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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, with thing number 24, very relevant to the election year and to life in New York, 100 years of crime and punishment. Crime rates and incarceration rates are obviously big, contentious issues in our area and this country overall. Maybe seeing where we've been will help give us perspective on where we are and maybe even where we should go.

For example, the number of murders in New York City in the year 2000, according to the city's official stats, was 673. Last year, it was 391. It hit its low during the De Blasio years of 2017 and 2018 when they were fewer than 300. Similar with robberies. That includes what we often call muggings and other instances of stealing stuff directly from your person. 32,000 in the year 2000, only half that last year at around 16,000. If you've lived here all that time, when did you feel safer? In 2000 or in 2023? We could frame this as 100 years of crime, punishment, and perception as well.

Stepping back from that 25-year view to 100-year view, prisons, professional police forces, plea bargaining, drug laws, gun crimes, white collar crimes, incarceration rates compared to other countries, the rates of incarceration by race, the death penalty, all of these gradually became features of modern American life in their modern ways over the last 100-plus years. Of course, they are contentious political issues. Let's talk about 100 years of crime and punishment in America.

My guest is Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of, among other things, his groundbreaking 2010 book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which traces the intersection of race, crime, and punishment in the United States back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Professor Muhammad begins an appointment in January as professor of African American Studies and public affairs at Princeton.

He has been directing the institutional anti-racism and accountability project at Harvard and, as some of you New Yorkers know, is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Professor Muhammad, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Obviously, not everything about crime and punishment in the US is about crime and punishment and race, but I think you would argue that a lot about how we experience and punish crime here is a function of our unique racial history. Before we go through any timelines, I wonder if you would discuss that premise however you see it as a starting point?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Sure. No, it's a great question, and it's also a very controversial one in terms of how we think about the nation's colonial past and its founding narrative. This, in many ways, sits at the heart of the backlash against CRT and DEI, what students can learn in our classrooms. If we take the premise of your question, it doesn't take much to understand that in the beginning, in the 1600s, Europeans came, and they used violence as a means of conquest, first against the Indigenous, and they eventually used violence to control the labor of people of African descent, those they enslaved.

We built a society, a set of politics, a way of governing society, that ensured that the state, that is, the government, either in the form of colonial leaders or eventually state leaders, would have the full use of criminal legal policies in order to protect their interests, both in land and labor and eventually safety. That safety being against people who did often rebel, either for Indigenous tribes or African people who ran away. That's just an origin story that covers about 250 years of American history before we get to the modern period of what we come to understand today as modern policing and modern prisons.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. In your book, The Condemnation of Blackness, a starting point is a little more than 100 years ago. It's the US census of 1890, one generation after the end of slavery, as free Black people are integrating into society, or at least living in free society, and beginning to move in large numbers to New York and elsewhere in the North. Is that a good place to start with a little pre-100-year history?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: It sure is. [chuckles] Yes. The 1890 census is fascinating for an obvious reason, although people who don't know this history will be surprised. The 1890 census represents 25 years of freedom. It's for social scientists and for demographers in that period of the late 19th century. It's a perfect generational cohort to test the basic idea, were Black people better off enslaved, or were they better off as free people?

Now, this is not an obvious question. This is a question that grew out of the politics and the ideology of those who were trying to make a case that Black people were, in fact, a dangerous threat to modern society. They looked at the 1890 census, and, Brian, what did they find? They found that the African American population, in general, was about 12%, but they were overrepresented in the nation's prisons by nearly three times. There were about 30% of the nation's prisoners. The raw number was essentially 22,000 out of a population of 82,000.

While you and I might say, "Okay, well, surely this was a time of systemic racism directed towards Black people," many people of that era said just the opposite. They said this number actually proved that Black people had squandered their freedom, that they had taken license and liberties in their freedom to become criminals, and that they had been better off as enslaved people because they were not capable of self-governance. It, in fact, fueled a new national argument that wherever Black people were, in the South or in the North, on farms or in factories, that they were, in fact, a dangerous criminal class.

