OPINION:
Few journalists get an entire social science concept named after them, but former New York Times scribe Fox Butterfield is an exception — though probably not in a way he would hope.
The “Butterfield Effect,” as it has come to be known, refers to when somebody mistakes an obvious cause-and-effect relationship for a paradox. It’s named after an unintentionally hilarious series of articles Mr. Butterfield penned for the Times on the supposed paradox that crime was falling as prison rates rose. The classic of the genre was a 2004 article with the obtuse headline “Despite Drop in Crime, a Rise in Inmates.” That “despite” is doing a lot of work.
The Butterfield Effect pops up frequently. Travelers grouse that they’re forced to take their shoes off by the TSA despite there having been no attempted shoe bombings in nearly two decades. News consumers chortled that the Y2K bug was overhyped despite corporations and government spending billions of dollars working to ensure that the turn of the millennium did not bring down computers systems worldwide.
People continue to cite the Butterfield Effect when it comes to crime. The new fad for criminal justice reform, embraced both by the left and on many precincts of the American right, relies heavily on it. Crime is near multidecade lows, they say; so why are we continuing to lock people up? And indeed, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the democratic world. (It’s best to keep the self-reported statistics from authoritarian countries like China out of the comparisons.)
Reducing sentences or even pardoning those convicted of so-called “non-violent drug offenses” has become a particular point of agreement. Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, a former prosecutor desperately running from her law-and-order background to seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency, suggested at a recent televised town hall meeting that she would pursue mass pardons of people imprisoned for such offenses.
“We have to have the courage to recognize that there are a lot of folks who have been incarcerated who should not have been incarcerated and are still in prison,” she said. “They were convicted under draconian laws that have incarcerated them for in some cases, a lifetime based on what is essentially a public health issue.” The senator has also backed legalizing marijuana and suggested in her book that she backs ending the war on harder drugs, too.
There’s no doubt that mass drug addiction is a public health crisis, but it’s not really what is driving the criminal justice crisis. The “vast majority of people imprisoned are there for violent, property, or weapons charges,” points out Rafael Mangual, who studies criminal justice issues at the Manhattan Institute. Fifty-nine percent of those convicted of drug possession serve less than year — and those who receive longer sentences almost always do so because they already have long criminal records by the time they’re brought up on drugs charges.
Moreover, as Los Angeles County prosecutor Eric Siddall wrote in 2016, “The overwhelming majority of ’nonviolent drug offenders’ serving prison time are there because they were convicted of transporting or selling drugs. In other words, ’nonviolent offender’ is a polite and more politically palatable way of saying ’drug dealer.’”
As Mr. Siddall notes, drug dealing is hardly non-violent; not only is there the violence that hard drugs themselves inflict on their users, but there’s the extraordinary violence unleashed by drug gangs and cartels as well. Street-level drug dealers are crucial for the cartels’ ability to sustain themselves.
Perhaps the most important point, though, is that those drug convictions are frequently plea bargains and thus sometimes mask the real world offense. The convict escapes a harsher charge — say, illegal weapons possession — and sentence by pleading guilty to drug possession. In federal courts, an astonishing 9 out of 10 cases are resolved with guilty pleas, evidence of how widespread plea bargaining has become.
And here is where the real irony lies. Consider: Were the government to stop pursuing drug possession cases, defendants would lose their ability to plead down. Picked up on a weapons charge? Rather than cop a plea for carrying some weed, you’d now be charged with carrying an illegal weapon — and end up serving a much longer sentence. In other words, ending the incarceration of “non-violent drug offenders” would actually end up increasing the prison population.
Perhaps one day we’ll call that the Kamala Harris effect.
• Ethan Epstein is deputy opinion editor of The Washington Times. Contact him at eepstein@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @ethanepstiiiine.
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