michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, a new book on criminal justice reform.

emily bazelon

Well, if you lock up all these people, are we really going to be safer? What are we really doing here?

david leonhardt

Then what would a better system look like?

michelle goldberg

I’m actually fine with a 20-year cap on prison sentences.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

So you drink your coffee black, David?

david leonhardt

Criminal justice reform has quickly become a hot political topic. And it’s unlike almost any other hot political topic because there are actually some areas of bipartisan agreement. President Trump recently signed a bill backed by both Democrats and Republicans that would make small changes to the federal system of criminal justice. You also have both Libertarians and Progressives supporting moves at the local level. Emily Bazelon is a writer for The New York Times Magazine, and she has a new book out called “Charged,” which focuses specifically on prosecutors. Michelle sat down with her to talk about the book. You’ll hear that first, and then Michelle, Ross and I come back to talk about the larger issue of criminal justice reform. Here are Michelle and Emily.

michelle goldberg

So to start, there’s this moment in your book where a member, I think, of the Daily News editorial board tweets how bizarre it is to see D.A. candidates competing to see who can be softest on crime. And I guess I’m hoping that you can sort of help explain how we got to that point.

emily bazelon

Yeah, so that tweet comes in the middle of the race for Brooklyn district attorney in 2017. And I think you have to kind of go back to the 1970s when, in the early ‘70s, the United States had the same kind of rate of incarceration as Scandinavia has today. And then we had a crime wave. And we responded to it with these huge increases in sentencing laws and a lot of mandatory minimum sentences, which are important for my story, because they give a lot of power to prosecutors. We incarcerated five times as many people. We got ourselves to this current prison population of 2.2 million. And we didn’t notice very much that crime actually dropped a lot along the way, and that the reasons crime rises or falls are not particularly tied to locking up lots more people. I think in the ‘80s and ‘90s when people were passing these really tough laws, they were doing it in response to real fear and also very high-profile scary crimes that were committed. And it wasn’t really thought through, like O.K., well, if you lock up all these people, are we really going to be safer? What are we really doing here? What you see in the last five years or so is a lot of research starting to come out, questioning whether locking lots of people up actually deters crime at the levels that we’re doing it at. And so that, I think, has been one of the lessons that states and cities have started to learn. And then the other thing that’s driving this conversation— I would say two things: One is the Black Lives Matter movement, a really energized grassroots city-by-city effort to push back on the worst excesses of policing and of criminal justice. And then another thing are Conservatives and Libertarians who are concerned about cost. If we’re spending all this money and we’re not getting anything from it, what’s the return on investment here?

michelle goldberg

Can you talk a little bit about the specific role of prosecutors? Because one of the arguments you make in your book is that if you want to change this sort of mammoth system, the easiest entry point is to get progressive prosecutors.

emily bazelon

Yeah. So in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we were passing these stricter sentencing laws, we set these mandatory sentences for lots of crimes. And the thinking behind that was like, we want to make sure the judges really throw the book at people, that you can’t have some judge just treat people differently and be lenient. What we didn’t really surface at the time is that if you take discretion away from judges, you give it to someone else. You give it to prosecutors, because all of a sudden the charge that somebody faces determines the punishment that they’re getting, right? So I did a lot of reporting in this gun court in Brooklyn. New York has mandatory sentences for gun possession. You have a loaded gun, and they charge you with the maximum charge. You’re going to be going to prison for a minimum of three and a half years. It doesn’t matter if you have no criminal record. You could be in your house. That’s the way the charge works. And so once the prosecutor brings that charge, somebody is going to prison, whatever the judge wants to see happen. I mean, I watched judges ask prosecutors to lower charges to misdemeanors for defendants they thought didn’t deserve to go to prison. And the prosecutor said no, then the answer was no.