Brian Lehrer: You contrast that response to Black criminality 100-plus years ago with that to white immigrant criminality, also higher than the general population. This goes from that 1890 point that we started with through the period of 100 years ago, like the 1920s. White ethnic, immigrant criminality, also higher than the general population at that time, and how government policies and Progressive Era reform advocates responded differently in the face of some of the bias and hatred that they encountered and their marginalization. Can you talk about some of that? What kinds of crimes, what kinds of responses in comparison?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: That's right. For a typical listener of your show, Brian, I'm going to make an assumption here. They've come of age with all of those Martin Scorsese films and Francis Ford Coppola films, from Goodfellas to The Godfather. They have some popular culture understanding that once upon a time in America, there were a lot of Italians and Irish people who were caught up in underground economies, bootlegging, selling drugs, prostitution, you name it.

To some degree, these stories do sit on top of a true history that drove New Yorkers, particularly New York's police and its elite communities, crazy because they were very upset and anxious about the ways in which these immigrant white ethnic populations turned to extortion and racketeering and crimes of poverty in order to close the gap between their expectations of upward mobility in this country and the reality that they were subjected to segregated, disinvested communities and subjected to xenophobia and nativism.

There was all kinds of crime, from drug dealing to murder to domestic violence, you name it. It was soup to nuts, everything. What's fascinating about looking at that community in reference to African Americans who eventually arrived in places like New York City in the 1890s, and certainly by the time of the Great Migration, which unfolds in the wake of World War I, so around the 1910s into the 1920s, you've got this perfect opportunity to really compare how a new group of reformers step into this era. They call themselves progressives.

They are pushing back against the eugenicists and the social Darwinists and the conservatives who essentially closed the borders to Southern and Eastern Europeans in a 1924 Immigration Act. That's just how rich this period is 100 years ago. We could even think today that here we are in 2024, 100 years ago, the nation closed its borders, by and large, to populations of Italian Americans, for example, drastically reducing them in the name of law and order. For progressives, the idea was, "Hey, wait a minute."

Their crime statistics are actually an indication of the racism and the stigma and the discrimination that they face. Their crime statistics are an expression of the economic realities that they have been largely excluded from opportunity in this country. What's fascinating, when you look at the history of white ethnics and compare it to African Americans, you will see that those same arguments don't apply.

The same reformers said there was actually something particular or peculiar about Black migrants living in New York, that while they might be subject to a certain amount of discrimination, they had cultural propensities to criminality that made them distinctive from their European cousins. To be honest with you, Brian, the evidence simply doesn't support this.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, this relates interestingly to the presidential race today and specifically the big issue of the last few weeks of Trump targeting a Black immigrant group, Haitians, as a criminal threat, and citing cultural differences for something they're not even doing. For the moment, that's an aside.

Getting back to the history, an article about you in Harvard Magazine a few years ago said your book describes how police reforms in the early 20th century, in response to European immigrant crime, continuing to make that distinction, European immigrant crime, the response to that included police reforms that made law enforcement look more like social work. That was in the article. Is that how you would put it?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Oh, absolutely. Listen, what we understand from that early period is that policing transformed dramatically. Police officers went from being an expression of machine politics, where police officers were strong-arm enforcers of corrupt politicians, where often the Irish were on the short end of a billy club, literally, to the Irish finding a measure of political mobility by becoming the police itself and that through that process of upward mobility for Irish Americans in New York, for example, or even Italian Americans in New York, the accountability mechanisms and policing became much more sensitive to an era when immigrants were often targeted by police.

That's a success story. It suggests to us that for white ethnic communities, policing was a ladder to social and economic progression and mobility, which, again, was not the case for Black officers on the NYPD in the early days. In fact, Black officers could not police white communities, ethnic, immigrant, or otherwise, whereas white ethnics could police the entire city.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. What kinds of reforms, though, in the early 20th century that could make them look like social workers at that time? Many of our listeners might think police reform as we know it today, as we use that term today. It didn't really begin until maybe the Black Lives Matter movement of the last decade or so.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Well, let's take one tiny step backwards and make a contextual point. While police officers did eventually play a role of providing social services in these early years that we're talking about 100 years ago, it was the juvenile justice reformers about a generation before them at the turn of the 20th century, 1900s, that set a model that certain classes of people deserve something other than the blunt instrument of the criminal justice system.

