Rafael Mangual challenges the chief claim of prison abolitionists that America suffers from a mass incarceration crisis. He argues instead that the trauma suffered because of the failure to incapacitate repeat offenders should be the North Star of criminal justice policy discussions. He builds on the work of James Q. Wilson and argues that crime control is possible to achieve and should be the central national policy objective, particularly in the most marginalized communities (Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Chicago’s Austi, and Baltimore’s Belair‐Edison neighborhoods).
Mangual considers 1970s tough‐on‐crime tactics to be relevant and appropriate today. By contrast, he finds anti‐police rhetoric and calls for decarceration and depolicing less useful. He notes that Black US residents have accounted for an outsized share of America’s homicides for decades. He marshals the following key evidence to show the harm of the anti‐police and anti‐prison rhetoric: “while Black people already had the highest homicide victimization rate (19.5 per 100,000) of any group in 2019, the disparity grew even starker in 2020, when that number shot up to 25.3 per 100,000.”
Mangual rejects progressive arguments about economic, political, or social causes for minority overrepresentation in prison. Instead, he argues that entitlement and anti‐social personality disorder are the best predictors of aggression and involvement in the criminal justice system. He suggests that “what drives criminal violence has a lot more to do with the anti‐social disposition of violent criminals and street culture that elevates violence.” Only policing and incarceration, according to Mangual, can address these root causes.
Mangual also posits that “the most serious violent crimes are disproportionately committed by individuals with lengthy rap sheets and active criminal justice statuses, and many of these individuals could (and probably should) have been incarcerated at the time of the offenses in question.” Incapacitation can prevent crime for Mangual. He rejects the oversimplification that the “US has five percent of the world’s population but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners.” For Mangual, such facile comparisons fail to account for the concentration of crime in certain communities. He notes that homicides in four American cities outpaced homicides in England, Wales, and Germany combined.
Furthermore, according to Mangual, postconviction imprisonment rarely matches the sentencing parameters for violent crimes. He cites a US Department of Justice study that shows that between 2003 and 2009, a minority (40 percent) of state felony convictions were of defendants subsequently sent to prison. He also places a spotlight on violent reoffenders. He notes that “the average number of prior arrests for cohorts of state prisoners released in 2005, 2008, and 2012 ranged between 10.6 and 12.1. Additionally, as of 2018, more than 60 percent of state prisoners were primarily incarcerated for a violent or weapons offense. He suggests that these statistics may be an undercount because of plea bargaining.
Mangual is incensed that between 70.8 and 77 percent of inmates reoffend within five years of their initial arrest. Unmitigated recidivism is an argument against decarceration. Mangual argues that “decarceration advocates … focus on the subset of the prison population that doesn’t belong behind bars, but what they don’t grapple with is the larger subset of the general population that does.” Failure of unwillingness to incapacitate is, for Mangual, a major driver of America’s crime problem. He cites a University of Chicago Crime Lab study that found that, on average, someone arrested for homicide or shooting had nearly 12 prior arrests and that almost 20 percent of Chicago shooters and killers had more than 20 priors.
In Chapter 3, Mangual turns his attention to pretrial detention. He observes that “of the 2 million or so individuals incarcerated in the US on a given day, approximately 631,000 of them are jail inmates and nearly three‐quarters of those people are awaiting the disposition of their cases.” He concedes that a persuasive argument against pretrial justice can be made in the area of cash bail (“the problem with relying on cash bail is that it makes the question of pretrial release one of means rather than one of risk”). Still, he argues that bail reform involves trade‐offs, namely public safety. Mangual cites a study by Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford university researchers that found that pretrial release increased the likelihood of rearrest prior to case disposition by more than 37 percent and the likelihood of a defendant failing to appear in court by 124 percent. Mangual would favor reform that the use of validated algorithmic risk assessment tools to empower judges to remand dangerous or high‐risk offenders to pretrial detention, irrespective of the charges they face.
Mangual is unmoved by arguments that incarceration is “tearing families apart” (e.g., “approximately 17 million children are currently being raised without a father, a growing social problem that only perpetuates cycles of violence and crime”). For Mangual, “policy decisions driven by broad generalizations or the emotions certain unfortunate realities evoke” are meritless. Mangual instead argues that “exposure to highly antisocial fathers is extremely detrimental for children and associated with a host of negative life outcomes.” He finds the psychological effects of anti‐social and criminal parents on children’s outcomes the more compelling concern.
When Mangual discusses use of force in Chapter 5, he begins with the context of the Watts riot in 1965 and the Los Angeles riots in 1992. He finds “the tone of our police reform debate toxic” when it is limited to five most popular proposals: defunding the police, demilitarizing the police, abolishing qualified immunity, recommitting to de‐escalation training, and diverting certain calls away from the police to mental health responders. He suggests that “the data on police shootings and other uses of force simply don’t support” an actionable pattern of behavior. Tragedies are individual affairs for Mangual. Mangual cites the 2018 study “Injuries Associated with Police Use‐of‐Force,” which analyzed more than a million calls for service that resulted in more than 114,000 criminal arrests. Police officers used physical force in just 1 in every 128 of those arrests, meaning that more than 99 percent of those arrests were completed without the use of any force. When Mangual widens the context for arrests to a national level, he asks the following question “in the context of almost 700,000 officers making more than 10 million arrests and conducting tens of millions of traffic and pedestrian stops, can you honestly say that the data on uses of force establish an institutional police violence problem?”
Mangual suggests that militarization is not driving the use of force. He cites a 2017 study that concluded that there is no “positive and statistically significant relationship between 1,033 transfers and fatalities from officer‐involved shootings.” He concludes that police violence cannot be significantly reduced by limiting the use of SWAT teams or the access of officers to certain types of equipment. He also offers a contrarian view on no‐knock warrants. Officer safety demands the use of “unannounced dynamic entry.”
Mangual is even more adamant on the question of qualified immunity. Mangual frames qualified immunity in terms of clear precedent of a clearly established civil right. Judging police conduct in light of a priori established civil rights is a fair standard, according to Mangual. Qualified immunity is a poor shield, according to a Yale Law Journal study by University of California, Los Angeles law professor Joanna Schwartz. Out of 1,100 cases filed against state and local law enforcement defendants under Section 1983 of Title 42 of the US Code, qualified immunity was a possible defense 83 percent of time and resulted in a partial or whole grant of dismissal 4 percent of the time. The real bugaboo should be indemnification (“the vast majority of American police officers work in jurisdictions that, pursuant to either collective bargaining … indemnify them against financial liability for damages awarded as a result of actions undertaken within the scope of their employment”).
With respect to de‐escalation and mental health diversion, “there is little evidence in the peer‐reviewed literature that crisis intervention training programs show benefits on objective measures of arrests, officer injury, or use of force.” Mangual indulges in some sociological conjecture in Chapter 6 when he blames the “tough‐guy posture” of profiled Black men for escalation during police‐involved altercations. For Mangual, anti‐bias training for police would not reduce profiled stops (“Terry stops”). He also insists that “civilians didn’t have a particularly firm grasp of their right to terminate certain interactions with police.” In Chapter 7, Mangual finally engages race head‐on. Racial gaps in sentencing are the result of urban reform policies of pursuing violent crime reductions through drug enforcement. He also notes that “in cities across the country, police chiefs, district attorneys, lawmakers, cops, prosecutors, and judges dedicated themselves to a mission of crime control.” The primary beneficiaries of crime declines “are people we’re told are singled out by the system for unfair treatment.” The unequal distribution of crime across America explains the unequal distribution of police attention and enforcement.