There is so much that the business leadership could do to help fight crime in Memphis.
They could fully participate in the meetings of law enforcement and criminal justice officials that are regularly called to consider ways to improve the fight against crime and urge their employees to do the same in numerous community meetings.
They could act in partnership and communicate with the many organizations such as the Justice and Safety Alliance that are fighting crime at the grassroots, pursuing evidence and data-based solutions, and listen and act on their recommendations.
They could help develop a data hub with a comprehensive measurements that provide a context for evaluating the police, criminal justice system, and corrections, replacing the present data hubs with their weak and incomplete metrics.
The could urge the reboot of the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission or the creation of a replacement since its ideas have clearly not worked, crime has climbed dramatically on its watch, and it fails to lead the campaign for a better, comprehensive data hub.
Most of all, the business community could fund national experts with track records for reducing crime in other cities to come to Memphis and undertake a top-to-bottom analysis of MPD structure and policies, the criminal court system to ensure that speedy justice is more than a talking point, the problems in the county’s historic public defender’s office, and the interlocking programs and policies that converge to influence crime.
These are just some of the things that the Memphis business leadership could do to contribute to the development and implementation of innovative strategies that are working in other cities.
A Curious Decision
So what did they do?
They sent a letter to Governor Bill Lee asking for the help of state government, ignoring its decidedly political approach offering prepackaged and partisan answers with no real knowledge or expertise in local governmental safety and justice issues. It is generally hyperbolic, research-free and lacks evidence to support its requests, instead chasing magic legislative answers of the moment.
Under the banner of the Greater Chamber Chairman’s Circle and its 170 businesses, among the things they asked for in their letter, they asked for:
- $50 million for crimefighting in the “tourist zone.”
They did not define the geography of the area but it’s presumed to be downtown (although the Graceland area is a tourist zone). It’s unclear where the $50 million price tag in the ask came from, if it is based on any analysis, or how it will be spent. (It immediately brought to mind that Memphis businesses receive approximately $750 million every 10 years in tax breaks or don’t pay taxes because they are located on public property.)
- Pass legislation making the possession of a stolen firearm a felony.
Or put another way, they asked state government to pass a law for a problem that it contributed to, caused by legislation that led to the proliferation of guns, including assault weapons, on city streets. The letter does not ask for support for the common sense gun laws supported by a majority of Tennesseans and that’s a fatal oversight.
- Support and pass Senator Brent Taylor’s blended sentencing legislation and support and pass Senator Brent Taylor’s bail reform measures.
Mr. Taylor’s political agenda for criminal justice has been embraced by people on the right side of the political spectrum, and they have done it without research and analysis to prove that Mr. Taylor, a funeral director, knows what he’s talking about or that the solutions he proposes actually would result in crime reduction. A curiosity about these kinds of laws is they have emerged after a Democrat was elected to the attorney general’s office and it’s hard to escape the feeling that it is a Republican effort to control policies of officials elected in a Democratic city. (We also suspect the Crime Commission’s invisible hand is at work as well.)
Mr. Taylor’s bail “reform” proposal is more about political pandering than solving an actual problem. Bail is largely misunderstood by the public which is regularly critical about it, assuming that almost everyone out of bail commits another crime. The actual facts tell a different story: Less than 1% of people out on bail are arrested for a violent crime and 12.5% are arrested for other charges. As for the Taylor proposal, the letter offers nothing to support his proposed changes.
- Maintain and increase the hiring and retention bonuses for Tennessee Highway Patrol Officers on duty in Shelby County.
This has always sounded good on the surface but there are questions about how seamlesss THP has worked with MPD and if THP officers are actually trained for urban law enforcement. There is no data we’ve seen that shows what the results have been.
Partisan Posturing
It’s not unusual for the Chamber to express its priorities for each session of the Tennessee Legislation and there is no question that the 170 businesspeople who signed the letter are rightly concerned but its strongly partisan, if not strident, tone and the intemperate accompanying comments by Richard Smith and Ted Townsend undercut any hopes for broad community support from the many grassroots groups working thoughtfully on this issue.
At a time when the business leaders were professing concern about the city’s population decline, some comments spawned rumors that FedEx was leaving Memphis and others made the city sound irredeemable.
The letter also perpetuated politically driven talking points with “sustained lack of criminal prosecutions” being mentioned twice in the letter. In turn, while it focused on prosecutions, it failed to mention that MPD only solves one in three crimes. That means only a minority of criminal offenders enter the criminal justice system in the first place. In support of its positions, it used trigger words like “organized crime” to describe crimes by juvenile offenders but without any supporting evidence.