The juvenile court system, was founded in Chicago in 1899 by Jane Addams and others, the famous social worker, is intended to soften the way in which young people were ensnared in an adult system and often set onto lives of crime in ways that everyone could see was a bad outcome. In a sense, this is the first example of an alternative to incarceration or a diversion program, which is the language that we use today. What does that mean? It increased the role for police officers to do more social work, to engage young people, to provide on-the-street counseling and coaching.

This is where the idea of midnight basketball first emerges, where you see police athletic leagues take on this work in a thoughtful and intended way. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Was there police brutality even still? Absolutely. When you compare what the ethos and approach was for those police officers working with white ethnic youth in the 1920s compared to what policing was for Black youth in the same period, there are dramatic and sharp differences. One is progressive and prosocial. One is punitive and antisocial.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I want to jump ahead to the second half of the 20th century. From other histories I've read, crime rates and incarceration rates were relatively stable in the first decades after World War II, and then both began to explode around 1970. First, on the post-war years, the immediate post-World War II years, which were also the civil rights movement years, is there a basic story of that time that you would describe in any way?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Sure. Well, the basic story is one that animates some of the policies that we have in front of us today, that we can choose to adopt, which is to say that the period between World War II and 1970 is the period of the lowest inequality in American history. It is a period when the federal government took on an increasing role in alleviating the vagaries of capitalism in the marketplace.

Coming out of the Great Depression, the federal government invested in housing and education at the cornerstone of asset creation for mostly white working-class Americans. Black Americans also benefited, though not to the same degree, by migrating from the South to the North, where they did experience greater wages, greater political participation, more civil rights, and a kind of version of the American dream, à la segregated and redlined nonetheless.

This period, we actually have pretty good evidence that robust social and economic policies that minimize poverty in American society goes a long way towards minimizing crime and violence in American society.

Brian Lehrer: Then violent crime did start to spike in the late '60s. I was looking at an FBI year-by-year chart, and in New York State, statewide figures, not just New York City, in New York State, there were 1,000 murders for the first time recorded in 1968, 2,000 murders for the first time in 1972. The number peaked at around 2,600 in 1990 and then started to come down. 1997 was the last year that New York State saw 1,000 murders or more. What happened, as far as you understand it, to spark that high crime era, if you accept those stats as roughly accurate?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Well, first of all, you don't have to rely on me. I just want to emphasize, my colleague Elizabeth Hinton, who's a Yale historian, has written a fabulous book that tells much of this history and really unpacks the way that the federal government-- Let's talk specifically about the transition between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon, a story that is lesser known but very important.

Lyndon Baines Johnson is the first US president to begin to deliver block grants for local crime fighting. There had been federalization of laws against kidnapping and bank robberies and things going back to the 1930s, but it's under LBJ that we get Omnibus Crime legislation and in particular the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. What this law essentially does is it is the stick to the carrot of the war on poverty. What it does is it incentivizes states to do more law enforcement, which unfortunately creates a dynamic that we see today.

Communities that are over-policed then as now are often communities that are criminogenic communities. The more police engage to some degree, the more they find, that would be the conservative argument, but also, the more that they alienate the population, disincentivize law-abiding, and create its own criminogenic or crime-causing forces. Elizabeth Hinton and a number of historians will say that this period between the late 1960s and the 1990s starts with the federal government getting involved in local crime fighting. Rather than investing in the war on poverty at scale, it mitigates against its own philosophy.

Then we get Richard Nixon, who officially uses the politics of racism under the heading of law and order to actually increase abusive behavior in policing. Now, some of this is innocence, meaning people are swept up and are completely innocent. Some of it has to do with an increasing criminalization of poverty. This is a period when America's economic system begins to break down. We see record inflation and increasing poverty, known as stagflation, which ultimately means that African Americans are subjected to economic immobility that will also contribute to poverty. Poverty is a contributing factor to crime.

That's before we get to the heroin epidemic and eventually gives way to a crack epidemic in the 1970s and 1980s, which, to be clear and frank, does create violence because those underground economies were regulated by people using guns to fight over turf, as opposed to simply being a legal system where we'd have police engaged in courts in this sort of thing.

Brian Lehrer: We will get to the very consequential 1980s and then the very consequential 1990s in this 100-year history, but let me go back to one thing you said in that last response. The one thing that may be stuck in some listeners' heads is, "Wait, why would that happen?" That is that when policing, in those later Johnson years, started to increase in cities of America, that that led to more crime.

