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Members of the US Army National Guard patrolling Penn Station in New York City. | Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images Crime rates are falling. Why are lawmakers passing tough-on-crime bills? When it comes to public safety, lawmakers have two primary jobs: enacting policies that curb crime and making their constituents feel safe. It might seem like those two things go hand-in-hand; after all, if lawmakers successfully reduce crime rates, then people have less to worry about. But as has been especially evident recently, there can be a big disconnect between actual crime trends and how people feel about them. According to a Gallup poll, for example, the share of Americans who believe that crime is an “extremely” or “very serious” problem afflicting the country recently hit an all-time high — 63 percent in 2023, up from 48 percent just five years earlier. But the crime data paints a very different picture: According to the FBI, after an uptick in crime in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, crime rates have actually been falling across the country, with murders declining by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. In New York City, one of the cities Republicans often point to as a supposed example of lawlessness, shootings are down 25 percent, and homicides are down 11 percent. “We keep getting a lot of really great information suggesting that violent crime is declining — in some cases extremely sharply,” said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “At the same time, there’s a real lag between what the data show and how people perceive the data.” That gap between reality and public perception is proving to have serious consequences. “Elected officials don’t govern based on necessarily what the data say,” Grawert said. “They govern on what the data say and how the public perceives it.” So as long as people continue to feel that crime is a problem — a reality prompted by an early pandemic crime spike and subsequently fueled by media reports that often overstated the rise in crime — lawmakers feel pressured to respond to a problem that, by and large, appears to be subsiding. That’s why a slew of cities and states have started adopting laws that hark back to the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s, a trend that has crossed party lines. Some jurisdictions, for example, have dramatically increased police presence, cracked down on homeless encampments, and imposed harsher penalties for petty crimes. These policies, in both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions, threaten the meaningful progress that criminal justice reform advocates achieved in the past decade, including a reduction in the prison population. This kind of legislation is both shortsighted and irresponsible: Many of these bills are getting enacted after crime began falling, which not only means they’re likely unnecessary, but they could also potentially pave the way for a reinvigorated era of mass incarceration. New crime bills are not responding to actual crime trends Louisiana was once known as the prison capital of the world, with more prisoners per capita than any other US state, or country for that matter. In 2012, according to the Times-Picayune, one in 86 adults in the state was serving time in prison, which at the time was almost twice the national average. The racial disparities were staggering, too: In New Orleans, one in seven Black men was either in prison, on parole, or on probation. But following a wave of criminal justice reforms across the country, some of which had bipartisan support, Louisiana lawmakers sought to change the state’s reputation. They succeeded, overhauling crime laws and ultimately reducing the prison population. The number of people held in prison for nonviolent offenses, for example, declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2023. Legislators in the state recently passed changes to its criminal justice system that will likely reverse that pattern. The new laws will impose harsher penalties and longer sentences for a range of offenses, including carjackings and drug dealing, make it significantly harder to qualify for parole or overturn a wrongful conviction, and treat 17-year-olds who are charged with a crime as adults. But deep-red Louisiana isn’t the only place this sort of change of heart is happening. In San Francisco, voters approved ballot measures in March that would expand police surveillance and impose drug tests on welfare recipients — showing a public appetite, even among liberal voters, to do away with a more forgiving law enforcement approach. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently deployed hundreds of National Guard troops to patrol the city subway system, despite the fact that crime on the subway was relatively rare and already on the decline. One area getting a lot of lawmakers’ attention is drug enforcement, especially against the backdrop of rising overdose deaths across the country. Oregon’s Democratic governor, for example, recently signed a bill that recriminalized possession of drugs in the state, reversing a decriminalization ballot measure that voters passed in 2020. But criminalization of drugs in particular is an easy way for lawmakers to say they’re responding to a problem without actually committing the necessary resources to address it, like making treatment centers more accessible. “The laws that are being proposed to counteract this by punishing people are not being proposed with public safety in mind,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. If they were, she said, they would be accompanied by an expansion of programs, including treatment centers and safe injection sites. Part of the tough-on-crime trend can be explained by the fact that an election is coming up, and politicians are concerned that the public’s sentiment about crime might sway voters. Fear-mongering about crime — and law-and-order campaigns in particular — is especially popular among Republicans every election cycle. This time around, Democrats seem to be responding