michelle goldberg

And one of the sort of interesting— I don’t even know if it’s an irony, but it’s interesting to see how New York’s strict gun control laws, which I’ve always thought of as a progressive victory, have actually worked to worsen mass incarceration or worsen criminal justice abuses. Are those two things naturally in tension?

emily bazelon

They don’t have to be. But I think what happened in New York were these mandatory sentences for gun possession we were just talking about. And so like the question is, O.K., if you want to reduce the rate of gun ownership and make it hard to get a permit, what’s the penalty if you have a gun without a permit, right? And in New York, the penalty is that you go to prison, which is pretty distinctive. That’s not like— look, there are several states in the country where there is no such thing as an illegal gun. So I completely understand the importance and the impulse behind gun control. My question is, does sending everybody to prison who has a gun without a permit make sense? And why do people, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where this is pretty common, why do people have guns? And can we help them think through the circumstances of their lives that led them to this decision rather than just blaming them for it? So when I was interviewing lots and lots of teenagers and men in their 20s who were in gun court, they would say to me they had guns for protection. Well, what did they mean by that? What was behind all those decisions? That I found really absorbing, and I try to unpack all of that in my book. And I think that you need to understand it in order to think through whether this mandatory prison sentence really makes sense.

michelle goldberg

What do you think does make sense or what works in terms of getting guns off the streets and trying to crack down on unlicensed gun ownership without sort of dooming the most disenfranchised people in the city to these really life-ruining interactions with the criminal justice system?

emily bazelon

So I watched some teenagers go through a diversion program in Brooklyn, where they would plead guilty so they had a sentence, prison sentence hanging over their heads. But then they got a second chance, where they would work with a social worker over the course of the year. They had a bunch of rules to follow. The idea was to try to get them to reroute their lives. And so I follow one person, Kevin, particular in the book, as he is going through this process. And I think that second chance is really powerful. I think also, it’s really important when you’re thinking about preventing crime and getting guns off the streets, to think of all the solutions that have nothing to do with law enforcement. And I’m talking here about there’s research showing that when you increase the number of nonprofit groups working on health and other measures of public welfare, that that brings crime rates down. So for example, you have a vacant lot in a poor neighborhood. And some people come in and they decide to turn it into a playground. Well, that’s not something they’re doing to bring the murder rate down, but then they have a playground where kids are out there. And then their parents are going to be watching them, or other folks. And so then you have foot traffic that goes up. And the whole community can get safer and healthier. I think those kinds of interventions, we don’t usually think of them as law enforcement or preventing crime. But they’re really important to the picture in a way that doesn’t get enough attention.

michelle goldberg

Has the N.R.A. ever intervened on behalf of these kids who are going to prison for owning a gun, which, as you said, is not a crime in huge parts of the country?

emily bazelon

Not on my watch in the Brooklyn gun court. I mean, I can’t speak for the N.R.A. anywhere. But it was really striking, Michelle, to think about how there are certain images of young people with weapons that the N.R.A. celebrates. When you’re talking about poor black kids in Brooklyn though, the N.R.A. was nowhere to be found. Not in my reporting.

michelle goldberg

Right. And those kids definitely kind of have guns for self-defense in the same way that— I don’t even know who that ridiculous girl is who parades around with her rifle.

emily bazelon

Her AK-47.

michelle goldberg

Yes. So I’ve never been able to figure out as I watch this issue, I mean, obviously, you have a lot of elite Republican support for criminal justice reform. Some of it from a Libertarian perspective. I mean, some of it, frankly, because there’s a lot of Republican corruption. A lot of leaders on the Republican side seem to be people who have gone to prison and then realize that it’s terrible and counterproductive. But I’m wondering how much that filters down to the grassroots, right? I mean, it doesn’t seem— although, Donald Trump did sign criminal justice reform. It also doesn’t seem that that’s something that’s super popular with the base of the Republican Party. Or am I wrong?