People may say police are effective or ineffective at fighting crime, that's always a big debate, but to say that the advent of larger police forces and more policing in the cities of America, rather than tamping down crime because people are afraid of getting in trouble or whatever, actually led to increases in crime, were you making that argument, and if so, could you explain it further?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Sure. No, it's a great question. It is certainly counterintuitive, the way in which police often tell us that their presence only moves in one direction, which is their presence only lowers crime. That's just simply not true. First of all, there's the obvious evidence, which is that police agencies have struggled for the entire time of their existence, going back to the mid-19th century, with massive corruption.

When you have drug economies, and I'm not making this up, we can look at the Mullen corruption report-- There have been a number of reports in New York City alone. You might even remember the Seabury Commission. In any case, listeners can look these things up. We have documented consistent evidence, almost decade by decade, of serious police corruption where police officers are involved in drug rackets or other kinds of rackets, which essentially means that the only way that underground economies work efficiently is that people get bought off to look the other way or are on the take.

This is not just movies and television. This is a fact. The problem is that the saturation of police officers as, first, a political choice, a policy choice, we could have chosen, like we learned in the period after World War II, that greater evidence of crime is an evidence of poverty and inequality that should be addressed with social policy. We chose not to. We weaponize the criminal justice system to deal with poverty and alienation. Then are we surprised that police officers incentivize people to break the law? That is the fact and the evidence that is presented historically.

Now, it's a mixed story. Do police officers, in some instances, on some occasions, deter crime? Absolutely. Can they clean up certain neighborhoods by scaring away or locking up all the bad guys? Yes. As we know, drug economies are sticky, and as a consequence, people who are moved from one area will move to another area, and police officers who are in those new areas can sometimes be implicated in that work. That's the criminogenic effects of policing when we don't solve these problems with social policy at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few comments, questions, or stories about crime and punishment and prevention in the last 100 years. 212-433-WNYC. Any story from your own families, previous generations, or your own experiences in any role, from victim to perpetrator to criminal justice reform advocate to prosecutor to violence interrupter or anything else?

Or ask a question of our guest, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Princeton professor as of this coming January, leaving Harvard, former Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library director, and author of, among other things, his groundbreaking book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, thing number 24, 100 years of crime and punishment in America. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

I'll read one text right now, though I'll address it a little later, Professor. Listener writes, "The crime wave of the '70s through the '90s was caused by the baby boom reaching the highest crime age." In other words, a lot of people in the most crime-prone age. We're going to get to that as we go. When we come back from a break, we're going to move on to the 1980s in particular and a consequential figure in New York and America who you may not realize would figure prominently in this discussion, Mario Cuomo. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we are in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, thing 24, 100 years of crime and punishment in the United States with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who'll start at Princeton in January, and among other things, wrote the groundbreaking book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Moving on to the 1980s and staying in New York State for the moment, Governor Mario Cuomo, in office for most of the '80s and the early '90s, is remembered for being an outspoken liberal in the Reagan years. The history of what he actually did in office also included a lot of prison construction. I'm going to read here from a New York Times article from October 1990.

October 1990, New York Times, when Cuomo was running for his third term, which he won, it says, "He has presided over the most sweeping prison construction program in New York State history, adding almost 30,000 new beds to a system that was already one of the nation's largest. Since Mr. Cuomo took office, the number of inmates in state custody has nearly doubled to 55,000, but during the Cuomo years, the state's crime rate has not declined. It has grown worse. Few would lay blame for worsening crime at the governor's door. Yet, many criminal justice experts question whether the state's huge prison expansion has been an effective response to the problem it was meant to address, drug-related crime. Increasingly, they are asking if some of the money spent on new cells would have been better spent on other programs aimed at addressing the roots of crime."

