Misdemeanors have always been the chump change of the American criminal system. We call them “petty.” We call them “minor.” They are the way that we punish people when we think that their offenses are not serious enough to warrant felony treatment. Not only felony punishment, but also the due process and attention that goes with prosecuting and adjudicating serious crimes. In writing this book, it was shocking to me how little attention we have paid to this vast swath of criminal justice work that the state engages in.
Currently, 5.4 million people in the U.S. want a job but can’t secure one; according to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, around 75 percent of formerly incarcerated people struggle to find work. Lack of access to employment and incarceration in the U.S. go hand in hand, but Brady believes that open hiring proves they do not have to. In a sense, it comes down to pure math: It costs around $30,000 a year to incarcerate a single person. Imagine if that money was used instead to pay someone a living wage?
Especially in places like Yonkers, which is struggling with disinvestment after its textiles industry went under several decades ago, the idea is transformative. Greyston has employed 176 people from the poorest neighborhood in the city over its history, and, in doing so, it’s equipping people with the resources to remain in place and contribute to the local economy.
I think the left wing’s push for gun control and the right wings push back against crime and the war on cops is kind of tone deaf.
While the media is highlighting crime and gun violence, the opposite is true in most people’s lives – crime is going down, neighborhoods are the safest they’ve been in half a century. Murders have fallen to historically low levels, indeed much of the reason why suicides have increased in the country is because murder has fallen so much. Murder after all is suicide by other means.
Indeed, if you look at the push by the left to loosen criminal penalties and legalize marijuana, much of it comes from the realization crime has fallen dramatically. Likewise, right wing gun advocates can legitimately say that fears of gun violence are overblown when crime and murder has fallen so much in recent decades.
Television news brings violence into one’s home every night. It shows sad relatives and friends of the dead, it shows the drama of the courtroom as mostly the colored and poor are brought to what the television calls justice. But despite what indigestion television is causing to folks eating TV dinners, and the cheers and jeers of the politician class, it’s distant from the everyday reality folks are living.
On August 14, 1962, a man in a police uniform stopped a mail truck headed for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. What the postal worker behind the wheel didn’t know was that the officer was an imposter, the truck was filled with $1.5 million and the largest cash heist in history up to that point was underway.
Brandishing guns, the “policeman” and another man wearing civilian clothing stormed the truck, which had just left tourist-laden Cape Cod. The thieves forced the mail employees out of the truck and onto the highway, where they were bound and gagged. They then threw their captives into the back of the truck and took off.
According to the employees, the hijackers, who called each other “Buster” and “Tony,” stopped twice to unload cash before dumping the truck and the people inside just outside Boston, some 60 miles from Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the robbery occurred. By the time the hostages escaped, Buster and Tony had already made their getaway.
Because of the carefully chosen location of the heist, there were no witnesses. A 15-foot-high median strip prevented southbound motorists from spotting the suspicious happenings in the northbound lanes, where the truck was stopped. Buster and Tony—or their accomplices—placed stolen detour signs about four miles south of the truck to reroute traffic behind them.
PLYMOUTH -- Forty years after a mail truck was robbed of more than $1.5 million in one of the largest holdups in state history, the crime remains unsolved.
Authorities think as many as five men and one woman were involved in the robbery on Route — in Plymouth, which netted $1,551,277, about $300,000 more than the more famous 1950 Brinks robbery in Boston. But the only two people ever brought to trial were found innocent, and the money was never recovered.
The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales. Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.
“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high. The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”
It's often underestimated how much technology changed that ways of human relationships, and while I doubt cellphones entirely drove the drop in crime over the past two decades, all the evidence suggests that crime has dropped due to many different factors.
