Almost every time someone is arrested for murder in Philadelphia, he has a criminal record of some kind. In many cases it is for minor drug dealing or for possession of a gun.
So, the tough on crime crowd that supports Carlos Vega for DA crowd blames the criminal justice system in general and the DA, Larry Krasner, in particular for the murder saying that if only the guy arrested for murder were in jail, the crime would not have been committed.
What people who advance this idea forget is how many people in this city are involved in minor drug dealing and are carrying illegal guns. Most of them will not murder anyone. We can’t just arrest the corner drug dealers with guns who are likely to commit murder in the future. We don’t know who they are. If we throw the book at every one corner drug dealer with a gun we will vastly expand the number of people in prison.
That will, first, come at enormous cost to the lives of people who are incarcerated who will face the violence in prison and the impact of a prison record on their ability to secure a decent job when they get out.
Second, it will come at enormous cost to the city for both prosecuting more crimes and then incarcerating the people convicted.
Third it will not reduce the murder rate substantially. We can arrest and incarcerate a lot more people. But we can’t arrest all of them. And so long as drugs are illegal and the market for them continues to grow–a market driven in part by middle class people who come into the city to buy drugs–and too many communities in Philadlephia provide young people with limited opportunities to get ahead, there will new drug dealers carrying guns to replace the ones are in jail.
And of course this policy is racist. The people who are most likely to be arrested and incarcerated are young Black men both because of how the police deploys its resources and how racism accounts for both poverty and drug dealing in the city. But the people creating the market for drugs are far more likely to be white.
We have lived through the dynamic of trying to arrest our way out of crime. We are still living through it. Carlos Vega wants to ramp it up. What he is calling for is the expansion of policies that created the racist mass incarceration that has afflicted our country and, especially, the Black community.
Mass incarceration is on the ballot in Philadelphia in May. We must say no to it.