emily bazelon

Well, I’m not sure you’re right about that. There are polls that suggest that the majority of Trump voters want to reduce the number of people in prison and jail along with other people, too. And I do think you’re seeing in places like Texas a real openness to decriminalizing marijuana, for example, or ending the practice of putting people in jail for unpaid traffic tickets. So these are bills that are up for debate in the Texas legislature right now. And they do have some Republican support. So I actually think this is one of those issues that is becoming more and more bipartisan. And you saw evidence for that with the passage of the First Step Act. So that is a small law in the scale of really taking a big bite at mass incarceration, but it got a lot of attention. And then strikingly to me, there is President Trump at the State of the Union celebrating the release of a drug offender from prison because of this law. Not the kind of image of a criminal or criminal justice that you expect Republicans or, frankly, Democratic candidates to be putting forward.

michelle goldberg

So you write in your book, conservatives have traditionally used the position of D.A. as a springboard to higher office, right? And I think not just conservatives. Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris. But one of the really interesting things that’s happened is that things that would have been a net plus probably 10 years ago have now become a net negative at least in a Democratic primary. And so I’m wondering, how do you evaluate, for example, Kamala Harris? Because it does seem to me unfair to judge her, given how quickly our thinking on all of this has changed and the political possibilities on all of this has changed.

emily bazelon

Well, I think that you’re right about the changing standard. And another kind of element to add to this is that Kamala Harris is one of the first African-American women to be elected to statewide office in the country. And coming to that race when she ran for attorney general and then senate as a former prosecutor, well, that’s been a way that she and some other women have kind of shown that they are strong enough to be political leaders. So there’s like a kind of irony to me here about now saying this is a net negative, when I think, especially for women who are trying to prove themselves, a law enforcement background has been helpful. That said, I think the problem is that Kamala Harris claimed the mantle of progressive prosecutor for herself when her record doesn’t reflect that in terms of what that label has come to mean. And inside the criminal justice reform movement, that label is contested. People who want progressive prosecutors to really take big steps to reduce mass incarceration, they don’t want to dilute the meaning of a progressive prosecutor. And when you look back at Harris’s record when she was D.A. in San Francisco, she did some things. She called herself “smart on crime.” But she is really a kind of interim step here. So I don’t think it’s necessarily that her record as a prosecutor should be held against her in some way that means she can’t be the Democratic primary candidate, but I do think that for her to say she was a progressive prosecutor, when her record then doesn’t match up with what we think that term should mean now, that is a problem. And I haven’t seen her really grapple with that.

michelle goldberg

She wrote her first book “Smart on Crime” in 2009. Was she a progressive prosecutor according to what that term would have meant then?

emily bazelon

We didn’t even really have that term then. Nobody wanted to get anywhere near that term then. It just wasn’t a thing, right? So then I think you have to look at the specifics of Harris’s record. And she did decide not to charge the death penalty in a big case in San Francisco where a police officer had been killed. She took a lot of heat on that.

michelle goldberg

She faced a huge backlash for that, right?

emily bazelon

Absolutely. But then after that happened, she really tried to reach out to law enforcement and not go too far to be seen as some like lefty radical. And so I’m sure you’ve seen these, there are videos of her circulating online where she talks about threatening parents with jail if their kids are truant. And those videos don’t play very well in the current environment. She seems like a little gleeful about putting those parents in jail. And it all seems like out of sync with this moment of what we think progressive prosecutors should be doing.

michelle goldberg

What are the implications of this movement for white collar crime? Because I think if you— from a progressive point of view, if you’re kind of analyzing the criminal justice system, the problem isn’t that we’ve been too lenient with everyone, right? We’ve been extremely harsh on certain classes of people and extremely lenient on other classes of people. And so if you’re looking for some sort of accountability for the financial crisis or for the orgy of corruption that takes place in the Trump administration, doesn’t that imply that more violent criminals should be going to prison?