There is a readiness for people, mostly White and conservative, to buy into the political agenda that blames the attorney general who’s been in office 16 months for the violent crime crisis that began several years before he took office. After all, in the decade before Mr. Mulroy took office, the murder rate increased 142%. It raises the question of whether the businesspeople would have sent the letter if former Republican Attorney General Amy Weirich had been reelected.
Another anomaly of the business community’s involvement is that its letter made no mention of state government’s culpability in the proliferation of guns in Memphis. To explore the point, the Chairman’s Circle should pay for a study determining the impact of the state’s gun law obsession on Memphis gun crimes and send it to state officials who are in denial about the impact of making guns ubiquitous in all parts of our lives.
Neither did the letter make any mention about the failure of the state’s prison system to rehabilitate felons released into the city and who re-offend as in the case of the man who killed Eliza Fletcher after serving 20 years in a state prison.
Businesses Could Do More
As a general rule, if state government is the answer, you are asking the wrong question. The Lee Administration and the Tennessee Legislature are driven by partisan talking points and political motivations only. Decisions based on research and in-depth analysis are as scarce as allowing Democrats in the Legislature to introduce legislation.
Meanwhile, cities comparable to Memphis are reducing their crime rates with innovations and new strategies – some of which are pursued by Mr. Mulroy – but state government continues to emphasize the arrest more people and invoke longer sentences philosophy that has done nothing to change the negative trend lines for crime in the city.
If local businesses want to maximize their impact and show effective leadership, they could pay for experts who could bring additional intellectual capital to this crucial discussion in Memphis. It would allow decisions to be made on facts and data rather than the political magic answer of the moment, but in addition, explain what the facts are saying about crime here and opportunities to reduce it.
Memphis is an anomaly these days as city after city reports drops in crime to historic lows. That’s where the answers to reducing crime are most likely to be found – in cities that are making it happen, not in the state government which has treated Memphis as a punch line for years.
That’s why it would make much more sense – and they would be acting in a truly businesslike way – if the Chairman’s Circle led the way in funding the development of a plan of action based on expert help and authoritative analysis – something sort of like what they would do in their businesses.
Government Acting Like A Business
Business leaders are often saying that government should act more like a business. Here’s a chance for them to show how that’s done.
Memphis took a direct hit in comments by some business leaders and the wounds are especially deep since they are made by people who know the city best. Because of it, Memphis needs to send the unmistakable message that the city and its people are taking assertive, strong action to produce innovative strategies. Rather than look to Memphis as a high-crime city drifting into the future, the city can be seen as a place rolling up its collective sleeves to work together with the best experts on a shared crime reduction plan.
Josh Spickler, Just City: We know what reduces crime
A final note: The business leaders say they were motivated to mail their letter because of the population decline for Memphis. But the truth is that the city’s population has been dropping since the 1970s. We simply masked it with serial annexations.
Since 1970, roughly 170,000 people have moved beyond the 1970 Memphis city borders but it was ignored because annexations were propping up the Memphis population.
It’s worth remembering that the sprawl was supported by the Chamber of Commerce and the business community who called it “growth” when it was in fact a historic out-migration of Memphians.
It’s also worth remembering that state government blew up the annexation process although Memphis and the county’s municipalities had signed agreements that agreed on their annexation reserve areas. These contractual agreements were ignored by state government which dynamited the process in Tennessee in pursuit of political points from suburban voters.
Ultimately, the state’s injection of its politics into local annexation policies led to the deannexation of several areas that removed about 11,000 people from the city’s population.
It’s only one of the ways in which we already suffer here from state government’s “help” and it’s why we should not look to Nashville for the solutions for our problems, crime and otherwise.
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Thanks for continuing the discussion. I was curious about the effect of long sentences. I’ve heard this argument a lot and was unsure of the data supporting it. I looked into it this morning and there does appear to be a benefit to long sentences, specifically for violent crimes, of between 5-10% reduction. The effect on drug-trafficking appears to be null or in the opposite direction. Increasing the solve rate and increasing the sentencing length of violent offenders would likely have an additive effect. The authors of the report cited below suggest that the most effective approach to crime reduction is “The certainty and swiftness of consequences function as a more effective crime
deterrent than their severity.”. Would be interesting to hear more from local criminologists on their perspectives.