That from the New York Times in 1990. Even the question of more incarceration versus more preventive policies was in the public conversation even then. Professor Muhammad, does any of that surprise you? How would you talk about the Mario Cuomo legacy in this respect or crime and incarceration in the 1980s in particular?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Well, it's a great example for New York, which mirrors so much of what is happening in the nation. Let's just start with New York. Cuomo is himself inheriting an infrastructure that made a dramatic shift under a previous governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who oversaw some of the earliest draconian policies of the modern period. First, stop-and-frisk. We often associate stop-and-frisk with the 1990s in the wake of Giuliani and others, but versions of stop-and-frisk are happening in New York and elsewhere from the 1960s, essentially giving broad discretion for pretextual stops of either motorists or pedestrians, under which Rockefeller himself supported.

Many people know, of course, that Rockefeller was governor at the time of the Attica Rebellion, which we now know through the work of Heather Thompson, who's written a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Blood in the Water, that Rockefeller not only sent in the state police to quell a rebellion, killed not only a number of prisoners but guards as well, and then commenced to covering up the whole thing, which is just a shameful period in New York and national history, and speaks a lot to the way in which the politics of law and order for many governors only got more intense in the wake of that.

Then finally, on Rockefeller's point, he's also infamously known for the Rockefeller drug laws, which again, enhanced penalties for basic drug use, which we now understand in the era of methamphetamine of opioid use, that huge swaths of white America are not facing criminalization as Black Americans and Latino Americans faced in the '70s and '80s, but in fact, are facing policies of at least some version of decriminalization and harm reduction.

What Cuomo's legacy represents is that history where it was a bipartisan project, Republicans and Democrats. Charlie Rangel himself in Congress, from 1967 forward, participated in the ratcheting up, both in New York as well as federally, of more and more punitive responses. None of us can take any solace in any partisan identification when it comes to understanding the politics of the war on drugs and mass incarceration for liberals and conservatives.

Brian Lehrer: I want to mention Cuomo in one other respect, and then we'll get a few phone calls in and try to get as close to the present as we can. We could do this for hours, as I'm sure it doesn't surprise you, Professor Muhammad, you do this for a living. At the same time as that Cuomo legacy, he was a leading voice against the death penalty during his years in office. In 1976, the Supreme Court had declared the death penalty is constitutional, that it does not in and of itself violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Executions began to increase. They peaked, according to numbers I saw on Pew, peaked in 1998 with 99 executions in the US that year. There were only 24 in the US last year. That's still a lot compared to a lot of other places, but that's how much they've come down. This, of course, is back in the news, and controversially so because of the execution in Missouri just yesterday.

The CNN story on it, for example, is headlined, "Missouri executes Marcellus Williams, despite prosecutors and the victim's family asking that he be spared." The USA Today headline reads, "Marcellus Williams executed in Missouri amid strong innocence claims." My question is really about Mario Cuomo and the arc of history. Do you write about the death penalty in your book?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: I do not.

Brian Lehrer: Or follow it at all? Not the--

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Of course. Of course. Of course. [chuckles] I can jump in on this, I just don't write about it in my book.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Listen, the Marcellus Williams case really should speak volumes to everyone in this country about the resurgence of a way in which punishment is a metaphor for who gets to control America, a vision of a dark nation where crime and danger is around every corner, where every immigrant is a potential threat to one's life and liberty, where lies told about those immigrants-- It is just a simple fact that immigrants are underrepresented in crime rates, have always been and continue to be to this very day, despite what news reports on the right are articulating.

Marcellus Williams represents a very old story in this country where the killing of a white person, and in particular a white woman, has evoked the darkest and most heinous behavior that white Americans, by and large, but not exclusively, have participated in this country the traditions of mob violence and lynching. Here, Marcellus Williams was certainly not lynched by a mob, but in some ways, the spirit of lynching lives in our criminal justice system, as the famous civil rights and criminal defense attorney Bryan Stevenson has so well articulated in his work, Just Mercy and the work of the Equal Justice Initiative.

When we have a society that is an outlier as a Western rich democracy that continues to execute people by contrast to many liberal democracies in Europe, and when we have evidence where innocence appears to be the case and where we have constitutional violations, where Black jurors have been struck, we are reaching deep into the well of our racist past. It is a well that continues to produce political currency. People continue to win elections on it.

Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana, has rolled back all sorts of advancements in reform in a state that has the largest maximum-security prison that literally sits on the land of five former slave plantations. Why is he doing this? Because he is speaking to a resurgent movement among conservatives that are weaponizing ideas about crime and race that for Marcellus Williams, the latest victim of all of us as a nation should take note. If I take off my professor hat here, we should be ashamed.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a couple of calls in. I'm going to ask you, callers, to be really brief so we can also bring this a little more up to the present before we run out of time in this 100-year history of crime and punishment in America. It's such a big topic to do on one radio show, but we're doing, obviously, tentpoles of history, if you want to call them that. Mike in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Mike, do it in about 30 seconds, if you can. Hi.

Mike: Hi. In 1989, a friend of mine who happens to be an African American guy, we started a nonprofit working with at-risk youth. A lot of them were involved in incarceration and stuff like that. Again, he was an African American guy, and his theory was that Black people were the only group that didn't have their own organized crime to start with and that's one of the reasons why they suffered economically.

For example, Jews, Irish, Italians, they all had this organized crime group that brought in capital, and once they had that capital, that could then serve future generations to actually go into legitimate businesses. African Americans never had that, and they were denied it. Obviously, they were-- systemic racism, things like that. Anyway, it was always an interesting theory, and I thought I might share that with you guys.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it relates back to what we were talking about earlier about the white ethnic immigrant groups in the early part of the 20th century and crime in those communities. Anything very briefly on that, Professor Muhammad? First time you heard that, or no?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Yes, it's not a man-on-the-street idea. There are some scholars who've made a similar argument, and there is certainly something to be said about the laundering of money that came from crime and racketeering that moved into legitimate businesses. We are potentially seeing a version of this in the decriminalization of marijuana and the legitimate businesses that are emerging. Who knows what the future holds for Black people in this regard?

Brian Lehrer: Anthony in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Anthony, you there? [background noise] Anthony is multitasking. It happens. Glen in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Glen, we have 30 seconds for you. Want to try it?

Glen: Yes, sure, Brian. When I really noticed things have really changed-- I've lived in New York since the '80s, and by the early 2000s, I noticed people taking their wallets out and counting their money on the subway. That was something I thought I'd never live to see.

Brian Lehrer: Meaning it became that safe. That brings us to our last thread of conversation. In the '90s, crime started coming down in New York and nationally. Professor, I think people credit various things. The crack epidemic waned. There was the Dickens police buildup, just more cops, more involved in communities. I know you were talking about other evidence that that doesn't work. Some people said that did work.

There was the Giuliani and Bratton era, broken windows policing approach enforced the small disorder violations to prevent the bigger violent crimes. Also controversial, but people credit it. There were fewer young people in the most crime-prone ages after the baby boomers became adults, as our previous text messenger pointed out. There was even a theory that Roe v. Wade in 1973 meant there was less of a generation of unwanted young adults who would grow up in at-risk for crime situations.

Others say the high incarceration rate of the era just kept more people at risk of committing violent crimes off the streets. By the mid-'90s, there was a stat-- Well, I'm just going to stop there and let you give us your take on why you think crime has come so far down in the last 35 years.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Yes, I'll keep it simple in the interest of time. The easiest way to answer this question is to say all of the above, with regard to the number of explanations that you just gave, Brian. I will also say that I served on the National Academies of Sciences Consensus Study in 2014, looking at the growth of incarceration. It was co-chaired by Jeremy Travis, who was former president of John Jay School of Criminal Justice, and Bruce Western, who's a leading sociologist on this issue.

We came to the conclusion, the nation's leading social scientists, that prisons were only responsible for about 5% to 25% of the crime reduction. That was the best that evidence could show based on everything that you just described. That's important. It's important because when we compare across the nation, every nation, every city in America didn't look like New York, and so you have incredible heterogeneity in the causes.

If you look internationally, the story gets even more interesting. Most nations never adopted the high policing and large incarceration policy approaches that the United States did, and they saw the exact same drops in violent crime and general crime across their various countries. That tells us that there was something sociologically happening in the world that reduced the level of offending that was occurring at that time. We've just simply given too much credit to policing for solving that problem, especially in New York.

Brian Lehrer: That is the last word in this segment. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, thank you so much for joining us today. Great conversation. Really, really appreciate your participation.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: That's 100 Years of 100 Things for today. Next up, next Monday, thing number 25, 100 years of Jimmy Carter on the day before his 100th birthday. That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio, and we had Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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