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Chapter 6

The Smart-on-Crime Agenda

By Ja'Ron Smith

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Public order is the basis of good community and the American Dream. When large segments of a community fear for their lives and property, it is impossible to create a society that affords opportunity to all.

How does crime stifle economic, social, and community growth? To start, it’s simply expensive. There is no definitive estimate of the cost of crime. But by any reckoning, crime takes a toll, fiscally and psychologically.

The direct costs of policing and punishing crime are substantial. In 2019, the latest year for which complete data are available, the US Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that county and municipal governments in the US spent $107 billion on police and $31 billion on corrections annually. State governments spent another $53 billion on corrections. Real (inflation-adjusted) justice system expenditures increased 68 percent from 1997 to 2019, rising to $328 billion that year.1

Then there are the indirect costs, which are evident even if hard to measure. The RAND Corporation estimated that in 2010, every murder cost society more than $9 million ($12 million in 2025 dollars) in tangible costs (investigation, adjudication, and punishment) and intangible costs (loss of productivity, costs of increased security, generalized fear, etc.)—a number that has doubtless increased since then.2 A 2021 estimate of the aggregate costs of crime in the United States put the bill at $4.71–$5.76 trillion every year.3

These costs ripple out and have profound second-order effects. The unpredictable nature of crime and the way it can raise the costs of doing business—insurance, repairs, increased security, and so on—are a major impediment to economic revitalization in many communities. As just one example, in 2023, The Washington Post ran a fascinating series on the H Street corridor in Washington, DC. There, an economic revitalization that saw dozens of restaurants, bars, and shops sprout up along a previously run-down street was snuffed out by rampant violent and property crime, which made it impossible for businesses to take root.4

And then there are the psychological impacts of crime. Security is a prerequisite for all sorts of things that contribute to human flourishing: not just economic activity but also education, family formation, community engagement, and child-rearing. All these activities are made immeasurably more difficult in high-crime environments, because resources of time, energy, and attention must be redirected to personal safety.

For decades, Americans were the beneficiaries of a historic drop in crime. The property crime and overall crime rates peaked in 1980, while the violent crime rate reached a high in 1991.5 Violent crime and homicide rates started to rise in 2015 and jumped in 2020. Amid the dislocations of the COVID-19 pandemic, the violent crime rate rose by 4.5 percent, and the homicide rate rose by 28.9 percent, the highest-ever one-year increase on record.

Thankfully, violent crime and homicide rates fell in 2023 and 2024, and evidence points to declines in 2025 as well.6 However, as a result of the pandemicera increases, crime is currently salient in our political culture in a way it has not been in decades. Americans are concerned about public disorder, organized theft, recidivism, and spontaneous violent crime. They are increasingly wary of criminal justice reforms that appear to have struck the balance between punishment and leniency in a way that exposes the public to disorder.

Emblematic of this concern about public disorder is San Francisco. In 2022, a former New York Times reporter, Nellie Bowles, penned an elegy on how crime and disorder had helped break the City by the Bay. Bowles accused San Francisco’s leaders, including leftist District Attorney Chesa Boudin and a group of “progressive” prosecutors who came to power after the George Floyd riots, of parroting “left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city.”7 San Francisco voters recalled Boudin just 18 months into his term.8 Since Boudin’s recall, crime has become an increasingly salient political issue nationwide, with about seven in 10 Republicans and half of all Democrats saying before the 2024 election that addressing crime should be a top priority for the next president—a substantial increase in both numbers since the end of President Donald Trump’s first term in early 2021.9

Rolling back the failed, naive policies of an official like Boudin is a helpful corrective. San Francisco—a city preternaturally blessed with geographical and social riches but beset by addiction, poverty, and public disorder—is an excellent example of how crime impedes opportunity. But like with any backlash, the danger is always overcorrection. That is, opposing the naive and dangerous policies of a crime apologist such as Boudin need not mean re-embracing outmoded “lock ’em up” policies that proved costly, ineffective, and unjust. There’s a potential middle path between punitiveness and naivete—between “tough on crime” and “soft on crime”—that privileges public safety while remaining open to mercy, forgiveness, and rehabilitation.

