Anti-intellectualism, on both the left and the right, is preventing us from improving criminal justice.
As we debate whether artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, one thing is clear: Humans aren’t putting their best foot forward. Anti-intellectualism is currently rising faster than Bitcoin.
Just recently, Vice President J.D. Vance bristled when asked about his time before politics as “an intellectual” and National Review contributor, casting both as insults. There’s a wellspring of anti-intellectualism on the left as well. The Biden administration, for example, refused to acknowledge the consensus among economists that excessive government spending contributed to inflation, instead invoking the bogeyman of corporate price gauging.
Anti-intellectualism has always had a certain appeal in this country, as meticulously documented in historian Richard Hofstadter’s book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” This is despite our shared inheritance as a people shaped by erudite figures like James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. We are, after all, a nation that once had a Know-Nothing Party.
Now, with more information than ever at our fingertips, anti-intellectualism persists, and its presence makes it harder to get public policy right, particularly when it comes to criminal justice. Why does this often damaging outlook endure? And what can be done to challenge it?
One aspect of anti-intellectualism that impedes sound policy is a reluctance to consider the context and baseline on which potential policy solutions are overlaid. In criminal justice, the public debate all too often boils down to a contest between those who believe we always need more police and more incarceration and those who believe the reverse. All things being equal, research does suggest that more police visibility deters many types of street crime. But it’s commonsensical that having four officers monitoring a high-crime location instead of one won’t yield four times the benefit.
The relevant context and baseline is not just the existing number of officers per capita, but the crime rate, number of calls for service and other factors that influence the need for officers. Consider that Baltimore and Washington D.C. have three times as many officers per capita as El Paso and Fargo. It would be intellectually dishonest to conclude that because crime is higher in the former cities, the visible presence of police and their efficacy in solving crimes does not contribute to crime control. Instead, it is likely that if Baltimore and Washington D.C. reduced their police forces by two-thirds, they would have even more crime.
Anti-intellectualism makes it harder to get public policy right, particularly when it comes to criminal justice.
The need to account for the baseline and context is just as clear when examining incarceration rates. Research suggests that incarceration plays a critical role in incapacitating the most dangerous offenders, but that rates above a certain level can lead to diminishing or even negative returns, in part because prison is often criminogenic. The return on investment must also be compared with investing the same dollar in other crime control strategies.
Massachusetts has four times fewer people in prison per capita than Louisiana. The countries with the lowest incarceration rates — rates a fraction of the level of those in Massachusetts — are among the poorest nations in the world, a list including Yemen, Gambia and the Republic of Guinea. These low rates may not stem from a desire to avoid incarceration, but from a lack of sufficient resources. Understanding factors such as the baseline incarceration rate, the rate of serious crimes and the length of carceral sentences is crucial to evaluating whether there are too many or too few people being locked up in a given jurisdiction.
Anti-intellectualism is often characterized by a refusal to acknowledge trade-offs. There is no free lunch — a dollar spent one way can’t be spent in another. Trade-offs can be found almost everywhere you look in the field of criminal justice. For example, policies like stop-and-frisk and civil asset forfeiture may identify criminality and contraband in the case at hand, but they also do damage to the broader fight against crime by sowing distrust between communities and police.
Finally, anti-intellectualism can lead to a lack of interest in evaluation. Ideologues often don’t want facts to get in the way of a compelling narrative. For example, some on the right continue to push bootcamps for youth, despite a significant body of research showing that any improvement in kids’ behavior while they are in such camps evaporates upon their return to society. Meanwhile, some liberal advocates still promote gun buybacks to address community violence. But research indicates that while buybacks may reduce suicides, they have no discernible impact on violent crime, since those inclined to misuse guns don’t turn them in.
How can we counteract these tendencies? First, we can equip policymakers with more information. We should bolster the capacity of institutions that provide objective analyses like the U.S. Government Accountability Office and similar entities at the state level like the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, which is known for its cost-benefit analyses.
Some skepticism of expertise is healthy. But being smart on crime requires actually being smart.
The current moment could also prove serendipitous for partnerships with universities. Academia is reeling from funding losses and, especially in the humanities, it has often justly been criticized for focusing too much on esoteric topics while shortchanging research with practical applications. A new Brookings Institute proposal envisions university-government partnerships to develop more innovative ways to deliver public services. Perhaps when more universities engage in such a practical way, it will in turn reduce the resentment with which many Americans view the “Ivory Tower.”
One remarkable example is the Criminal Justice Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina, which has partnered with local governments and law enforcement agencies to develop and spread best practices across the state. For example, the lab has built a Court Appearance Toolbox that has helped many counties adopt solutions such as text reminders that boost the rate at which defendants show up for their hearings in court.
Some skepticism of expertise is healthy. After a pandemic when we were initially warned against touching surfaces and when many schools were closed far too long, we know the state of knowledge is always evolving. Moreover, public policy cannot be monomaniacally focused on maximizing a single metric, whether that is public health or public safety. Constitutional rights must be sacrosanct, even when abridging them might help stamp out disease or crime.
But being smart on crime requires actually being smart. That means rejecting an anti-intellectualism that provides a license to indulge our own intuitive impulses and ideological fixations at the expense of doing what makes Americans safer.