“These findings have been used for decades to support attempts at “selective incapacitation,”
or identifying individuals already engaged in, or likely to engage in, chronic offending, and
incarcerating them to reduce crime.3 Overall, results from these studies suggest that
incapacitating people engaged in violent offending, in particular, offers a 5% to 10%
reduction in violent crime.4
The empirical evidence on selective incapacitation suggests that long sentences may
produce short- and long-term public safety benefits for individuals engaged in violent
offending,5 but may produce the opposite effect for those engaged in drug-related offending
or other group-based crimes where an incarcerated individual is quickly replaced by a new
recruit.6 This “replacement effect” occurs–and undermines the overall crime-reducing
effects of incapacitation–when there is “demand” for particular criminal activity. The illicit
drug business offers the most obvious example: when someone who plays a role in a drug
trafficking organization is incarcerated, someone else must take his or her place.
One study7 found that incarcerating street-level drug dealers fueled their replacement by
younger and more violent individuals. Additional research8 replicated these findings through
an examination of the public safety impact of California’s three strikes law from 1994, when the law was implemented, to 1998. This work found short- and long-term decreases in most
types of crime, but also found that imprisoning chronic drug offenders had no impact on the
drug crime rate. The authors hypothesized that incarcerating chronic drug offenders did not
result in an incapacitation effect because “when one drug offender is jailed, there is another
(and perhaps more than just one other) ready to take his or her place” (p. 139-140).
Additional analyses further indicate that incarcerating people for drug trafficking may result
in increased crime rates in general and increased rates of violent crime, specifically, because
of organizational destabilization and the need for new recruits to prove themselves.9
https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Impact-of-Long-Sentences-on-Public-Safety.pdf
From Department of Justice National Institute of Justice:
U.S. Department of Justice.
National Institute of Justice • Strengthen Science • Advance Justice
May 2016 NCJ 247350
Five Things About Deterrence
NIJ’s “Five Things About Deterrence” summarizes a large body of research related to deterrence of crime into five points. Two of the five things relate to the impact of sentencing on deterrence — “Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime” and “Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.” Those are simple assertions, but the issues of punishment and deterrence are far more complex. This addendum to the original “Five Things” provides additional context and evidence regarding those two statements.It is important to note that while the assertion in the original “Five Things” focused only on the impact of sentencing on deterring the commission of future crimes, a prison sentence serves two primary purposes: punishment and incapacitation. Those two purposes combined are a linchpin of United States sentencing policy, and those who oversee sentencing or are involved in the development of sentencing policy should always keep that in mind.“Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.”Prison is an important option for incapacitating and punishing those who commit crimes, but the data show long prison sentences do little to deter people from committing future crimes. Viewing the findings of research on severity effects in their totality, there is evidence suggesting that short sentences may be a deterrent. However, a consistent finding is that increases in already lengthy sentences produce at best a very modest deterrent effect.A very small fraction of individuals who commit crimes — about 2 to 5 percent — are responsible for 50 percent or more of crimes.2 Locking up these individuals when they are young and early in their criminal careers could be an effective strategy to preventing crime if we could identify who they are. The problem is: we can’t. We have tried to identify the young people most likely to commit crimes in the future, but the science shows we can’t do it effectively. It is important to recognize that many of these individuals who offend at higher rates may already be incarcerated because they put themselves at risk of apprehension so much more frequently than individuals who offend at lower rates.“Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.”To clarify the relationship between the severity of punishment and the deterrence of future crimes, you need to understand:• The lack of any “chastening” effect from prison sentences, • That prisons may exacerbate recidivism, • The different impacts of the certainty versus the severity of punishment on deterrence, and • That individuals grow out of criminal activity as they age. More severe punishments do not “chasten” individuals convicted of crimes. Some policymakers and practitioners believe that increasing the severity of the prison experience enhances the “chastening” effect, thereby making individuals
convicted of an offense less likely to commit crimes in the future. In fact, scientists have found no evidence for the chastening effect. Prisons may exacerbate recidivism.Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes. In 2009, Nagin, Cullen and Jonson published a review of evidence on the effect of imprisonment on reoffending.3 The review included a sizable number of studies, including data from outside the U.S. The researchers concluded:“… compared to non-custodial sanctions, incarceration has a null or mildly criminogenic impact on future criminal involvement. We caution that this assessment is not sufficiently firm to guide policy, with the exception that it calls into question wild claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects.”Certainty has a greater impact on deterrence than severity of punishment. Severity refers to the length of a sentence. Studies show that for most individuals convicted of a crime, short to moderate prison sentences may be a deterrent but longer prison terms produce only a limited deterrent effect. In addition, the crime prevention benefit falls far short of the social and economic costs. Certainty refers to the likelihood of being caught and punished for the commission of a crime. Research underscores the more significant role that certainty plays in deterrence than severity — it is the certainty of being caught that deters a person from committing crime, not the fear of being punished or the severity of the punishment. Effective policing that leads to swift and certain (but not necessarily severe) sanctions is a better deterrent than the threat of incarceration. In addition, there is no evidence that the deterrent effect increases when the likelihood of conviction increases. Nor is there any evidence that the deterrent effect increases when the likelihood of imprisonment increases.A person’s age is a powerful factor in deterring crime. Even those individuals who commit crimes at the highest rates begin to change their criminal behavior as they age. The data show a steep decline at about age 35.4 A more severe (i.e., lengthy) prison sentence for convicted individuals who are naturally aging out of crime does achieve the goal of punishment and incapacitation. But that incapacitation is a costly way to deter future crimes by aging individuals who already are less likely to commit those crimes by virtue of age.