The right way is to be “smart on crime,” which means being more than simply reactive. Instead, we should be proactive in addressing legitimate concerns about public safety.

A smart-on-crime agenda has four pillars. It starts with not just properly funding but even expanding the numbers of police. A well-trained police force, deployed to those areas of greatest need, is among the most effective anti-crime measures available. But this police force must be accountable to the public.

Second, the police must be freed from mindless administrative tasks that hamper their effectiveness. Currently, clearance rates for serious crimes are far too low, while police are inappropriately deployed to address social ills such as mental health crises. They should be directed toward where we need them most: fighting and preventing violent and serious crime.

Third, our systems of incarceration and supervision need a thorough overhaul. Punishment through incapacitation is a necessary and important part of the response to crime; it is a practical corrective and reflects deeper moral impulses. But it cannot be solely for punishment’s sake. The reality is that something like 95 percent of all incarcerated persons will be returning to our communities someday.10 The question, then, is not whether they return but what they are like when they get here. Do we prefer the incarcerated to return to our communities punished but also broken, unemployable, disaffected, and hopeless—or hopeful, with the skills and education needed to become productive citizens? Making prisons places of rehabilitation and personal renewal, to the extent possible, is not gooey criminal coddling. It is a practical response to a plain reality, an investment in the future peace and safety of the communities to which the incarcerated will return.

Finally, we need to embrace smart strategies that increase the efficiency of police, courts, and probation and parole boards. Those include investing in more and better criminal justice data and adopting police strategies such as focused deterrence and hot-spot policing.

These reforms are designed to address concerns about public disorder while preserving a pathway for those involved in the criminal justice system to become productive and responsible citizens. The smart-on-crime agenda is neither naive about criminals nor cynical about the possibility of personal reform. Instead, it embraces practical and evidence-based approaches to crime and safety that, above all, privilege democratic accountability and personal liberty—the deepest and most enduring American values.

Expand, Train, and Support the Police

Central to any smart-on-crime agenda is properly funding the police. Few policy initiatives have done more to undermine support for intelligent and effective criminal justice reforms than ill-considered calls to “defund the police”—whether the call is for outright abolition of police forces or its softer variant, “significant, permanent reductions to existing policing and carceral infrastructures” and a concomitant increase in funding for various social services. 11

But Americans have, quite rightly, roundly rejected “defund the police” initiatives. While public approval of the police has dropped somewhat in recent years, law enforcement remains one of the most broadly popular institutions in American life. And broad majorities want increased police presence in high-crime areas.12 Since the 2020 death of George Floyd and the disorders that occurred after, both black and white Americans overwhelmingly appear to have rightly rejected defunding proposals—including in the epicenter of the Floyd riots, Minneapolis, where a defunding initiative was solidly defeated in 2021.13

Expand the Number of Police

But more than simply resisting calls to defund the police, a smart-on-crime agenda seeks to significantly expand the number of cops on the beat, especially in high-crime areas, while also strengthening the accountability measures that we should apply to all applications of state power.

Expanding police forces and placing more police on the streets in so-called proactive policing strategies is essential to maintaining public order. There is strong evidence that hiring more police and then concentrating them in high-crime areas is among the most effective possible crime-reduction strategies.14 One innovative study used daily crime reports in Washington, DC, and correlated them with “terror alert” days, when the local police force increased officers’ presence in specific downtown areas. Researchers found that “an increase in police presence of about 50 percent leads to a statistically and economically significant decrease in the level of crime on the order of 15 percent.”15

Drawing on some of this research—and noting that the United States is the only major world democracy that spends more on its prison system than on policing—the economist Alex Tabarrok has argued in favor of the benefits of halving time served in prison while doubling police forces. 16 With significant research support, he theorizes that preventing crime from occurring in the first place is more effective than punishing it harshly after the fact, what he calls the “more police, fewer prisons” approach.17

There’s even evidence that this approach would be popular in communities that have been the most vocal about purported police misconduct. Indeed, as political scientist Michael Fortner has argued in Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, much of the 1980s “drug war” was supported by middle-class black Americans who felt imprisoned in their homes by rampant addiction and drug crime in their streets.18 Today, much of the backlash against policing in economically depressed areas and communities of color comes not from a sense that there are too many police but from being at once “ over-policed” (when it comes to minor crimes such as public drunkenness or turnstile jumping) and ineffectively “under-policed” (when it comes to preventing and solving major crimes such as murder and rape).19

Promote Professionalism and Refine Training

In addition to expanding the number of police, a smart-on-crime agenda would invest in training police and promoting police professionalism.