emily bazelon

Well, I mean, yes. But how about this? We should have a kind of consistent, proportional, evenhanded enforcement of law and order in this country, right? And so people who commit huge acts of fraud as white collar criminals often don’t go to jail at all, even though people who shoplift rather small sums of money do. So I feel like the problem there is one of proportionality and evenhandedness, and that you can think it is appropriate for a white collar defendants to be punished, including jail time depending on the offense, and still argue that in general, small time thieves and burglars are being overpunished. I don’t really see an inconsistency there.

michelle goldberg

Like you said, this movement is relatively new. But based on what we’ve seen so far, is it possible to generalize about the results both in terms of decarceration and in terms of public safety?

emily bazelon

Well, luckily, crime is still going down. And I think one challenge for this movement will be, if it goes back up, can the leaders of it persuade people that that is not a reason to just ratchet up sentences one more time? And I think also measures like community satisfaction, and whether communities seem like they’re healthier and in better shape, those will be— if prosecutors feel like they can contribute to that kind of increase in public welfare, that will be a plus for them politically. So far I think one thing that’s been accomplished is that local voters and community organizers have poured themselves into some of these races in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Boston, in St. Louis. And these have been real tangible victories for them, which have shown people at large and their supporters that local votes matter, right? You’re frustrated with President Trump or Washington, DC. That can seem so insurmountable and far away and huge. Well, these are like small local races in which a relatively small number of votes can make a huge difference— can determine the outcome. The A.C.L.U. did a poll a couple years ago. Only half of Americans even knew that they elected their district attorneys.

michelle goldberg

And are there kind of marquee races coming up in 2020 with regard to prosecutors?

emily bazelon

Yeah, I would say the biggest one is in Los Angeles. The district attorney there, Jackie Lacey, is not a progressive by any measure. And so that will be one to watch. That’s something between like 10 and 12 million people live in Los Angeles County. So changing how the district attorney’s office works there is a big deal.

michelle goldberg

I mean, to me, the thing that I think is most impactful from your book is the point that you just made, right? That if you feel like impotent and miserable and full of despair, here is this one sort of race that you can actually make like a huge difference in the way justice is done in this country.

emily bazelon

Yes. Good. That’s the thing I feel the most. I mean, to me the most powerful line in the book about prosecutors is, “Their power is our power, because we elect them.” So if all my book accomplishes is just like making people understand, hey, this is a race I can pay attention to and have an impact on, just like the race for mayor, that’s good.

michelle goldberg

Great. Thank you so much.

emily bazelon

Thank you. It was a pleasure talking with you.

david leonhardt

Now we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. O.K. Michelle, Ross, and I are all now back together. And we’re going to talk about criminal justice reform. Ross, why don’t you go first?

ross douthat

Sure. So like a lot of conservatives, I have a broad sympathy for a lot of the work that’s been done on criminal justice reform. I think we have had an overincarceration problem in this country, and that the move away from imprisonment for nonviolent offenses, drug offenses and so on, is probably a good thing. But I also think this conversation and Emily’s book gets us to a place where liberals and conservatives are likely to just disagree. And I guess I’ll start by offering a basic disagreement. I think Emily told a story early on in the conversation about the history of incarceration in the US, and said, look, we had this big crime wave, and then we sort of reflexively started putting people in prison. And putting people in prison doesn’t actually have much of an effect on crime. And I’m really skeptical of that take. I think putting people in prison does have an effect on crime. It’s not the only thing that drove down the crime rate. Maybe it accounts for 20 percent of the decline in crime. But that’s a huge number of crimes that don’t happen because we lock people up. And I think if you look at the actual history of incarceration rates in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in fact, at the beginning of the crime wave, incarceration rates go down, because, frankly, liberals were in charge of America’s criminal justice system in various ways in that era. And they thought, as they still think, that there wasn’t a link between incarceration and crime. But in fact, I think there was. And the fact— and part of what became mass incarceration was society playing catch up by basically putting people back in jail who should have been in prison in the first place after a period when we weren’t really locking up enough people and were reaping part of the crime wave because of it.

