In January, the Daily Caller raised questions about draft federal recommendations that could lead to increases in crime, after talking points about those recommendations were “inadvertently” emailed to a Daily Caller reporter by a federal employee. The talking points were hostile to incarcerating criminals, calling for economic, “social and structural” change instead, as a way of dealing with the “root causes of community violence.”
Days later, the Bader Family Foundation and the Liberty Unyielding blog submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking government records related these upcoming recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC failed to produce records in response to the FOIA request. Meanwhile, it went ahead and issued its crime recommendations with some modest changes, recommending a set of progressive policies at the state, local, and federal levels. For example, the CDC advised expanding welfare programs to cut crime, even though crime quadrupled from 1960 to the early 1990s, as poverty fell & welfare expanded.
After months passed, and the CDC released no records, the Bader Family Foundation sued the CDC in federal court on May 13, demanding that it release internal agency communications and other records about the CDC’s recommendations, which were officially published in August as the “Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action.”
On August 30, the CDC released 1795 pages of records about these community-violence recommendations. (Pages 1-450 of the records are available here, while Pages 901-1350 are available at this link, and Pages 1700-1795 are found at this link.)
The records CDC released show that it received emails in January questioning claims it made about “community violence prevention.” One email cited well-known studies at odds with the CDC’s claims. None of those studies are cited in the final version of the CDC’s “Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action,” which ignores them, while citing hundreds of articles by progressive and left-wing authors, that blame crime on social and economic conditions like poverty and prejudice — conditions that happen to exist throughout the world, including in countries that have much lower crime rates than the U.S. does (such as countries that are much poorer than the U.S., or have greater ethnic or religious divisions, yet have lower crime rates — like India and Bhutan).
The CDC has not produced the spin that accompanied its “Community Violence Prevention Resource,” known as a rollout cover page, which contains talking points in response to potential questions from the public. A September 2023 version of that page drew critical scrutiny in January from the Daily Caller for making unsupported claims, such as alleging that “increasing punitive measures, including incarceration, does not reduce community violence.” But incarcerating criminals does cut crime — for example, a peer-reviewed 2014 study in the American Economic Journal found that incarceration reduces crime through incapacitation. Longer sentences also deter crime better, according to some studies.
It is unclear whether the same talking points were used when the CDC released its formal recommendations in August: The recommendations do not explicitly make the false claim that “increasing punitive measures, including incarceration, does not reduce community violence.” But the recommendations do disparage what they call “mass incarceration,” a slippery concept that the CDC nowhere defines, and its recommendations consistently highlight only the costs — not the benefits for public safety — of incarcerating criminals. The CDC shortsightedly complains about “mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino/a people.” But most incarceration is necessary to prevent the crime that disproportionately afflicts the black and Hispanic communities. 62.9% of state prison inmates are violent criminals, most of whom are repeat offenders. Letting criminals out of prison increases the crime rate — indeed, most inmates are arrested again after being released. Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime. The typical state prison inmate has five prior offenses, and 81.9% of state prison inmates released in 2008 were arrested again within a decade. The victims of these inmates are disproportionately black and Hispanic people. CDC concedes, “Black or African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Hispanic or Latino males ages 10-34 are at greater risk of dying by homicide than non-Hispanic White males of this age...In 2022, the homicide rate for Black or African American boys and men ages 10-34 was 20 times higher than the rate for White males in this age group.” Moreover, violent crime is mostly between members of the same race, so to protect black victims, we need to incarcerate black criminals, who commit a disproportionate share of the killings in this country. The rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics
There are, however, some changes from the draft version of the “Community Violence Prevention Resource,” such as the fact that the official, final version released in August no longer cites a study by critical race theorists that contains “critical race theory” in its title, which the draft version cited as a source on the subject of school suspensions. But the final version continues to cite a legion of articles by progressive and left-wing scholars and authors who believe that racism is embedded in every aspect of our society, which needs to be fundamentally transformed through various progressive or even radical policies. The CDC has released all of the sources cited in a draft version of its “Community Violence Prevention Resource,” but withheld almost all of the draft itself, leaving it unclear how much changed from the draft version in January to the final version released in August.
The CDC endorses policies to increase the income of the poor, who are disproportionately likely to commit crimes, such as “Tax credits,” “Income support policies,” “Social insurance programs,” “Investment accounts,” and expanded access to welfare (“Temporary Assistance for Needy Families”). CDC seems to think that poverty is a big cause of crime that more welfare benefits can solve.
But the fact that criminals are often poor (due to lack of discipline or failure to stay in school or get a job) does mean that poverty causes crime. Raising people’s incomes does little to reduce the crime rate, which is why the violent crime rate quadrupled in the U.S. between 1960 and the early 1990s, even though Americans got richer during that period, society became more socially equal, and the black poverty rate fell.