Recruiting and training are major blind spots in American policing, and both need a thorough overhaul. Fundamental to rebuilding trust between police and underserved, underprivileged communities is building a culture of police professionalism—in which policing is understood as a learned vocation, like medicine or law, that is marked by minimum standard entry requirements, rigorous specialized training, and continuing education.

Building such a culture starts with minimum standards of entry. Most police departments require only a high school diploma to join the force. But there is evidence that officers with more education use physical force less often.20 While it may not be practical to limit policing to the college educated, we should make policing a more attractive vocation to those with more education. States and localities should also consider requiring a college degree to become a department leader, with assistance for those who want to move up the chain of command.

Police academy training in the United States is woefully inadequate. The average police training academy requires about 806 hours of in-class instruction, supplemented by about 450 hours of probationary field training.21 That’s less classroom training than the “1,000 hours of instruction in a beauty culture school” required to become a cosmetologist in Texas.22

The content of police training also needs adjustment, reorienting it from the militarized “stress” model that currently dominates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average recruit receives only about 20 hours of training in de-escalation techniques (or what the agency terms “verbal judo”). That means that recruits often have little training in how to defuse an encounter besides immediately moving to immobilizing a person with holds, tasers, or other uses of force. That 20 hours of de-escalation training compares unfavorably with an average of 72 hours in firearms training for recruits, 64 hours in defensive tactics, 40 hours in emergency vehicle operations, and 23 hours in report writing. 23 Indeed, as of 2017, 29 states had no requirement that officers receive any training in de-escalation.24

All these topics are, of course, appropriate for academy training. But in the distribution of training hours to specific topics, police forces send a message to recruits about what they think is most important to policing and, especially, what skills will get a recruit promoted up the chain of command. De-escalation skills should be near the top of that list, not the bottom—especially since there is evidence that increasing training in de-escalation can, in fact, reduce use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints about excessive force.25

Further, what makes this comparison of training hours allocated by subject so striking is that—public perceptions notwithstanding—only about a quarter of officers have ever fired their weapon at any time in their career, while encounters with stressed, aggrieved, or traumatized persons are a near-daily occurrence.26 That is to say, police academy training is strangely disconnected from the actual work of policing in most instances. Academies should refocus on scenario-based training that reflects police’s actual lived experience and that encourages the development of emotional intelligence skills, as well as a graduate school–type element of book learning on use of force and constitutional norms. And overall, we simply must require and fund more extensive academy training of future police.

Training needs to be career-long, not just in the academy. While large municipal departments often have formal continuing education requirements, many have only ad hoc programs or none at all. Continued training should especially be required of those looking to become departmental leaders.

Increase Accountability

Finally, expanding the ranks of police and properly training and funding them does not mean handing them a blank check, nor proposing a hands-off policy without accountability. In a democratic republic like ours, checks and balances apply to the police as well. To that end, a smart-on-crime agenda emphasizes careful reforms to promote police oversight and accountability.

Almost any police chief will tell you that a disproportionate number of excessive-force incidents spring from just a handful of officers: the proverbial bad apples in the bunch. Yet chiefs’ discretion over personnel decisions is often quite limited. In many cases, police union contracts limit the number of people who can question an officer (usually to one person) after an incident, limit the amount of time allowed for questioning, and prevent questioning or investigation by civilian review bodies.27

Some contracts also prevent investigators from publicly acknowledging that an officer is under investigation.28 One Chicago police union contract prohibits the department from taking disciplinary action against officers if their testimony is later found to be inconsistent with body-worn camera footage. 29 No such protections would be afforded to an ordinary citizen in an investigatory context.

If an officer is disciplined for police misconduct, other protections and procedures are often activated in the form of forced arbitration of personnel decisions. Nearly a quarter of officers who are fired for misconduct win their jobs back through binding arbitration. 30 In Minnesota, one investigative report found that more than 500 current or formerly licensed police officers had been convicted of at least one crime, but 75 percent of those officers were never formally disciplined or removed from their posts. 31 In Baltimore, an officer remained on the police force despite being adjudged guilty of crimes that included falsification of evidence. 32 To be clear, those with criminal records should not be denied the opportunity for gainful employment. But police officers hold a position of public trust, and that must be weighed against the severity of their criminal convictions.

To address these issues, a smart-on-crime policy agenda supports expanding the ranks of police—but also demands better-trained and more-accountable police forces. One important reform would address the “wandering officer”—the police officer who is fired from one agency for misconduct and simply gets rehired at another (often smaller and less well-equipped) agency down the road.33

While the extent of this problem is unclear, it is not negligible: One seminal study found that in any given year between 1988 and 2016, about 1,100 officers on the job in Florida had been fired from their previous job. 34 These officers are often permitted to bounce through several different jurisdictions because smaller agencies lack the expertise or resources to conduct thorough background checks. They also tend to be the focus of significant concern around misconduct and are far more likely than others to be fired (again) for serious misconduct or neglect of duty.

There’s nothing that good cops dislike more than bad cops who bring the profession into disrepute. To address the wandering-officer issue, Congress should build on the 2020 executive order from President Trump that called for the establishment of a national database of fired and decertified officers to help localities identify when a new recruit has previously been fired from law enforcement and for what.35 Giving chiefs a tool to keep problematic officers out of the profession is crucial for rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve.

Focus Police Time and Resources

The second major pillar of a smart-on-crime agenda is refocusing police time and resources on those activities that have the greatest “bang for their buck” in preventing crime and deterring offenders.

Reallocate Police “Time on Task”

Contrary to the image promoted by police procedurals on TV and true-crime podcasts, very little of policing as actually practiced has anything to do with preventing or responding to serious crime. One study from 1998 found that community-oriented and beat officers in Cincinnati spent only 10 percent of their time dealing directly with crime.36 They spent 26 percent of their time on motor patrol, 19 percent on administrative tasks, 10 percent in transit and waiting, and 10 percent on personal tasks. Recent data from several major cities indicate that of a police officer’s total time, the share spent on violent crime is only about 4 percent.37

A 2017 national survey of police departments across the United States indicated that more than half of police officers spent at least three hours per shift on reporting and other paperwork, including 13 percent who spent at least four hours on paperwork. 38 In addition, these paperwork burdens (and the time taken to manage them) have likely increased: Nearly half of police chiefs and command staff surveyed in 2021 agreed that documentation requirements had increased since March 2020, and two-thirds of those holding this view blamed federal regulations and mandates.39

Inefficient reporting processes and burdensome paperwork requirements impede police officers’ ability to serve their communities: Nine in 10 officers surveyed report that administrative requirements limit the time they can spend in the community. And 85 percent of police chiefs and command staff agree that onerous administrative tasks result in officers spending less time actively policing.40

Improve Clearance and Arrests

The results of this morass of paperwork are apparent in clearance rates and arrests. In 1960, the clearance rate—that is, cases in which a suspect was arrested or identified and a file closed—for murders was more than 90 percent. The clearance rate fell below 70 percent by 1990 and then dropped to below 60 percent for the first time ever in 2020. As of 2024, it was back up to 61.4 percent.41 Clearance rates for other serious crimes such as rape and violent assault remain shockingly low in the United States. In 2024, the clearance rates for rape (27.2 percent), robbery (30.4 percent), burglary (15.2 percent), and motor vehicle theft (9.2 percent) were even lower than the clearance rate for murder.42

The focus on lower-level offenses is also apparent in arrest statistics. While police made an arrest at a rate of once every four seconds in 2024, fewer than 6 percent of those were related to serious violent crimes and just 12 percent to serious property crimes.43 In contrast, some 82 percent of arrests were for lower-level offenses such as drug abuse violations, disorderly conduct, and weapons possession. Again, this phenomenon accounts for the sense that many communities of color are “ over-policed and under-protected,” with neighborhoods where police focus on petty offenses rather than serious crime.44

Refocus Police on Serious Crime

Policing time is limited. The reality that every hour an officer spends on paperwork is an hour stolen from other, more pressing duties suggests that departments need to reduce paperwork burdens on police and refocus energy on serious crimes rather than low-level public-order offenses. There are great potential fiscal savings here. In one study, for example, researchers found that police departments in places such as Los Angeles; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, could save tens of millions of dollars (up to $177 million in Los Angeles, for example) by outsourcing 75 percent of administrative tasks to contractors and administrative staff.45 But the most important effect may be in giving police the time and resources needed to raise clearance rates and refocus on serious and violent crime.

As one additional means of refocusing police on serious crime, localities should explore expanding “co-responder” models that pair police in appropriate situations with trained social services professionals. The value of this model is especially apparent in the police response to persons having a mental health crisis. Between one-quarter and one-half of all people killed by police in the United States have a mental health disorder.46 Police themselves report they feel overwhelmed by becoming first-line—but woefully under-trained—mental health responders. 47

One of the oldest co-responder models, crisis intervention teams (CITs), originated in the 1980s.48 In a CIT program, selected officers are trained to identify persons undergoing a mental health crisis, employ de-escalation techniques, and serve as liaisons between police and mental health agencies. 49 A 2019 study found that CIT training was associated with reductions in arrests, increased diversions to mental health services, and positive changes in police attitudes and responses toward mental illness. 50 The University of Memphis, which helped develop the CIT model and national CIT training curricula, reports that over 2,600 local agencies nationwide have CIT programs of some kind—at least one in 46 states.51

Two other popular programs, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) and the Police Assisted Addiction & Recovery Initiative, 52 were created in the past decade. In addition to these high-profile examples, a plethora of local police-led diversion efforts have sprung up across the United States in recent years. These programs employ a variety of approaches, such as promising not to initiate criminal charges against individuals who actively seek out police for assistance, training officers to administer naloxone to combat opioid overdoses, and using the threat of criminal citation to leverage suspects into accessing treatment and other services.53

In addition to avoiding the costs associated with an arrest, these strategies can improve recidivism outcomes. An initial analysis of the LEAD program in Seattle found that participants were significantly less likely to be rearrested in ensuing months or charged with a felony. 54 Likewise, a review of the Pre-Arrest Diversion/Adult Civil Citation program in Leon County, Florida, revealed an 80 percent reduction in the rearrest rate for individuals who successfully completed the program. 55 Another report focusing on juvenile civil citation in Florida similarly found improved recidivism outcomes for those who received a civil citation in lieu of a criminal arrest.56

The culture of law enforcement naturally makes it wary of efforts to divert from arrest and prosecution in cases where such action would be legally justified.57 As a result of these attitudes, there is significant resistance to co-responder programs among officers, with at least two studies showing as many as half resisting arrest alternatives (though both studies found that resistance decreased and antipathy toward current drug policies increased among more seasoned officers—itself a telling finding).58

But those resistant attitudes can be changed by making CIT and co-responder models not simply one more administrative burden on police but a reform that helps police refocus on core policing tasks like preventing and solving serious crime. Along with outsourcing nonessential paperwork burdens, such models can supplement police efforts to assist the mentally ill and physically addicted persons they come in contact with every day. Everyone is a winner in this scenario: Police are relieved of responding to crises they are not trained for, those undergoing a crisis are connected to treatment and assistance without garnering a criminal record, and the public can rest assured that its police are focused on preventing serious crime.

Improve Outcomes After Incarceration

While we should enact policies to divert people from unneeded arrest and incarceration when possible, punishment will always be a cornerstone of our criminal justice system. A period of incarceration or other punishment is often necessary to protect the public order and adequately express society’s moral convictions about the gravity of certain criminal conduct. But even when punishment is necessary, it should be paired with smart and effective programming and policies that help reduce recidivism and assist the incarcerated to become productive and responsible citizens once they are released.

Prison Reforms

This approach starts with reforms to our prisons, especially improving rehabilitative and educational programming in carceral settings. While the effects of rehabilitative approaches to incarceration remain under-studied, existing academic literature does suggest that—especially for persons with lower educational and employment levels—rehabilitative programming and a reentry-focused approach to incarceration improve employability and discourage future criminal behavior.59 One meta-analysis found that participation in educational programming in prison reduced the risk of recidivism by 13 percent and increased the likelihood of post-incarceration employment by 0.9 percentage points.60

As with the mental and emotional space of prisons, the physical space of carceral settings needs reform. Prisons are notorious for harsh physical conditions that include rampant noise, clutter, dilapidation, and lack of privacy, which are “important pathways by which personal and social duress emerge in prison.”61 These physical conditions—which policymakers could address through reforms to prison construction standards—not only take a profound toll on inmates but also directly contribute to making working in prisons as a corrections officer one of the most stressful, least desirable occupations in the United States, with high rates of mental and physical stress, comorbidity, depression, and suicide.62 Addressing the built environment to permit officers and inmates light, space, ventilation, and beauty would go a long way to reducing the stresses and improving the lives of all those who work and reside in prisons.

Probation and Parole Reforms

As large as the American prison population is, the number of people involved in “community supervision”—systems of probation and parole—is even larger. At the end of 2023, about 3,772,000 adults were under community supervision through probation, parole, or aligned systems. That’s about one in every 70 adult US residents, three times the incarcerated population.63

The high number of people under community supervision is partially because probation and parole terms have lengthened and states have increased the number of conditions associated with probation and parole. These conditions lead to an increased number of “technical” violations that are not themselves criminal and may have little to do with public safety but nonetheless can lead to supervision being revoked and a person being sent to jail.64 Persons on community supervision often have to comply with up to two dozen separate supervision conditions, including not “associating” with others who have a criminal record, which can limit housing options when other family members have a prior conviction.65 The difficulty of complying with numerous, sometimes onerous conditions for yearslong stretches contributes to a supervision failure rate of roughly one-third.66

A number of studies have shown that lengthy supervision sentences contribute unnecessarily to mass incarceration and have a negative impact on public safety—meaning that our expensive community supervision systems are actually increasing recidivism and incarceration while making communities more vulnerable to crime and instability.67 Research by the United States Sentencing Commission shows that lengthier supervision terms yield diminished returns in reducing recidivism, since most new offenses occur within two years of release.68

Other studies have found an even shorter period of heightened risk of recidivism, concluding that most supervision violations occur within the first year of supervision.69 After that, continued supervision simply increases costs and imposes administrative burdens—to say nothing of hampering an ex-offender’s return to full personal autonomy—without any substantial effect on recidivism rates. Yet the average term of federal supervised release in 2020 was 43 months, or more than 3.5 years. 70 In many state systems, it is far longer.

Many states already offer opportunities for early discharge from probation: 16 states, including Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah, award individuals “earned time credits” for good behavior. Additionally, at least 10 states have laws requiring a periodic review of probation cases to assess whether the individual can be discharged early.71 At the federal level, the First Step Act of 2018 established an incentive system in which certain federal inmates can earn “time credits” to reduce their prison sentences by completing rehabilitation programs that have an evidence-based deterrent effect on future crime.72

Early discharge seems to have little impact on recidivism: Research published by the US Courts in 2013 found that only 10 percent of those whose supervision terminated early in 2008 were rearrested within three years, while 19 percent of individuals who completed a full term of federal supervision were rearrested within that time period.73 So there is ample support for reducing probation terms and creating new opportunities for early exit from supervision, without increasing arrest rates or threatening public safety.

In a smart-on-crime world, people on federal and state supervision would be able to earn time credits for abiding by the rules of supervision and making meaningful progress toward reentry, such as by securing employment. In addition to incentivizing good conduct and work, time credits shorten the sentences of the most engaged and compliant supervisees, allowing supervision officers to reduce their caseloads and focus more on higher-risk persons who need personalized and more intrusive attention. Officers are also less likely to impede successful individuals with unnecessary check-ins.74

States and the federal government should also reduce the number of supervision conditions, carefully connecting each imposed condition to legitimate and customized penological goals. And they should replace immediate reincarceration for violations of those conditions with systems of “graduated” sanctions—permitting judges to use sanctions (such as additional addiction treatment or mandatory attendance at skills training) short of sending someone back to prison for initial violations while reserving reincarceration for new crimes or repeated violations. These reforms would refocus supervision less on compliance with technical conditions and more on connecting supervisees who are experiencing trouble to the key drivers of post-incarceration success: housing, employment, education, and addiction treatment.

Collateral Consequences

In the popular perception, a person involved in the criminal justice system “does their time” and moves on. It is rarely, if ever, that simple. Instead, ex-offenders face a host of collateral consequences, or legal and administrative restrictions that limit access to employment, occupational licensing, education, housing, voting, and other rights and benefits, often for a lifetime.

Consider: The vast majority of employers report using background checks, and in one early 1990s survey of employers in four metropolitan areas, over 60 percent of employers reported they “probably” or “definitely” would not employ a person with a criminal conviction.75 Many states bar any person who has ever been convicted from public employment. Other consequences of a conviction include a lifetime ban on federal housing assistance for those with certain convictions and prohibitions on receiving public assistance.76 And many states restrict or prohibit persons with convictions from obtaining occupational licenses—including broad prohibitions in places like Vermont, which explicitly permits all licensing boards to deny licenses for any felony conviction, “whether or not related to the practice of the profession.”77 In most states, there are hundreds of collateral consequences of a criminal conviction baked into state laws and regulations.78

The effect of all these employment restrictions is severe. Good estimates are hard to come by, but perhaps 40–50 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals remain unemployed one year after release. 79 Because of reduced employment and lower pay, the lifetime earnings of the formerly incarcerated are depressed by as much as half, compared with those of similarly situated persons without a conviction.80 One analysis of gross domestic product losses due to employment barriers for people with criminal records put the figure at $65 billion for 2008.81 These policies also affect recidivism: One study showed that in states with more burdensome licensing laws, average rates of recidivism jumped by 9 percent over 10 years, while those with less restrictive laws saw recidivism rates drop by 4.2 percent.82

Finding a job, securing stable housing, and building a career are the best possible antidotes to future criminal behavior. The collateral consequences of our policies toward ex-offenders constitute some of the most self-defeating aspects of the current criminal justice system. States and the federal government should remove or reform the policies that create these unnecessary and unhelpful collateral consequences and instead give credence to the popular notion that once your time is served, your punishment is over.

Clean Slate Initiatives

Expungement (which is different from a pardon) wipes certain criminal records clean after a person has remained crime-free for some period of time. In 2020, Michigan passed a clean slate initiative that will automatically expunge certain felonies and misdemeanors after seven years crime-free.83 A major meta-analysis of clean slate programs found they have significant prosocial effects for beneficiaries, including increased chances of employment, housing access, government aid eligibility, and confidence about the essential fairness of the criminal justice system. Clean slate beneficiaries thus felt more invested in avoiding future criminal behavior.84

The federal government should expand expungement for certain federal crimes, especially drug crimes, giving ex-prisoners an additional chance to reintegrate fully into society as law-abiding citizens without the anchor of a criminal record holding them back. Federal leadership can also incentivize additional states to enact similar legislation.

Increase the Criminal Justice System’s Efficiency

Finally, there are a host of larger, more ambitious criminal justice reforms that should be enacted to fundamentally transform the system in ways that make it more effective and that serve the public interest.

Improve Criminal Justice Data Collection

One of the major impediments to better criminal justice policy is a lack of reliable data. For example, a major issue with identifying appropriate and effective reforms to probation and parole is that so few states—13 as of mid-2020—report data on the number of people who are rearrested for a new felony within a given number of years after release from prison. And throughout the entire United States, there are fewer than 200 people whose job it is to collect and analyze all these complex criminal justice data.85 Improving the quality and quantity of data and data analysis is crucial to better policymaking.

Use Hot-Spot Policing and Crime Mapping

One of the oldest forms of “proactive” policing is an officer on the beat, walking the street, interacting with the community—and serving as a deterrent to criminal activity.86 That age-old tactic has been upgraded in modern times with the addition of “crime mapping” techniques that can identify areas in a jurisdiction that generate criminal activity and target police resources to them.

Hot-spot policing, as it is called, has been identified as one of the most effective crime-fighting techniques available, with a major 2022 meta-analysis finding that implementing hot-spot policing generated “statistically significant reductions in specific violent crime, property crime, and drug/disorder offense outcomes.” More importantly, it reduced overall crime in a locality by 16 percent, suggesting that targeting small geographical units with high crime rates did not simply “displace” crime to other areas.87 The federal government should support the adoption of hot-spot policing throughout the country through grants and technical assistance programs.

Employ Focused Deterrence

Hot-spot policing focuses on discrete geographic areas that generate significant crime. Focused deterrence, by contrast, targets small groups of people responsible for substantial amounts of crime—often those with significant criminal histories or a record of gang involvement.

Focused deterrence was first developed in Boston in the 1990s in response to widespread gang activity throughout the city. Police and community members engage with those at risk of violent criminal activity and use a blend of “carrots and sticks” to deter further crime. As incentives, these individuals receive personalized job training and drug treatment. On the deterrence side, they get information about the enhanced penalties they will likely face from any further criminal convictions.

Beyond the use of carrots and sticks, focused deterrence initiatives attempt to involve the local community in opening opportunities to the targeted individuals and improving police-community relations.88 Focused deterrence has been shown to decrease the crime rate by engaging a variety of community partners and allocating officers and community members “in ways that heighten the perceived risk of apprehension” among would-be criminals.89

Conclusion

Preserving the public order is a necessary component of increasing opportunity. In a society that cannot effectively prevent, investigate, and punish crime, entrepreneurship, economic risk-taking, family formation, and community engagement will all suffer as time and energy are redirected to personal safety. Therefore, we should always be concerned about crime rates, especially violent crime, and be prepared to address crime forcefully when necessary.

Nothing in this smart-on-crime agenda should ever be read as embracing naive or unfounded notions about crime or criminals. But we cannot allow concerns about crime to become an excuse for an ever-expanding bureaucrat state, the loss of personal liberties, or the elimination of paths to rehabilitation and redemption for offenders. And we should not allow the rising public salience of crime—nor the apparent embrace of naive thinking about criminals and public disorder on the left—to become the excuse for reenacting failed policies or embracing one-size-fits-all punitive responses.

Conservatives especially have led the way in the past two decades in enacting reforms to criminal sentencing, probation and parole, and incarceration that have saved public money and helped reduce recidivism. The early-2000s reforms to criminal sentencing in Texas, which prevented a collapse of that state’s prison system and saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, are a prime example. At the federal level, there is the First Step Act, signed into law by President Trump. In providing a means for revisiting the harsh sentences of certain drug offenders who have shown the greatest promise in rehabilitating themselves, the act allows the federal prison system to focus its resources and attention on needier inmates and returns rehabilitated persons back to productive work in society. A smart-on-crime agenda preserves that proud conservative legacy and provides new ways to keep the public safe and promote human flourishing in our society.

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  2. James Dobbins et al., “How to Defuse Iran’s Nuclear Threat: Bolster Diplomacy, Israeli Security, and the Iranian Citizenry,” RAND Review , May 11, 2012, https://www.rand.org/pubs/corporate_pubs/CP22-2012-04.html. The dollar amount is adjusted for inflation using the personal consumption expenditures price index. See Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Personal Consumption Expenditures: Chain-Type Price Index, December 29, 2025, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI.
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  22. Tex. Admin. Code § 83.20(a)(5)(A) (2022).
  23. Buehler, State and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies’ Training Topics and Instructors, 2022—Statistical Tables , 6, table 2. Again, the average hours for each type of training are derived by multiplying the average number of training hours required by the share of academies offering that training.
  24. Gracie Stockton, “21 States Still Don’t Require De-Escalation Training for Police,” American Public Media, June 24, 2021, https://www.apmreports.org/story/2021/06/24/21-states-still-dont-require-deescalation-training-for-police.
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  38. Nuance Communications, Police Officers Need Smarter Tools to Help with Incident Reporting , 2018, https://www.nuance.com/content/dam/nuance/en_us/collateral/dragon/misc/nuance-dragon-role-of-tech-police-paperwork-infographic-en-us.pdf. For the year the survey was administered, see Campus Safety, “Nuance Survey: Police Officers Spend Half of Shift Completing Paperwork,” press release, February 3, 2018, https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/press-releases/nuance-communications-police-survey/47464/.
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