Mangino examines criminal charges filed against Trump

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 discussing the unprecedented criminal charges and arraignment of former president Donald Trump.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

No mug shot, no problem: Trump creates his own

Donald J. Trump may not have an actual mug shot, but his campaign team was not going to miss an opportunity to raise money off his arrest with a ready-made meme: a $36 T-shirt bearing the former president’s face in a pretend booking photo, reported The New York Times.

The “Official Trump Mugshot White Cotton T-Shirt” shows Mr. Trump above a letter board that reads “President Donald J. Trump,” the numbers “45-47” — presumably signifying his status as the 45th and possible 47th president — and the date of his arraignment, above the words “NOT GUILTY.”

In a touch of Trumpian embellishment, his height on the chart behind him appears to tip past 6 feet 5 inches. (In 2016, his doctor listed him as 6 feet 3 inches.)

Mr. Trump’s campaign said it had raised $7 million since The New York Times broke the news of his indictment last Thursday. (Financial records corroborating the claim will not be available for weeks.) The news that Mr. Trump would be the first former American president to face criminal charges set off a flurry of fund-raising efforts by Democrats and Republicans alike.

The T-shirt appeared Tuesday on the website of Mr. Trump’s Save America Joint Fund-Raising Committee, whose proceeds go toward both his 2024 campaign committee and a separate committee known as Save America.

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Dr. King remembered 55 years after his murder

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 55 years ago today, on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, TN.

The night before his murder, King gave a speech at the Mason Temple in support of the Memphis sanitation works that were on strike. He closed his remarks with the following painfully prophetic statement:

“I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The struggle continues!

Visit the National Civil Rights Museum CLICK HERE

Mangino a guest on Law and Crime Network

Watch my interview on Law and Crime Network with Linda Kenney Baden discussing the trial of Gwyneth Paltrow.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

MacDonald: 'Criminal justice reform should by guided by evidence'

 Criminal justice reform should be guided by evidence, not ideology, anecdote or magical thinking, writes Professor John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania in Vital City

 There is a growing body of evidence that politically popular justice reform efforts, such as raising the maximum age under which someone can be handled in the juvenile justice system, are proving to make no difference or even increase the risk of recidivism. Policies and programs for criminal justice reform should be guided by scientific evidence, not wishful thinking about what may work in a Utopian world. As Thomas Sowell notes, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear” The field of experimental criminology should continue to embrace evidence-based policy and push back against “replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

The field of experimental criminology has become influential in designing, testing and evaluating criminal justice reforms and reporting their results, even when results are contrary to popularly held beliefs. After all, science advances by trial and error and generating findings sometimes that are at odds with prevailing beliefs. Science is about generating objective evidence. The only faith required is the belief in the scientific method. Findings should be objective as possible, recognizing that choices of statistical analyses and program evaluation designs can change findings. Hence the need for replication of results in other settings and reproductions of results when new methods develop.

In the context of criminal justice reform, social programs that do not show evidence of being effective at reducing crime or that increase crime should be redesigned or abandoned, regardless of political popularity. The esteemed economists John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman rarely agreed, but there are two quotes that offer useful guides for criminal justice reform efforts. John Maynard Keynes is attributed as stating “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” Similarly, Milton Friedman stated,, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Criminal justice reform efforts should be guided by a basic understanding of the facts of crime and criminal offenders, and by scientific findings from social programs that have been shown to prevent crime and minimize the use of the criminal justice system. Over 100 hundred years of research has revealed seven indisputable facts about crime and offenders:

First, crime is highly concentrated by place. As little as 3% of addresses and 5% of street blocks account for more than 50% of crimes reported by citizens to the police. The concentration of crime is even greater if one focuses on more serious crimes that are less subject to under-reporting, such as shootings and homicides.

Second, crime is also concentrated by times of day, days of the week and months. Summers, nights and weekends are peak times for violence. Burglaries happen during the middle of the day when homes are empty and people are away at work, school, or on errands.

Third, crime is highly concentrated among active offenders. Most of the criminal offending in the population is generated by a small fraction of chronic offenders, such that the incapacitation of one high-volume offender abates an estimated 9.4 felony offenses.

Fourth, just as crimes are highly concentrated among places and people, so are the social costs of crime. A subset of serious crimes generates the most harm. Social costs of crime derived from jury awards, the willingness to pay to avoid specific crimes, costs to victims, criminal justice system costs and from sentences imposed for a given offense all show that violent crimes are the costliest.

Fifth, among criminal offenders, the rate of offending peaks in early adulthood, consistent with the “age-crime curve.”

Sixth, offenders do not specialize in specific offense patterns. Rather, active offenders tend to engage in what could be called a “cafeteria style” of offending and select a lot of different offenses from a menu of options. While some offenders show repeat behaviors, even the most optimistic approaches to estimating offense specialization can only find some modest evidence of offending preferences.