david leonhardt

Yeah. I see that critique. I mean, the way I think this through, there are hard questions and easy questions. And the easy questions to me are, is there enough accountability for prosecutors? And the answer is absolutely not. When prosecutors make horrific mistakes that imprison innocent people, they tend not to get punished. They often just keep their jobs, and people stay in prison. Is our bail system broken? It’s completely broken. It’s basically a big tax on poor people. And so I think there are a lot of things that we could clearly do to improve our criminal justice system, including not imprisoning people for nonviolent offenses. But then I think there are hard questions. And Ross I’m sympathetic with you that the idea that the great crime decline, which is a really big deal, that it’s completely coincidental to the increase in imprisoning people. That strikes me as just a little bit too convenient. And it’s the kind of thing that we would all love to believe, because it doesn’t bring any trade-offs. But I think there are actually hard questions about, what is the right level of incarceration to keep crime down? Michelle, I’m curious about how you think about that trade-off.

michelle goldberg

I mean, Emily’s book talks about the fact that, yes, the hard questions for criminal justice reform are kind of what we do with nonviolent offenders or drug offenders. It’s that if you want real criminal justice reform at a certain point, you have to think about what sort of punishments are appropriate for people who commit a violent crime and the extent to which we as a society believe they can be redeemed. If you think that locking people up has a measurable impact on the crime rate and are willing to believe that that’s true to some extent, but I also think you have to factor into that the impact that locking people up has on making them more— I think the criminal justice term is criminogenic. There’s a ton of research about being in jail for a short time, even simply because you’ve been arrested, and you don’t have bail, and you’re waiting for your trial, drastically increases your likelihood of committing crimes later. Never mind spending two years in prison on, for example, a gun charge, right? And so the way in which that then precipitates a cycle of crime and also destroys families in ways that kind of lead to further social breakdown, I think you have to factor all of those things in. And so I understand what you’re saying that it’s too tidy to say, yes, locking people up does nothing to deter crime. But I think you also have to measure that with a realization that locking people up can itself foster crime.

ross douthat

I think we can sort of maybe find some general agreement on the principle that the ideal criminal justice system would be able to distinguish between the people who are appearing in court or who are ending up in jail and so on for minor crimes, where if you overincarcerate you will turn them into hardened criminals, and people whose communities will be better off if they are removed from those communities for an extended period of time. Again, I think there’s a lot of evidence that we have ended up erring too much on the side of putting people away for lesser offenses that do have the effect Michelle describes. At the same time, I mean, when I look at like the average time served in prison for serious violent crimes, for murder, robbery, assault, rape and sexual assault, and so on, there’s a broad range. And there are undoubtedly lots of people who end up with sentences that are too long for the crimes they commit. But the average time served in prison for murder in the US is about 13 or 14 years, according to the Department of Justice statistics on state prison. When I look at that, that doesn’t seem to me like a sort of out of control statistic, an average of 13 years for murder. I’m curious whether you guys’ reaction to those statistics is the same as mine, or whether they— because some of this debate comes down to questions like, for instance, do you cap prison sentences at say 20 years, right? Is that a good idea? So yeah, I’m curious about sort of where people ultimately come down on how long is a reasonable sentence for a violent offense.

david leonhardt

I mean, I’m surprised by those numbers. I’ll admit I would have thought it was longer than that. And I agree with you. I don’t read those numbers and say, my goodness, that’s terrible. We need to reduce it. On the other hand, we have more than 2 million people living behind bars. So that means if we’re not putting people away for sexual assault for long stretches of time, we’re putting huge numbers of people away for other reasons, often nonviolent reasons. And it’s just a reminder that this is a crisis. And then I guess the second thing I would say and this is sort of philosophical, but I’m not saying 13 years in jail is enough for murder. But it’s worth remembering 13 years in jail is a really long time. I mean, it is a life-defining sentence in many ways. Jails are horrific places. I’ve been in one only once in California when I was reporting a story, but I mean, they’re basically fascist colonies. They are designed to be that way in which people live in cages. And they live completely under the thumb of guards, and are constantly humiliated. And so I do think— I’m not necessarily defending those numbers you just cited, Ross, but I think it’s important to remember that a 10-year prison sentence, a 15-year prison sentence, that is an extreme measure of punishment.