Crime often falls during recessions, when people get poorer. As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual notes, “In New York, for example, the poverty rate in 1989 — the year before homicides hit a record-high 2,262 — was actually slightly lower than it was in 2016, the year before Big Apple homicides hit a record-low 292. And during the Great Recession, the national homicide rate actually declined by 15%, going from 5.7 per 100,000 in 2007 to 4.8 per 100,000 in 2010 — a period in which the civilian unemployment rate rose from 4.6 to 9.3 percent.”
And recent immigrants — who often were desperately poor — often had very low crime rates. As Professor James Q. Wilson, an authority on public administration, once noted, “During the 1960’s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.” See Crime & Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime (1985).
“Income support” and other policies promoted by the CDC are not needed to give people an escape route out of poverty. There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for people of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.”
The CDC suggests that “substandard housing” may be fueling crime. But Americans below the poverty line have as much living space as middle-class Europeans, yet the crime rate is much lower in Europe, where incomes are generally lower than in the U.S.. Even Americans below the poverty level have enough to live without turning to crime. As Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation observed in 2004, when Americans were poorer:
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)….Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.
In short, the CDC is determined to blame crime on “root causes” that actually don’t explain most crimes. As the Daily Caller reported in January,
The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains that putting more criminals in jail does not prevent violent crime but that addressing the “root causes” of violence, like racism, will make communities safer, according to internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The CDC is set to release new guidance, titled the Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action, on how to address community violence in the coming weeks, according to documents obtained by the DCNF. In a section of a document detailing the CDC’s planned responses to potential questions from the public on its upcoming recommendations, the agency claims that “increasing punitive measures, including incarceration, does not reduce community violence” and that “we can work to prevent violence by addressing the underlying conditions that contribute to violence,” like racism….the CDC’s internal communications strategy…indicates the CDC views crime as the product of underlying social factors like racism and economic inequality, and that it views incarceration as an ineffective means of reducing crime.
“Isn’t community violence caused by criminals who make poor decisions?” and “Shouldn’t we just lock these people up to keep communities safe?” are among the possible questions the CDC is “hoping against hope” it is not asked about their forthcoming guidance, according to the document. “Racism, economic injustices, and other systemic inequities contribute to the current and persistent increased risk of violence experienced by some communities,” the CDC’s pre-written answer to those questions reads.
“Dominant public narratives” surrounding crime and race “often consider violence primarily a problem of personal responsibility,” the CDC continues. Focusing on personal responsibility as a way to reduce gun crime “invokes images of youth and young adults, and especially Black or African American youth and young adults, as aggressors, troublemakers, or worse,” the CDC says. “Harmful narratives around race and violence” are “biased and inaccurate” and can “rob youth and young adults of their humanity by failing to value them as complete people and valued members of communities,” the CDC document states. Instead of buying into these narratives, stakeholders should work toward addressing root causes of violence, according to the CDC. The CDC identifies things like “structural racism” and “historical injustices” as among these root causes.
Both the Daily Caller reporter, and a member of the public, sent the CDC emails raising questions about the claims it was making.
An email released in response to our FOIA request asks the CDC,
Under the Data Quality Act, doesn’t the CDC have to have a factual basis for claims it makes?
A draft CDC Community Violence Prevention Resource claims that “Evidence shows that increasing punitive measures, including incarceration, does not reduce community violence.” The draft is posted in the news article, “EXCLUSIVE: CDC Champions Addressing Racism, ‘Injustices’ Over Jailing Criminals to Prevent Violence,” Daily Caller, January 5, 2024, found at https://dailycaller.com/2024/
01/05/cdc-criminal-justice- community-violence/. That claim isn’t accurate. Studies and real life refute it. There are real life examples of incarceration and other punitive measures reducing community violence.
There are many examples of serial killers and other repeat criminals who kept committing acts of violence until they were incarcerated or executed, at which point, they stopped committing violent crimes because they were incarcerated, and thus unable to commit more crimes. So catching more violent criminals — that is, increasing punitive measures — does reduce community violence, by keeping dangerous criminals from committing more crimes with impunity.