Seventh, criminal offending occurs within social networks, and the most active offenders tend to be clustered within dense criminal networks.

One can debate about which theories explain these facts the best, but the facts are indisputable. They exist across time periods, demographic groups, countries and whether crime is measured by official records or self-reported offending and victimization.

The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists focuses on fostering informal and formal social control.

Evidence-based crime policy should be guided by programs that confront these basic facts. The best evidence to guide policy are programs or interventions that have been experimented with in the real world, are attuned to the distribution of crime and offenders, can be scaled up to the population, are sustainable and are constitutional. We are fortunate that criminology has generated an abundance of experimental and quasi-experimental evidence over the past 70 years for what works to prevent crime. This evidence, however, has been largely absent from the current policy debates on criminal justice reform. A truly progressive criminal justice reform should be guided by evidence, not ideology, anecdote, or magical thinking.

The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists focuses on fostering informal and formal social control. Social control focuses on the constrained view of human behavior, or that society must control places and people to have a lawful society. Informal social control typically refers to the spectrum of actions taken by family, friends, neighbors and schools to maintain norms and rules. Formal social control refers to the exercise of the state to use sanctions or the threat of sanctions to enforce norms to prevent crime and illegal conduct. In conventional terms, formal social control is expressed through the functions of police, prosecutors and judges, and includes the other mechanisms of the criminal justice system.

Informal and formal social control are clearly linked to each other. While community safety is primarily produced by informal social control, high-crime areas are in particular need of formal social control like the presence of effective police and prosecutors when neighbors are unable to regulate the conduct of public spaces. So why have progressive criminal justice reforms in the past several years forgotten about social control?

The current state of progressive criminal justice policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations in criminology.

This is a rhetorical question, as I realize there is another view about the causes of crime that focus on crime as a social construct and criminal offending as solely a result of social inequality. Under this worldview, addressing crime requires redressing the social origins of crime. While the social origins of crime, such as concentrated disadvantage, can be viewed as “root causes,” we have few experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations of social programs that address root causes and show appreciable changes in the concentration of crime by place, among active offenders and within offending networks. There are programs and policies that can help reduce social inequalities and help mitigate crime, but they are longer-term investments and not the proximal causes of changes in the crime rate in each period.

Criminal justice reform needs to be tailored to the present facts on the ground. The facts of crime in the moment need to be responded to with efforts that prevent crime and not ignore those efforts in the hope for a more promising distant future. Moreover, there is no logical reason that policies cannot address both the current facts of crime in the population and longer-term efforts to reduce future cohorts from experiencing surges in crime and violence. A criminal justice reform effort that is effective at controlling crime with the minimum use of punishment necessary should be guided by evidence on what drives the crime rate and what can reduce inequalities in the criminal justice system.

A close review of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations offers support for the following social programs that focus on those at greatest risk of serious criminal offending, the concentration of crime by place and the networked nature of offending: 

Family: Functional Family Therapy, Multi-systemic Therapy and Nurse Family Partnership all are programs that have been demonstrated to work through at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial among at-risk youth. All these programs focus on teaching parenting skills and increasing pro-social thinking among youth.

Schools: School-based programs that have demonstrated efficacy similarly involve teaching thinking skills to constrain aggressive or criminal behavior. Such programs include Life Skills Training, Positive Action and Becoming a Man. These programs focus on social control, helping youth learn self-control and increasing bonds to school.

Places: Summer jobs for at-risk youth are delivered to youth in communities with the highest rates of crime and violence and thus fit within the general framework of establishing social control in places. These programs help keep kids off the streets in the summer with productive things to do. Also, having adults monitor youth in actual jobs is another form of informal social control. Business improvement districts (BIDs), for example, are a social program that involves local businesses organizing in a defined geography and hiring private security guards and CCTV cameras, cleaning crews and place promotion and marketing materials to make a commercial area look and feel safer. The key logic model of BIDs is the focus on reducing physical disorder in places and offering extra “eyes upon the street.” Other social programs that focus on the physical environment and offer evidence for reducing serious crime include vacant lot greening and vacant housing remediation, improving street lighting and nuisance abatement.

Criminal Justice Agencies: Social control from criminal justice agencies may be one of the least popular social programs among contemporary criminal justice reformers, but it is an area where we have arguably the best evidence. This includes support for deploying extra police to crime “hot spots” — when police stay vigilant about crime prevention in crime hot spots, they exert a significant impact on serious crime and violence. The theoretical logic of hot spot policing is also consistent with the offender-specific program of focused deterrence, a multi-stakeholder approach that involves providing direct deterrence messages to individuals with high rates of offending. Rigorous designs that compare cities with and without focused deterrence or groups of offenders that could have been eligible find that when the program is implemented with fidelity, it significantly reduces serious crime and violence. Research from several quasi-experimental studies also suggests that increasing prison time for active offenders also helps prevent crime.