michelle goldberg

I’m actually fine with a 20-year cap on prison sentences for everybody except members of the Trump administration, but I’m not sure that that’s like politically feasible in the near future. But I also think that the ground of criminal justice reform right now is not really rapists and murderers, because there is a huge middle ground between people who commit nonviolent offenses and people who take a life. And one of the characters in Emily Bazelon’s book is this kid Kevin, who’s basically a good kid who gets in sort of like normal adolescent trouble. And one of the things that I think is challenging about her book is this idea that New York’s very strict gun laws, which I of course support, and locking up kids who aren’t really violent and aren’t really threatening, but either have guns because they feel endangered in their own communities, or because guns are this status symbol that they like to pose with and be seen with, and that the system is sort of incapable of distinguishing between cosplay gangsters and real gangsters. And so there’s like this whole huge middle ground of people who do something violent, but are not kind of inherently violent people and who don’t really pose a threat to the community. And what do we do with them? And we’re sort of not really equipped to talk about mercy for them, right? I mean, there’s a reason why the criminal justice conversation has defaulted to nonviolent people and people who are locked up for basically drug offenses that I’ve probably committed 20 times in my life, right? Because that’s easy. And I think that we do need to at least start by expanding our sense of kind of who deserves mercy to people who have done something that is like a little bit more socially destructive, but doesn’t sort of completely rend the social fabric.

david leonhardt

And then, of course, there’s the racial aspect to all this. And in her book, Emily Bazelon says that she thinks one day we will look back on mass incarceration with some of the similar ways that we now look back on slavery. And that’s obviously a pretty extreme statement. But I’m sympathetic to it. Both when you think about, as I was just saying, the horror of living in prison, and the fact that it is so racially unequal, the fact that the idea of being part of the criminal justice system is the norm in many African-American communities. And when you combine those two, I really have become sympathetic to the argument that our colleague Michelle Alexander makes, that this is the new Jim Crow. It is a system of oppression that not coincidentally by any means is a defining crisis for the African-American community. I’m interested, Ross, as a criminal reform sympathetic Conservative, whether there’s any part of that case that you disagree with.

ross douthat

I would challenge it a little bit on a couple of grounds. First, I think, historically, if you look at the rise of, among other things, mandatory minimum sentencing, crack cocaine sentencing, a lot of the things that criminal justice reformers are understandably concerned about right now, these are policies that are supported, yes, by white Republican voting suburbanites, but in their genesis, they had a lot of support from middle class black Americans, including black politicians in the ‘70s and ‘80s in periods when black communities were being absolutely ravaged by drugs and by the crime wave. That doesn’t mean that they don’t reflect to some extent the structural racism inherent in a society that had slavery and Jim Crow, but I think it should complicate a sort of easy narrative where it was just like, oh, we lock these people up because we’re racists. We lock people up, in part, because their own fellow citizens and neighbors felt like their communities were collapsing, and supported the some of the same law and order policies that white Republicans supported. So that’s one point. And then related to that, one of the huge problems still in urban, heavily African-American communities — and there’s a great book on this subject called “Ghettoside” that I would recommend to anyone — is that far too many people in those communities still get away with murder. Murder clearance rates in inner city communities are really low relative to other parts of the country. And there’s an argument, and I think it’s a plausible argument, that in some of those communities, they are effectively still underpoliced, and that structural racism expresses itself not through mass incarceration, but through the fact that politicians and the country at large don’t care enough about these communities to put adequate policing resources into them. In part, I think, the solution to some crime problems is less incarceration and more police. But if you put more police in, you would get more people in jail, at least in the short term. More people in prison— excuse me— in the short term. And that, too, I think is part of the story here, that there are communities that do right now underincarcerate, because it’s too easy to get away with murder in them.

