We will break this crime wave by stopping those responsible for creating it while deterring others from adding to the chaos.
We will break this crime wave by stopping those responsible for creating it while deterring others from adding to the chaos.
Editor’s note: This is the last in a series that Senator Cotton has written for National Review on the problem of crime in modern American life, and what to do about it. You can find previous entries here, here, here, here, here, and here.
O ver the past two years, violent crime and drug overdoses have claimed over 200,000 American lives. This dark reality must not become the new normal. We must instead face this crisis head on and reinvest in the three fundamentals of law enforcement: police, prosecutors, and prisons. We will break this crime wave by stopping those responsible for creating it while deterring others from adding to the chaos.
We should begin by making a once-in-a-generation investment in police salaries, training, and equipment, with a goal of putting 100,000 new officers on the street. In the 1990s, even Joe Biden voted for this solution to break that decade’s crime wave. For once, he was right. Those officers brought greater safety, security, and prosperity to countless communities nationwide. This solution worked then, and it will work now.
I recently introduced the “Fund the Police Act,” which would reprogram $50 billion in unspent coronavirus-relief money to support state and local police departments. This money would immediately provide $2 billion to law-enforcement grant programs and create a Law Enforcement Support Trust Fund that would award an additional $1 billion in grants each year for half a century. In its first year, this grant program could cover the annual salaries of nearly 30,000 police officers and detectives, and the trust fund could provide for 15,000 police officers and detectives every year after that. These funds can also be used to modernize departments with state-of-the-art equipment, fleets of new vehicles, and the best training available. State and local governments must also increase their law-enforcement budgets, but the Fund the Police Act would make a necessary down payment on community security.
Once we surge police onto the streets, we have to enforce the laws on the books, including so-called “petty” or “quality-of-life” crimes. That means fighting vagrancy and vandalism in addition to violent crime. Disrespect for the law doesn’t start with murder, and it must be stopped before it costs lives. Quality-of-life crimes degrade community environments and contribute to an atmosphere of criminality and a cycle of devolving standards, which harms the most vulnerable more than any other group. These crimes make up the majority of complaints from community members to officers, and they should be taken seriously.
Next, we must ensure that criminals who are put in squad cars are then put behind bars. This means surging federal prosecutors to especially dangerous cities and encouraging voters to recall, remove, and replace Soros-backed, so-called “progressive prosecutors” wherever they are found. Real prosecutors should pay special attention to federal gun criminals, gang members, and the peddlers of deadly narcotics and illicit opioids.
For its part, Congress ought to permanently classify fentanyl and fentanyl analogues as Schedule I controlled substances. Soft-on-crime opposition has forced the federal government to bounce from one temporary extension to another, when there is no doubt that deadly fentanyl analogues should be kept off the streets. Similarly, jailbreak activists want to retroactively reduce crack- cocaine-trafficking sentences for thousands of hardened criminals. They claim they want to reduce the “disparity” between powder-cocaine and crack-cocaine sentences. If that is really their aim, then we should increase powder-cocaine sentences to match crack sentences. These changes will not harm the victims of the drug trade (addicted drug users) but will instead punish only the traffickers who are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year.
State, local, and federal prosecutors must also have zero tolerance for rioting, looting, and political violence of any kind. Victims of politically motivated rioting and looting are not only subjected to assault or theft. They are also the casualties of an act of insurrection, an assault on society. Such actions don’t simply inflict personal pain, but wreak widespread societal damage and breakdown of trust within the body politic. These acts of violence should therefore be swiftly, reliably, and firmly punished.
Once convicted, criminals ought to stay behind bars for all or at least the vast majority of their prison sentences. Murderers currently serve an average of less than 60 percent of their prison sentences, and drug traffickers serve only 40 percent of their prescribed prison time. This is not justice.
We must also invest in our nation’s prison system, so that our jails and prisons have the resources to safely and securely hold inmates while giving them opportunities to become law-abiding, productive members of society. Prisons shouldn’t merely warehouse dangerous offenders for a few years before releasing them. Instead, they should connect convicted criminals with pre-release integration programing, work training, drug rehabilitation, and mental-health resources to break the cycle of crime.
Prisons can be institutions of reform, rehabilitation, and redemption, especially for lower-level offenders. Contrary to the beliefs of our liberal friends, discipline and determination are more important than compassion or charity in this endeavor, but the goal is the same: not only the just punishment of the offender, but the cultivation and reclamation of the citizen. Correctional facilities need far more resources for this goal to become reality.
Defunding prisons, as some radicals propose, wouldn’t just result in more criminals on the streets, but also more inmates emerging worse than when they entered. Poorly funded prisons too often become dens of crime and recruitment centers for gangs. Petty criminals can thereby be introduced to violent criminal networks, putting them on the path to personal and societal destruction. In 2015, the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center found that gang membership was growing at 68 percent of correctional institutions, while 44 percent of prison facilities also reported that gang members were joining the ranks of domestic-extremist groups. These are disturbing indicators that authorities do not have the necessary resources to protect inmates and maintain order. Perhaps the attorney general should be fighting against these real domestic extremists, instead of fake ones he imagines at school-board meetings.
One tool in particular is essential to the survival of extremist groups and gangs in prison: contraband cellphones. These devices are smuggled into prisons, then used for a variety of nefarious activities, such as coordinating the delivery of drugs inside prison walls, corrupting prison officials by soliciting outside payments, and maintaining criminal networks across and outside of prison facilities. Inmates also use these cellphones to intimidate witnesses and inflict retribution against honest officers in their prisons. Congress should pass my bill, the Cell Phone Jamming Reform Act, to enable prisons to jam the signals of contraband cellphones within their walls.
We should also improve pay and benefits for our nation’s correctional officers, who are outnumbered 3-to-1 by inmates and who perform one of the most difficult jobs in law enforcement. In a nine-year period measured by the National Institutes of Health, correctional officers suffered over 125,000 work-related injuries, and 113 tragically lost their lives. These men and women deserve a raise and improved benefits, making it easier to attract the best officers and making them less susceptible to pressure from rich and connected criminals. We should likewise expand the ranks of parole officers and encourage increased specialization, which has reduced recidivism rates.
Finally, the federal government should stop the flow of drugs and gang members across the border, which act as accelerants of crime. The president should declare a national emergency and surge resources, technology, and personnel to lock down our southern border. We need to finish the border wall, harden our ports of entry, and invest in the most advanced drug-detection tools in the world. Some may balk at the cost of securing the border. But the cost of an insecure border is far greater.
As we secure our border, our government must go beyond simple defense. We must go on offense and fight the drug trade at its source. The United States must lead our neighbors in Latin America — and insist on greater cooperation from them — to obliterate the powerful drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel alone has killed far more Americans than ISIS or al-Qaeda ever has. Similarly, we must not ignore illicit Chinese super-labs, which send massive quantities of fentanyl and its chemical precursors to Latin America for production and shipment across our border and into the United States.
Our country cannot foster opportunity without order or prosperity without protection for our people. A true anti-crime agenda will reestablish the rule of law in a society that is veering toward the criminality and violence of the 1990s. It is time to break the crime wave.