Deterrence and IncapacitationThere is an important distinction between deterrence and incapacitation. Individuals behind bars cannot commit additional crime — this is incarceration as incapacitation. Before someone commits a crime, he or she may fear incarceration and thus refrain from committing future crimes — this is incarceration as deterrence.
Deter would-be criminals by using scientific evidence about human behavior and perceptions
about the costs, risks and rewards of crime.
1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful
deterrent than the punishment.
Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more
effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison
isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but
prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime.
Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective
crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize
many to the threat of future imprisonment.
See “Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence” for
additional discussion on prison as an ineffective deterrent.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that
criminals will be caught and punished.
The police deter crime when they do things that strengthen a criminal’s
perception of the certainty of being caught. Strategies that use the police as
“sentinels,” such as hot spots policing, are particularly effective. A criminal’s
behavior is more likely to be influenced by seeing a police officer with handcuffs
and a radio than by a new law increasing penalties.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter
crime.
Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the
severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about
the sanctions for specific crimes.
More severe punishments do not “chasten” individuals convicted of crimes, and
prisons may exacerbate recidivism.
See “Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence” for
additional discussion on the severity of punishment.
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent
effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment
increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”
In his 2013 essay, “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” Daniel S. Nagin
succinctly summarized the current state of theory and empirical knowledge
about deterrence. The information in this publication is drawn from Nagin’s essay
with additional context provided by NIJ and is presented here to help those who
make policies and laws that are based on science.
Source: Daniel S. Nagin, “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” in Crime
and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 42: Crime and Justice in America:
1975-2025, ed. Michael Tonry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.1
The content on this page is not intended to create, does not create, and
may not be relied upon to create any rights, substantive or procedural,
enforceable at law by any party in any matter civil or criminal.
Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the
1. “Five Things About Deterrence” is available at https://ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf. 2. Mulvey, Edward P., Highlights from Pathways to Desistance: A Longitudinal Study of Serious Adolescent Offenders, Juvenile Justice Fact Sheet, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, March 2011, NCJ 230971. Available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/230971.pdf.
3. Nagin, Daniel S., Francis T. Cullen and Cheryl Lero Johnson, “Imprisonment and Reoffending,” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 38, ed. Michael Tonry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009: 115-200. 4. Sampson, Robert. J., John H. Laub and E.P. Eggleston, “On the Robustness and Validity of Groups,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 20 (1) (2004): 37-42.
2
N
ational Institute of Justice • Strengthen Science • Advance Justice
May 2016
Seems to me the businesses aren’t trying to solve crime themselves. Rather they’re saying government — local and now state, since local seems to be failing at it — need to do something to solve it or else they’re going to be leaving. Including the major area employers. That’s not good.
Don’t think some of these companies would be saying this publicly if it wasn’t a possibility. Feels like you’re shooting the messenger here and putting the onus to solve crime on the governed, as opposed to government. That kind of goes against the very basis of the social contract theory. I see this as a plea for help, and a warning about what’s to come if it isn’t heeded.
My point is they are pursuing the same philosophy that has failed for the past decade. Where you see a plea for help, I saw more of a threat rather than the Chamber doing the kind of research and work and collaborations with the grassroots groups pursuing the kinds of innovative strategies working in other cities and bringing in the experts and authorities that are reducing crime rates in comparable cities. Pursuing the same approaches that have failed and expecting different results is well, you know.