not by pointing to declining crime trends, but by trying to appear even tougher on crime than their Republican counterparts. Given people’s attitudes toward crime — and the wrong public perception that crime is on the rise — Democrats might be justifiably worried about appearing out of touch if they deny their constituents’ distorted reality. But that just leads to bad policymaking as a result. “It’s a punitive turn in American policymaking that reflects a political establishment that doesn’t have any good ideas,” Bertram said. “Republicans love to make penalties harsher and sentences longer. To see Democrats bandwagoning on it is sinister and new and reflects a fear that they don’t have enough in their platform.” A renewed era of mass incarceration After the number of prisoners in the United States peaked at around 2.3 million people in 2008, a range of criminal justice reform bills succeeded in bringing that number down by reducing sentences, decriminalizing drugs, and by prosecutors being more selective about which laws to enforce and against whom. And in 2020, after the Covid pandemic prompted lawmakers to release low-risk prisoners, the prison population dipped to around 1.7 million. In recent years, the number of people in prison has been starting to creep back up, increasing by 2 percent nationally between 2021 and 2022. In some states, the rise has been much more pronounced, like in Mississippi, where the prison population grew by 14.3 percent in the same period. That’s in part because crime did indeed rise during the pandemic, but it’s also likely the result of a stricter law enforcement approach to low-level crimes. The overblown shoplifting panic, for example, prompted many states and local prosecutors to impose harsher penalties on offenders, despite the fact that shoplifting, like other crimes, was trending downward. It’s too early to know just how much the new tough-on-crime laws will affect the overall prison population, but they could potentially erase years of progress and further entrench America’s era of mass incarceration as a permanent reality. It’s easy for lawmakers to forget that when the public seems desperately afraid of a crime wave that seems to no longer exist. “There’s a sort of sense of ‘We have to do something, this is something, let’s do it,’ rather than a sober-minded, careful response to the data and the history, and what we know works and what doesn’t,” Grawert said. Indeed, it’s important for lawmakers to take a long-term approach to crime instead of trying to find a quick fix to a short-term problem. One way lawmakers can remind themselves of that is this tidbit in public polling: The same poll that showed that 63 percent of Americans think crime is a very serious problem nationally also showed that only 17 percent believed crime was an extremely or very serious problem in the area they lived in. That could be because while they might read about a supposed crime wave across the country, they’re not actually seeing any evidence of it in their own neighborhoods. Even if new tough-on-crime laws are intended to assuage the public’s fears about crime, they’re seemingly unnecessary and end up hurting everyone in the long term. After all, policy responses like New York sending the National Guard to the subway, which only visibly reinforce the idea that there’s an active threat, won’t only make people feel less safe; they’ll likely lead to more arrests for low-level offenses, too. Lawmakers should ask themselves: What would that actually achieve?

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Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesIt’s the question everyone in British society and in the corridors of power is thinking, but nobody will publicly ask, let alone answer: Just how sick is King Charles III? The chatter that King Charles is significantly more unwell than his aides are letting on is proliferating in British society.Speaking to friends of the king in recent weeks about his health, the most common response is a lowering of the voice by half an octave or so, followed by the sombre, drawn-out pronouncement: “It’s not good.”His officials didn’t respond to formal requests for comment on the matter from The Daily Beast. To be clear, his team have made it very clear, since the king disclosed his cancer diagnosis earlier this year—in an unprecedented act of royal transparency—that they wouldn’t be providing a “running commentary” on his health.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Jordan Pettitt/PA Images/Getty ImagesThe white horse which charged through London streaked crimson by blood is in a serious condition but still alive, British military officials said Thursday.Vida, technically known as a grey horse, is in an equine hospital after the dramatic incident in Central London Wednesday. Up to five horses either bolted or threw their riders after builders working on a construction site dropped a heavy load of concrete and rubble from height on an otherwise quiet street the horses were being ridden on.The horses are all part of the Household Cavalry, a regiment closely associated with the king which provides ceremonial escorts at state occasions such as the monarch’s birthday parade.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Former President Donald Trump greets his own appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020. | Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images The justices already effectively gave Trump what he wants in his Supreme Court immunity case. Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history. I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself. So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some. Even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, is unlikely to buy Trump’s argument that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump’s lawyers have not even attempted to hide the implications of this argument. When the case was heard by a lower federal court, a judge asked Trump’s lawyer if the former president was immune from prosecution even if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” Trump’s lawyer responded that Trump was immune, unless he were first impeached and convicted by the Senate. If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election. And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants. So long as this case is sitting before the justices, that trial cannot happen. And the justices have repeatedly refused special prosecutor Jack Smith’s requests to decide this immunity question on an expedited schedule that would ensure that Trump’s criminal trial can still happen before November. This decision to put Trump’s appeal on the slow track is part of a much larger pattern in this Supreme Court: The justices do not always need to rule in favor of a conservative party on the merits in order to achieve a conservative result. They can do so simply by manipulating their own calendar. How the Court games its calendar to benefit litigants on the right By handling requests from Republican litigants with alacrity, while dragging their feet when a Democrat (or someone prosecuting a Republican) seeks Supreme Court review, the justices can and have handed big victories to right-wing causes while simultaneously sabotaging liberals. Before the Trump case reached the Supreme Court, this penchant for manipulative scheduling was most apparent in immigration cases. During the Trump administration, lower courts often handed down decisions blocking the former president’s immigration policies, and the Court (often over the dissent of several justices appointed by Democrats) moved quite swiftly to put Trump’s policies back in place. In Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary(2019), for example, after a lower court blocked a Trump administration policy locking many migrants out of the asylum process, the Court reinstated this policy about two weeks after the administration asked it to do so. Similarly, in Wolf v. Cook County(2020), the Court reinstated a Trump administration policy targeting low-income immigrants just eight days after Trump’s lawyers sought relief from the justices. Once Biden came into office, however, the Court hit the brakes. In August 2021, for example, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee who is known for handing down poorly reasoned decisions implementing right-wing policy preferences — ordered the federal government to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Supreme Court eventually reversed Kacsmaryk’s decision, it sat on the case for more than 10 months, effectively letting Kacsmaryk dictate the nation’s border policy for that whole time. Similarly, after another Trump-appointed judge struck down a Biden administration memo laying out enforcement priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Court waited about 11 months before finally intervening and restoring the administration’s longstanding power to set priorities for law enforcement agencies. The point is that, even in cases where the justices ultimately conclude that a conservative litigant should not prevail, they frequently hand that litigant a significant victory by sitting on the case and allowing a Republican policy to remain in effect for sometimes more than a year.(Given the slow pace of most litigation, this might not be particularly remarkable — except for the stark difference in how the Court has treated suits against Trump and Biden’s policies.) The Court’s ability to set its own calendar allows it to manipulate US policy without actually endorsing lower court decisions that cannot be defended on the merits. The Court’s behavior in the Trump immunity case is a close cousin to this tactic. Again, it is difficult to imagine even this Supreme Court ruling that presidents may commit crimes with impunity. But the Court does not need to explicitly declare that Trump is above the law to place him above the law. All it has to do is string out his immunity claim for as long as possible. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The United States has long had a great deal of religious diversity, and was built on the idea of religious tolerance. But one type of belief was always rare: none. Until recently, that is. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who profess no religion (as opposed even to having one that they rarely or never practice) has risen from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. (Back in the early 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans espoused this position.)This phenomenon of declining belief is of great concern to many religious leaders, as one can easily imagine. The Catholic theologian and bishop Robert Barron has built an enormous internet-based ministry in no small part by seeking to reach these so-called nones. Rather than simply railing against a secular culture, Barron turns the criticism around and calls the growth of this disavowal “an unnerving commentary on the effectiveness of our evangelical strategies.”The growing phenomenon of the nones, however, is not evidence of a lack of interest in spiritual life. Many today who previously fell away from their faith—or never had one to begin with—are seeking something faith-like in their life. They are open to thinking about such commitments, but just don’t know what to look for. Maybe this describes you. If so, ironically, the research data on why people say they became nones in the first place might hold the answer of what to focus on to set you on your spiritual path.In tracking the rise of the nones in American religious life, Pew has also studied people who had faith in childhood but left it in adulthood. In 87 percent of the cases, this came down to one of three reasons: They stopped believing (49 percent), they felt too uncertain (18 percent), or they didn’t like the way the faith was practiced (20 percent). More concisely, most people leave their faith because of belief, feeling, or practice.