For example, the serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin killed at least 11 people, but stopped killing people when he was arrested and incarcerated (Years later, he was executed for his murders). See Joseph Paul Franklin, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Joseph_Paul_Franklin. Studies also find that incarceration reduces crime, and that releasing inmates early increases the crime rate. See, e.g., Alessandro Barbarino & Giovanni Mastrobuono, the Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration from Several Italian Collective Pardons, American Economic Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-37 (2014), available at https://www.aeaweb.org/
articles?id=10.1257/pol.6.1.1 Some studies also find that longer prison sentences deter crime more effectively than shorter sentences. See, e.g.,Daniel Kessler & Steven D. Levitt, Using Sentence Enhancements to Distinguish between Deterrence and Incapacitation, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 6484 (1998), https://www.nber.org/papers/
w6484. A study concluded that certain crimes in California fell significantly because California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. It found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. Its finding reflected the fact that three years after Proposition 8 was adopted, crimes punished with enhanced sentences had “fallen roughly 20-40 percent compared to” crimes not covered by enhanced sentences. See Kessler & Levitt, Using Sentence Enhancements to Distinguish between Deterrence and Incapacitation, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 6484 (1998), https://www.nber.org/papers/
w6484. If people are more likely to get away with murder or other serious violent crimes, and avoid incarceration, then they are more likely to commit those crimes. America has a lower rate of catching murderers than Europe, which experts think contributes to it having a higher homicide rate than Europe. NPR cited a researcher — Philip Cook at Duke University — pointing out that incarceration is needed for deterrence, but that isn’t happening in places in the United States where rates of catching murderers (clearance rates) are very low. Those low clearance rates fuel devastating high homicide rates in the inner city. Duke University’s Phlip Cook described “low clearance rates undermining future investigations and potentially driving up the murder rate in some minority communities where lack of arrests undermines deterrence,” according to NPR. See Eric Westervelt, “More people are getting away with murder. Unsolved killings reach a record high,” NPR, April 29, 2023, available at https://www.npr.org/2023/04/
29/1172899691/more-people-are- getting-away-with-murder- unsolved-killings-reach-a- record-high. Maryland and Virginia are adjacent states that are rather similar, but Virginia has a much lower crime rate, apparently because it incarcerates inmates longer for the same offense than Maryland does, further illustrating that “increasing punitive measures” does reduce community violence to some extent. Counties in Maryland have much higher crime rates than the neighboring counties they border in Virginia, as news articles and think-tanks have pointed out. For example, the Heritage Foundation described how Virginia’s Fairfax County ended up with less than half the crime of neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland after Virginia cracked down on crime, abolishing parole for violent felons. See, e.g., David B. Mulhausen, ED120999: Crime in Two Counties, Heritage Foundation, Dec. 3, 1999, available at https://www.heritage.org/
crime-and-justice/commentary/ ed120999-crime-two-counties. Virginia has much lower rates of robbery, murder, assault, and property crime than Maryland does. Especially robbery — Virginia gives robbers much harsher sentences for robbery than Maryland does.
Virginia has a higher incarceration rate and lower crime rate and murder rate than Maryland, according to USA Today. See High crime rate: What states are the most dangerous, with most violent crimes per capita?, USA Today, Jan. 13, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/
picture-gallery/money/2020/01/ 13/most-dangerous-states-in- america/40969391/ In light of such studies and real life examples, it is a mistake for CDC to claim that “increasing punitive measures, including incarceration, does not reduce community violence.”
Claiming that would be at odds with the Data Quality Act, also known as the Information Quality Act.
The CDC Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action should be revised to reflect that. Thank you for reviewing this.
It seems to hard to argue with this email, but CDC does not appear to have substantively responded to these points at all, such as the arguments that the CDC’s beliefs are so false that publishing them would violate the Data Quality Act.
There were internal deliberations about how to respond to this email, in which one CDC employee suggested tempering the agency’s claims to make the CDC’s recommended policies (such as anti-poverty programs) complement the criminal justice system, rather than rejecting or replacing traditional crime-prevention strategies like incarceration. She wrote, “For your consideration, I would add these three words. What seems to be missing from the dialogue / or responses, and which could create challenges moving forward, is that the Resource for Action is not meant to replace justice approaches, or to eliminate the criminal justice system, but is instead complementary to law enforcement efforts.”
The Daily Caller reporter also questioned whether there was a basis for the CDC’s beliefs, in an email stating:
1. The CDC argues that “consider[ing| violence primarily a problem of personal responsibility” is both “biased and inaccurate” and can be harmful to black and lating communities. Could someone expand on the reasoning behind that statement?
2. The CDC claims that incarceration and other punitive measures are not effective at preventing gun violence. Could the CDC provide the evidence it cites for this claim? How does the CDC weigh that evidence against competing evidence?
3. Could the CDC expand on why it believes targeting the root causes of gun violence, like racism or structural Inequality, would be more effective than other approaches?
The CDC did not respond to these queries at all. As the Daily Caller reported in his subsequent news story, “Though the CDC asserted that putting more criminals in jail would not reduce community violence, it did not provide evidence to support its claim when asked to do so by the DCNF.”
