Good morning. The midterm election debates on crime have overlooked a success of criminal justice reform efforts. |
 | | Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney.Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times |
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Republican lawmakers up for re-election in Pennsylvania filed articles of impeachment last week against Philadelphia's progressive district attorney, saying that he was responsible for an increase in crime. In the state's Senate race, the Republican nominee, Mehmet Oz, has attacked his opponent, John Fetterman, for encouraging state officials to release more prisoners. |
The Republicans' approach in Pennsylvania reflects their party's embrace of crime as a top issue in many midterm elections. Republicans have demanded solutions to crime increases, and they have criticized Democrats for supporting major changes to criminal justice policy in recent years, claiming that they fueled swelling crime rates. |
As is typical in political campaigns, nuance is getting lost. Critics of the reform efforts have distorted the picture; no statistical link exists between, for example, progressive prosecutors and crime. Yet many Democrats, wary of being labeled weak on the issue, have remained quiet or criticized even successful changes to the legal system. |
And there have been achievements. Understanding them can give you a fuller grasp of crime in the U.S. right now than you might hear in debates or television ads in the run-up to next week's elections. |
I want to explain one such shift that has gotten little attention: Slowly, the American criminal justice system has become more equitable. The racial gap among inmates in state prisons has fallen 40 percent since 2000, fueled by a large decrease in Black imprisonment rates, according to a new report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank. |
Finding the right balance between public safety and human dignity animated many of the criminal justice policies enacted in the U.S. over the past couple of decades. The decline in racial disparities is a remarkable reversal of policies now widely seen as unfairly punishing Black people. "It's a tremendous drop," said Thaddeus Johnson, one of the report's authors. |
 | | Source: Council on Criminal Justice, National Prisoner Statistics |
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Why did inequities in prison rates shrink? The decrease was the result of a decades-long effort to reduce what critics call mass incarceration. |
That is their term for the harsher sentencing laws passed in response to a crime increase that began in the 1960s, which made the U.S. one of the world's biggest incarcerators. Black communities were disproportionately affected and in some cases targeted by law enforcement, as the Justice Department has found in Ferguson, Mo., in Baltimore and elsewhere. By 2000, Black adults were locked up in state prisons at 8.2 times the rate of white Americans, after accounting for population. |
Eventually, the high costs of incarceration and the racial disparities prompted activists from across the political spectrum to push for a rollback of the toughest punishments. Bit by bit, lawmakers obliged, reducing penalties mainly for nonviolent crimes. |
As those changes took effect, incarceration rates dropped. Since Black Americans were more likely to be imprisoned, they benefited the most. Rates of arrest and imprisonment for Black Americans fell sharply, the Council on Criminal Justice analysis found. White arrests also fell, but by less. And the rate of white offenders being sent to prison actually increased. |
Racial gaps remain in the justice system. Black adults are imprisoned at 4.9 times the rate of white adults. Black people, on average, spend more time in prison — an imbalance that is growing. |
The trends expose the limits of sentencing policy changes so far. State facilities hold around 90 percent of U.S. prisoners, and most of those inmates are in for violent offenses. So a majority of American prisoners see little, if any, benefit from leniency focused on nonviolent crime. |
The remaining racial gaps in imprisonment are not solely driven by racial bias in enforcement, but also by higher crime rates in Black communities, the Council on Criminal Justice concluded. "It's not that Black communities are broken or that Black people are more inherently violent," Johnson said. But long-term neglect of Black communities has led to social and economic imbalances. And violent offending, Johnson argued, "is the nexus where all the other disparities, all the other gaps" meet. |
Those problems go beyond the scope of the changes to the criminal justice system so far. But the midterm campaigns suggest there may not be an appetite for doing more, despite the strides toward equity. |
 | | Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva celebrated his win in São Paulo, Brazil.Victor Moriyama for The New York Times |
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- Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's divisive far-right leader, lost his re-election bid. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist former president, will replace him, capping a stunning political revival.
- Da Silva, known as Lula, promised to stabilize the economy and protect the Amazon rainforest, but congressional opposition will probably limit his agenda.
- After years of undermining Brazil's democracy, will Bolsonaro accept the results?
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 | | "Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary," is on display in Paris.Boris Mikhailov; via Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve |
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Lives Lived: Gerald Stern was a wistful poet who won a National Book Award. He died at 97. |
| SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC |
Packers lose four straight: The Bills are 6-1 after an imposing 27-17 win over the Packers last night, extending Green Bay's losing streak to the team's longest since 2016. |
Bronny James: He is a four-star prospect with a five-star name: LeBron James's son has the attention of top colleges, but some coaches question whether recruiting him is worth the inevitable hoopla. |
World Series travels east: The third game is set for tonight in Philadelphia, which hasn't hosted a World Series matchup since 2009. The Phillies have a chance to clinch at home if they win the next three games, but need better pitching if they want to claim the title. |
 | | Bryan Anselm for The New York Times |
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If you go trick-or-treating tonight for Halloween, odds are you'll come across a 12-foot skeleton. Don't be afraid: It's probably just Skelly. The towering Halloween decoration became a hit in 2020 — on TikTok, videos tagged #12ftskeleton have more than 70 million views — and two years later, shoppers are still racing from store to store trying to find one. |
Starri Taddeo, a New Jersey resident, spent two years looking for a Skelly before she bought one that she put up in her front yard. But looking through the decorations has become a seasonal activity for her family: "It's free entertainment." |
 | | Mark Weinberg for The New York Times |
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In an A.I. opera at the Lincoln Center, audience brain waves were part of the show. |
The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was blithely. Here is today's puzzle. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German |
P.S. An 1892 Times article called Halloween "the high carnival season for witches, fairies and the immaterial principle in humanity." |
Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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