The current state of progressive criminal justice policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental program and policy evaluations in criminology. Ideally, criminal justice policy reforms should be logically consistent with facts of crime and criminal offenders, tested in the field and implemented gradually.

By contrast, closing down summer job programs, letting physical disorder and mismanagement of places spread in neighborhoods, having the police pull back from high-crime intersections and the criminal justice system failing to hold active offenders accountable are all examples of ways to foster epidemic rises in serious crime and violence. These results were witnessed during the 2020–2021 rise in violent crime in large U.S. cities, but also echo the patterns of other violent crime cycles in American history.

Understanding the basic facts of crime and offenders explains why social programs that foster informal and formal social control and are targeted to those individuals and places at the greatest risk for criminal offending generate sizable reductions in serious crime. We have good evidence for social programs that work to prevent crime and minimize the footprint of the criminal justice system. This evidence base offers good guidance for effective criminal justice reforms. I am hopeful that the evidence generated from experimental criminology on what works to prevent crime can have a greater impact in the future than it presently has received from the policy community.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

Mangino discusses the future for Donald Trump on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with WFMJ-TV21 discussing what comes next for Donald Trump after his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Are there too many guns in America?

For the foreseeable future, there are simply far too many guns already in civilian hands to imagine a scenario in which those seeking a weapon to hurt themselves or others find it difficult to do so.

There’s no real question that a central reason the United States has so many firearm deaths is that the United States has so many firearms, reported the Washington Post. What question there is, instead, centers on that latter point: How many guns are there in this country?

Knowing that answer concretely wouldn’t have much of an effect on gun deaths in the United States. But that it is perhaps incalculably high — and rising — reinforces the political challenge faced by those hoping to reduce American gun deaths. For the foreseeable future, there are simply far too many guns already in civilian hands to imagine a scenario in which those seeking a weapon to hurt themselves or others find it difficult to do so.

While there are no hard counts of the number of firearms in the country — in part because pro-gun advocacy organizations are wary of having the government know where guns might be found — there are estimates. One, from Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, figures that there are 120.5 civilian-owned guns for every 100 U.S. residents. That’s nearly twice the ratio as seen in the second-ranked region, the Falkland Islands, and more than twice the ratio seen in Yemen, which comes in third.

A 2012 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) put concrete figures on its estimates. In 1994, it reported, there were about 192 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States. By 2009, that had jumped to 310 million.

By now, that estimate is more than a decade old. Since then, we’ve seen multiple surges in gun purchasing as reflected in requests made from gun dealers to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Some of those background-check requests are for concealed-carry permits or other non-purchase-related queries. But most are made by gun stores when buyers come in to purchase a weapon.

Since November 2012, the month that the CRS report was published, there have been nearly 291 million background check requests made to the FBI. In the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 there were 78.6 million alone.

From the early 1970s until the early 1990s, the rate of gun ownership in the United States was falling. That was true among both Democrats and Republicans, according to data from the national General Social Survey (GSS). (The figures below include independents who align with a political party.) But since the early 2000s, the overall decline has stalled, with Republicans being slightly more likely to report owning guns and Democrats slightly less likely to. 

How do we reconcile a decline in gun ownership with an increase in owned guns? Simple: Many gun owners now own multiple guns. The GSS asks people to identify what type of guns they own, allowing us to determine the percentage of gun owners who own more than one type. In the first three years for which GSS data are available, about 49 percent of gun owners reported owning a firearm from more than one category (pistol, rifle, shotgun). In the most recent three GSS surveys, that percentage rose to nearly 60 percent.

It has always been more common for residents of rural areas to report owning a gun than for residents of more urban areas. Rural residents are more likely to have a gun for protection or for hunting.

Even here, though, we see the effects of the partisan divide on gun ownership. In the most recent GSS, urban Republicans were about as likely as rural Democrats to report owning a gun.

Partisan politics heavily infects both gun ownership and the response to gun ownership, of course. The National Rifle Association’s effort to argue that the best antidote to gun violence is an armed response has become a central tenet of Republican politics. On Monday, The Washington Post published a lengthy look at how the AR-15 became a central part of the political discussion about gun ownership and how it became a talisman of pro-gun advocacy.

It is estimated that there are 20 million AR-15-style rifles in the United States at this point — a powerful, deadly type of weapon that was restricted as a consumer product two decades ago.

There have been proposals aimed at reducing that figure. As part of his short-lived 2020 presidential candidacy, former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke (D) proposed buying back assault-style weapons like the AR-15. Even if that were fully successful, of course, there would likely still be some 300 million firearms in the United States, according to that 2012 CRS report. Many of the deadliest firearms would be gone, but hundreds of millions of more would remain.

If significantly reducing gun deaths necessarily means significantly reducing firearm ownership, you can see the problem. It’s hard to think of a way that ownership could be reduced significantly, even if the political will to do so suddenly materialized.

There are far more American guns than there are Americans.

To read more CLICK HERE