michelle goldberg

But those two things can be related. I mean, the overincarceration for either petty bullshit or sort of things that fall in the spectrum between something that’s completely harmless and something that’s deadly, that can then contribute, I think, to these poor murder clearance rates, and to basically people getting away with murder. The focus of criminal justice reform is not going easier on murderers. And I think there’s a lot of research that one reason why people get away with murders in some of these communities that I would consider and I think activists would consider overpoliced is because the overpolicing has led to a complete breakdown of trust between the community and the police, right? So there’s a reason why people won’t talk to the police, cooperate with the police, call the police, why they don’t see the police as their protectors. And so that ends up leading to kind of underincarceration for very serious crimes, even as you have kind of too much policing of people’s lives for relatively small things.

ross douthat

I mean, I think that’s totally plausible, but I think we also should be clear that finding the right balance is really challenging, and that we have case studies. We’ve just had one over the last few years in Baltimore of what happens when police sort of simply retreat, right? That after—

michelle goldberg

Right. But nobody’s saying that police should simply retreat.

ross douthat

No. No, no, no. Well, the criminal justice reformers aren’t saying that exactly. But I’m just saying it’s hard. It’s hard. The criminal justice reformers had a reasonable complaint about how policing was carried out in Baltimore, but then after the Freddie Gray incident, you had a retreat from that kind of policing and other kinds of policing. And Baltimore has sort of returned to the bad old days of incredibly high crime rates. So clearly, I’m just saying, clearly, there has to be a better way than what existed prior to the Freddie Gray incident, but there is also a sense in which some of that policing that communities find heavy-handed is itself keeping worse problems at bay.

michelle goldberg

I mean, a counterexample is New York City, right? New York City enacted the sort of, quote, unquote, “broken windows” policing during Rudy Giuliani’s administration, which basically said that you sort of have to really focus on small violations of public order, so-called broken windows, because then that sort of sends a message that bigger violations won’t be tolerated. We had stop and frisk in New York. And when they did away with stop and frisk, there was a lot of fearmongering that this was going to bring back the sort of battle days of New York City crime. And that hasn’t happened.

ross douthat

Yeah, I know. I think that’s right. And I think that proves that there are some forms of aggressive policing that you can step back from. But New York does remain, as Emily’s book attests, a place with, among other things, very, very aggressive treatment of offenses like gun possession, right? I mean, New York is a case study on how certain Liberal goals on guns especially can be accomplished, but with a kind of brutality that Liberals then ultimately recoil from. But I agree. The stop and frisk example shows that you can pull back from certain aggressive forms of policing without turning into Baltimore. Although, New York is different from Baltimore in a lot of different ways.

david leonhardt

I want to end by circling back to the political part of the conversation, Michelle, that you and Emily had. It’s interesting. The three of us have argued a lot about this question of how broken the political system is. And Michelle and I tend to think it’s more broken. And Ross tends to think it’s less broken. This strikes me as an example in which it really is possible to make progress by just winning elections, which, Ross, is basically what you’re always arguing those of us on the left need to do, just go win elections. And basically, electing people who are much more open to proportional criminal justice.

michelle goldberg

Right. And I mean, I think the case that her book makes is that it’s very specifically a case of winning elections for prosecutor, for D.A.

david leonhardt

Yes.

michelle goldberg

And you’ve seen in a lot of places these sort of radical criminal justice reformers be elected to these roles that were formerly the province of kind of hardcore law and order people. And it makes a quick and immediate and sort of profound difference in the way that justice is administered. And so in that way, it’s a reason for hope, right? Because the national system feels so stuck. And we have kind of a Justice Department that’s increasingly on the side of outright fascism. But at the city and state level, you can change things.