The CDC redacted most of the draft version of the Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action, citing Exemption 5 of the Freedom of Information Act, which lets agencies withhold internal government communications about proposed policies. But the draft version is not internal to the government — it was shared with many outside academics, gun-control activists, and employees of interest groups, like the Community Justice Action Fund and Sandy Hook Promise. The Community Justice Action Fund’s web site describes itself as “advocating and demanding change.” “Community Justice Action Fund is a project of Tides Advocacy,” it says. Wikipedia says the “Tides Foundation is a far left-leaning donor advised fund based in the United States.”
Sharing a draft with outside consultants who have a strong “self-interest” in taking a position, waives the agency’s right to withhold that draft, according to a court ruling in a case I litigated, Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Office of Science and Technology Policy (Feb. 2016). That case ruled that an agency had to release a draft it shared with a climate scientist at Princeton University.
Here is an example of a CDC email sharing the draft with people outside the government, such as at the Community Justice Action Fund:
From: McKeithan, Samantha (CDC/DONID/NCIPC/DVP)
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2023 11:00 AM
To: shanes@aap.org; Bkozial@aap ong; mmelzer@mcw.edu; Eric.Sipel@childrenscolorado.org; kjackson@aasa.org: mightyfine@apha.org; MMangat@lisc.org; lmichael@lisc.org; jstark@lisc.org; isag@preventioninstitute.ore: rachel@preventioninstitute.org: Sana@preventioninstitute.org; Alex.French@sandyhookpromise.org; abigail.clawsonwolf@sandyhookpromise.org; tracy.haufer@sandyhookpromise.org; samuel. chasin@YMCA.NET; juliano@bigcitieshealth.org; greg@cjactionfund.org; fatimahd@thehavi.org; angelina@thehavi.org; sophia@humanimpact.org;…. ktheall@tulane,edu; marcz@umich.edu; tnsulliv@vcu.edu; elizabeth.miller@chp.edu;…ctillmon@uchicape.edu; sabuges@ucdavis.edu; debes@uchicago.edu; dwebsten@jhuedu; rowhani@uw.edu; maury.nation@vanderbilt.edu; ksacla2@uic.edu
Subject: Guidance for Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action Review: Feedback Due July 11thHello Partners,
On behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention (DYP), thank you for agreeing to review a draft of CDC’s forthcoming Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action: A Compilation of the Best Available Evidence for Youth and Young Adults.
* Attached is a PDF of the draft resource and the webinar slides to aid in your review….
* Please send your feedback to Samantha McKeithan… and Embree Moore…by Tuesday July 11th….
CDC nowhere discusses the most important thing in fighting crime, which is catching more criminals. Most violent crimes in the U.S. never lead to a conviction, and the U.S. has a lower clearance rate than European countries with lower crime rates, which manage to catch and incarcerate a higher fraction of murderers. The U.S. solves only about half of all murders. By contrast, more than 90 percent of all murders are solved in Germany. In the U.S., black-on-black murders usually are not punished. Chicago solves only 47 percent of cases when a murder victim is white, 33 percent when a victim is Hispanic, and a wretched 22 percent of cases when the victim is black, according to NPR.
As a result of low clearance rates, “America incarcerates fewer people per homicide than countries like Australia, Japan, Switzerland, and Austria,” according data provided by Professor Justin Nix. America needs to incarcerate more killers and violent criminals.
As Joe Friday notes at DC Crime Facts, “One of the most basic and consistent findings in criminology research is that increasing the certainty that a criminal is caught is by far the most effective way to deter criminals for committing more crimes,” as both liberal and conservative organizations have noted. But low rates of catching criminals in the U.S. make punishment seem unlikely and uncertain, emboldening offenders to commit crimes in the belief that they will probably get away with it.
To catch more criminals, America may need to spend more on its police. Europe spends more of its economy on its police than the U.S. does (it also has a lower murder rate, less than half of America’s). As Daniel Bier notes, “As a share of GDP, the EU [European Union] spends 33% more than the US on police.” “European countries almost uniformly spend a much larger share on police than US states, though just how much larger varies wildly.”
The CDC suggests that police are overpolicing black youth, but given very low clearance rates in cities like Chicago, where black-on-black murders typically do not lead to any punishment at all, the reverse may be true. The CDC wrote that “Youth and young adults from many marginalized racial and ethnic communities are often over-represented in both traditional and more recent justice system data sources. Researchers have suggested that this is because they are more frequently being reported to police compared to White youth and young adults, and have increased exposure to police due to” things like “profiling.”
But a meta-analysis of the criminal justice system found that it is racially fair, most of the time. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than whites, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates, not racism: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018). The fact that the black percentage of people arrested was similar to the black percentage of perpetrators of “crime reported to police” is telling, because the people who report violent crimes to police — mainly crime victims — are disproportionately black people themselves. Since victims are overwhelmingly the same race as their attacker, there is no reason to think that they are reporting those crimes out of racism. Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.
