After crime plummeted in 2020 ... “The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said

I didn't see an updated graph for 2020, but in 2019 Baltimore set a record for homicides. A graph of the past 30 years is illuminating: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190803_USC48...

Baltimore's homicide rate at around 58 per 100k people makes it the 11th most violent city on earth, second only to St Louis in the USA and over 10x the national average rate (which itself is 5-10x the homicide rate in most other OECD countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

Doesn't necessarily argue against ending prosecutions for minor non-violent offenses, but I find this story's framing and blanket rejection of "tough on crime" odd. You could get the impression Baltimore is a major success story in depolicing resulting in a calming peace, rather than it having a (perhaps stochastic) 1 year decline from historic and globally record levels of violence, when the murder rate has been bumping up and down by similar amounts while hovering around an absolutely ghastly level of death.

They're talking about announcing a shift in tactic. Until recently, "broken windows policing" had been very popular: prosecute the small crimes and you will remove the criminals from the system, before they escalate to bigger crimes.

Even before that, there was a tactic of prosecutors competing with each other to be "tough on crime", prosecuting every minor offense so that people would feel safe. It's popular with voters, but it doesn't seem to work. Most notably, people don't feel safe, even as crime falls and prisons fill up.

Baltimore has problems of its own, and it's clear that whatever they've been doing hasn't worked. So they're announcing a change of tactic. We won't know if it works for at least five years.

The murder rate dropped Baltimore's all time high murder rate of 348 to 335 and 2021's murder rate is increasing. Compared to calls for non-violent crime and coming directly from the article: "The number of 911 calls for violent crimes did not drop significantly in the same period."

The title of the post is a lie.

Personally, I'd love to see all non violent offenders skip jail.

That doesn't necessarily mean skip judgement but home arrest and community service should be the modes to serve penance where due.

This way people still pay their own way and the system is less bogged down and even low level criminals may find opportunity to become better through education etc...

Agreed, but you know who will push back? The police. The private companies running the prisons. Because it means less leverage, less power, and ultimately, less money.

Private prisons don't exist in many states and represent a very small fraction of people in prison. We lock up so many people because for many years that has been a popular thing to do, and people have affirmatively voted for it. I think those people are wrong, but let's not mislead ourselves about how this happened.

Even public prisons are primarily run and populates through the formiddable lobbying power of police and prison guard unions. Their influence is far more insidiuous than that of the comparably small for-profit prison industry.

Also an opportunity to question your union stance.

I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the comment that said "I'd love to see all non violent offenders skip jail."

For people that don't see prison as punishment, indeed, Maddoff should not a done jail. He should have been bankrupt and forbidden to ever work with financial services.

This.

Remove all his assets, maybe even his citizenship. I mean when crime exceeds billions of dollars, that's a bit more than just petty theft or something too...

The punishment should fit the crime, but prisons should be ONLY to protect people from dangerous criminals (Serial killers, rapists, etc) and not a form of 'punishment'.

For madoff just tax him at 90% of his income for life, assuming he/kin have zero assets. Ensuring he has to work at walmart as a greeter just to get by. I'm sure that's probably just as bad as prison for many white-collar criminals.

Madoff would have been less likely to go to jail had he made off with poor peoples’ money instead of that of rich people.

So trespassing is no longer a crime. Great. Sounds like SF where smashing car windows is no longer a crime either.

Yes, that's exactly what the article says. /s

I'm missing the part where they show the causation and not just the correlation.

Not a bad move in any case. Throwing drug users and sex workers in jail doesn't make one shred of sense.

Hamsterdam...

So, can we now have more seasons of the wire? The writer refused to make any more until the drug laws changed in Baltimore.

Stopping prosecution of non violent crime is one part of the equation. We can't overlook the UBI aspect of the stimulus checks, which could have had an impact on lower property crime.