, had specific examples that belied grand generalities about rehabilitation’s success.

And that is how we should think about crime.

Last month, Edwin Rivera was on his fourth parole when he shot an NYPD detective responding to illegal firearms reports. “Why was this person out of jail?” Commissioner Tisch appropriately demanded.

Rivera’s first violent felony conviction was at age 16, followed by subsequent gun and other convictions. He was most recently arrested in November for resisting arrest and possession of stolen property — before he was released to commit this cop-shooting three months later.

In the same week, repeat violent offender Shane Harrison, who previously punched an elderly stranger in the subway, sucker-punched a mother with her baby on a subway platform.

Ernst Delma, who slugged a policewoman in the face last summer, randomly punched a woman in Times Square.

Why were any of them on New York streets?

This is the question that every mayoral candidate should be asking. 

Cuomo, who oversaw the enactment of NY’s disastrous bail and discovery “reforms” as governor, must do better than broad statements against the recidivism these policies worsened.

He should talk about how he will keep New York’s many specific baddies behind bars.

Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute.