Sessions can put the brakes on criminal justice ‘reform’

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions has been a thorn in the side of the criminal justice reform lobby, on both the left and the right. 

His opposition to federal sentencing reform has drawn the ire of colleagues that include fellow Republican Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) for his 

{mosads}With Sessions’ nomination for attorney general, America’s top law enforcement official, criminal justice reform backers are wary that their case will fall on deaf ears.

They should be, since Sessions is correctly concerned that crime is no longer falling, the justification many reformers use to support claims that lighter sentencing regimes can paradoxically reduce crime and the overall prison population. 

But they are sadly mistaken as the latest police and FBI data show – violent crime is climbing, not falling. And murder is up precipitously over the past two years, especially in large American cities. 

Those escalating murder rates have to be tackled before any federal effort to lessen the penalties for serious crimes as is proposed by the Grassley-Cornyn sentencing reform legislation passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. 

How bad is the murder crisis? 

That depends on how you count, but many of the largest urban centers in America have seen homicide rise at alarming rates. 

Although Chicago posted 762 murders per police (812 according to the local coroner’s office), St Louis, Missouri is actually America’s deadliest city per capita with a murder rate of 60 per 100,000 residents. Closely behind are Baltimore (51.1 per 100,000), New Orleans (45.2 per 100,000), and Detroit (44.6 per 100,000) in 2016. 

Chicago ranks 8^th in terms of per capita murders at 28 per 100,000 residents. 

Those figures come on the heels of the 2015 spike of 10.8 percent in overall murders, according to the FBI.

Although the latest FBI data for the first half of 2016 shows the rate of increase declining, 2016 will likely surpass 2015’s murder rate. Murder is up 5.2 percent in the first half of 2016 over the first half of 2015. 

However, the murder jump is highly concentrated in large U.S. cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago.

Cities over 1 million in population saw murder increase by a staggering 21.6 percent in the first half of 2016.

Investigative journalist Jeff Asher estimates that across 73 cities over 250,000 in population, the average murder rate increase will be 11.3 percent in 2016, down from a 14.8 percent spike in 2015.

In Texas, the poster child of state-based sentencing reform, has seen the number of murders spiral out of control in its largest cities. Murder is up 48 percent in Dallas, 47 percent in San Antonio, 33 percent in Austin, and 25 percent in Houston from 2014 figures. 

In many cities, the demographics of murder victims is telling. Most victims are men of color. In Chicago, over 9 out of 10 victims were men and nearly 90 percent of them were black. Baltimore’s murder rates track very closely for African-Americans and men.

A 2016 study of murder rates by Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital found that murder rates for the young, African-Americans, and males have risen steadily over the past decade. Young black men fall victim to shootings and other violent death causes at rates in Chicago comparable to the violent death rates in third-world murder capitals and warzones, the study’s data showed.

FBI data confirm the pattern with 41 percent of all murder victims of known race in the United States listed as African-Americans between 17 and 44 years of age in 2015, despite being less than 10 percent of the population in that age category.

With men comprising about 80 percent of the murder victims nationwide, the murder rate for young, black men is approximately four times the national average.

Those murders are disproportionately taking place on the streets of America’s large cities. In 2015, almost half of murders occurred within the city limits of the 82 biggest cities in the United States, even though those cities account for only 60 million people out of a population of 317 million or 19 percent of residents.

So we don’t just have a murder problem. We have a series of communities (urban, young, black and male) dying on the streets at alarming rates.

But solutions are few and far between. Many blame the “Ferguson Effect” as police patrol less aggressively and communities of concern cooperate less frequently. But most critics offer little to “solve” the crisis.

Others have suggested calling out the National Guard to patrol the streets while in the country’s murder capital, the police seem fatalistic, with a police spokeswoman saying of the murder rate in that city, homicide is “a crime that is difficult to predict and prevent.”

If Sessions has a better answer, he should be lauded and confirmed.

In the meantime, criminal justice reformers would be wise to look for solutions to the murder epidemic in some communities instead of pushing their agenda.

Lives depend on it.

Sean Kennedy is a visiting fellow at the nonprofit Maryland Public Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. He previously worked as an aide in the U.S. Senate.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.