ross douthat

And also, there is, in fact, a consensus on both parties manifest in the bill that Donald Trump himself signed that we have gone too far in incarcerating nonviolent offenders. And that consensus has had an impact, right? Like, the US incarceration rate is now at its lowest rate in almost 20 years, I think. And it’s not back down to where it was in the 1970s. I think the bigger question here is— and we’ll probably test this. This is just sort of how the ebb and flow of politics work. It’s how far down can you drive it before you start getting real costs in terms of crime? And my hope is that sort of the current Liberal perspective is correct and you can drive it a lot further without having crime bounce back up. But I just think there’s a lot of uncertainty about that. And there is a sense in which what we’ve done is sort of the obvious low-hanging fruit, and we’re getting into harder cases.

david leonhardt

And as a way to close this segment, let me make a couple of recommendations for people who want to go deeper. First, we’ve been talking about Emily Bazelon’s new book “Charged.” I also mentioned our colleague Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow,” which is excellent, in which she talks about how she changed her own mind on this issue. And there are two podcasts I’d recommend. The second season of “In the Dark,” which talks about prosecutor misconduct in Mississippi, and the third season of “Serial,” which goes deep into the Cleveland criminal justice system. I’m listening to that right now. And it’s quite fascinating.

ross douthat

And let me just— since I mentioned the book without mentioning the author, I recommend, again, “Ghettoside” by Jill Leovy, who was a writer for the Los Angeles Times. And it’s a book that, again, as I suggested, it sort of cuts across Liberal and Conservative narratives, and should complicate anyone’s view of how urban policing works.

david leonhardt

And none of those count as our actual recommendation since they won’t take your mind off politics. So we’ll be right back with our weekly recommendation. This week it’s my turn. And I have another beverage-related recommendation, but I promise it does not involve seltzer. So a few months back I noticed a new coffee chain here in Washington called Philz. And my immediate reaction was skepticism, because it is spelled Philz with a Z, and to me, it just sort of looked like kind of a junkie knockoff coffee chain. But as many people in California know, which is where it comes from, and maybe Chicago as well, where Philz also is, it’s not junky. It serves excellent coffee. And my recommendation this week has to do with its temperature. I’ve spent years frustrated by getting the perfect coffee temperature. I make coffee. It’s too cold. I microwave it. It’s too hot. I basically spend kind of a ludicrous amount of time in the morning trying to adjust my coffee temperature. And I am recommending Philz, even though the coffee is far too expensive, because they have managed to get the temperature of their coffee absolutely perfect. It is truly remarkable. You get a cup of coffee, and it is that maximum heat without burning you. And so my recommendation is if you’re willing to spend $4 for a cup of coffee and you’re in California or Chicago or Washington, stop by Philz, order a cup of coffee, and enjoy the rare perfect temperature cup of coffee.

michelle goldberg

I am willing to spend $4 on a cup of coffee, but I am not really willing to countenance using Zs to make things plural.

david leonhardt

Totally fair.

ross douthat

So you drink your coffee black, David?

david leonhardt

I do not. Thank you for bringing it up. That’s right. They can deal with a twist. So I drink it with light cream. And it is still the perfect temperature. We may have to do a test where we take in thermometers and see. Do black, light cream and normal cream all end up as the same temperature? How scientific is the process at Philz? O.K. That is our show for this week. Thank you as always for listening. If you have thoughts or questions or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. It makes a difference. This week’s show was produced by Alex Laughlin and Wynton Wong for Transmitter Media and edited by Lacy Roberts. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We will see you back here next week.

ross douthat

Although, shop with a double P has a sort of old-fashioned ring.

michelle goldberg

But it doesn’t have a real old-fashioned ring.

ross douthat