[Derek Thompson: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]These are the reasons people quit religion, but we can also infer that these same three aspects of religious experience are central to maintaining faith—or to finding it anew and then keeping it. You might say that belief, feeling, and practice are the macronutrients—the necessary elements—of healthy faith. With only one of them, you will be spiritually malnourished: Belief alone is desiccated theory; by itself, feeling is unreliable sentimentality; practice in isolation is dogmatism. To build a new, sustaining spiritual diet, you need to focus on all three.Many great thinkers have made essentially this point. For example, the ardently religious Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book of daily pensées, A Calendar of Wisdom, that in times of trouble, “you have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect, and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.”Feeling is fundamental to religious experience, as scholarship on emotion has shown. Some religions elevate trancelike states of ecstasy, such as samadhi in both Hinduism and Buddhism, which involves complete meditative absorption. Most faiths emphasize the role of the emotional adoration of the divine, as in the Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that believers should “love Allah with all of your hearts.” One cannot rely on feeling alone, however, because it is so mutable. As the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, noted, faith features feelings of not only consolation but also desolation, at moments when God feels absent from one’s life.The second element of faith is belief, which are tenets you have accepted as truths, at least provisionally. These truths are not testable as scientific propositions are, so, in Thomas Aquinas’s definition, they are the “mean between science and opinion.” These are the propositions that you learn from reading and listening to other believers, and that you ultimately choose to accept; examples would be God’s laws for the Jewish people or the Eightfold Path to enlightenment for Buddhists.Accepting such beliefs as truth does not mean they’re impossible to revise. In fact, research has shown that spiritual people are generally open to reflection on existential questions and willing to modify their views. But these tenets of faith are based on considered arguments, rather than feelings, so they tend to be stable and enduring.[Peter Wehner: David Brooks’s journey toward faith]Finally, religious practice offers a set of actions and rituals that you commit to observing in order to demonstrate your adherence to the faith for yourself and others. This is the element of faith that takes it out of the realm of abstraction and makes it part of your real, physical life. You can say you believe in the ideas of Zen, but Zen itself will not become a meaningful part of your life until you practice Zen meditation. Similarly, you can say you believe in the divine inspiration of the Quran, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually read it.You might assume that any practice requires both belief and feeling—entailing that, for example, you would feel impelled to go to a political demonstration only if you already believed in the cause. But you may have noticed the opposite occurring in your life: If you go to a demonstration uncommitted, you may find that the experience stimulates feelings and belief, which might then lead you to go to future demonstrations.This is a basic form of what academics call “path dependence,” a phenomenon in which past decisions lead to similar actions in future. The concept is usually used by economists and political scientists to explain institutional inertia or resistance to organizational change, but the same principle can suggestively be applied to individual human behavior. Such path dependence can be affected by both positive and negative feedback, the sense either that people’s choices elicit increasing returns or that they are self-reinforcing or “locked in.”That feedback loop can be a problem if your religious practice makes you become rigid in your ideology; economists, for example, have modeled that voter path dependence might be one of the causes of our increasing polarization. As it pertains to faith, the trick, then, is to be wary of your path dependence if it results in negative feedback: If you feel or behave like a “locked-in” party-line voter, you might be too rigid in your belief. Yet if you use path dependence on your faith exclusively for positive feedback—that is, your belief elicits increasing returns, perhaps boosting your altruism, community ties, or sense of meaning in life—then you will be using it as a force for good.Put simply, be completely honest with yourself about why you’re practicing your faith; if your belief spurs positive feedback, carry on.[Faith Hill: The messy line between faith and reason]A healthy faith thus requires all three sources of spiritual nourishment. The data suggest that when one or more of those elements—of belief, feeling, and practice—are missing, people fall away. So if you’re looking for faith in your life, you need to seek all three.Here is an optimal way to do so. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: “Those who know the rules of true wisdom are baser than those who love them. Those who love them are baser than those who follow them.” In other words, to develop a healthy faith, practice is more important than feeling, and feeling is more important than belief. This implies the reverse of what most people do to develop a spiritual life: They read and think to acquire knowledge and opinions—that is, beliefs—then they see if they “feel” their faith, and only then will they move on to practicing it. But as the proverb implies, this order of priorities won’t work very well.The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. If the practice evokes sentiment in you, then study the faith to develop knowledge and opinions. This is an experimental, hands-on approach, much in the manner of how many inventions and innovations come about: An inventor tries something, sees whether it works, and then figures out precisely what’s going on.In a faith context, this means that you might go to a service of worship a few times. Then you could interrogate your feelings as to whether the services stimulated something deep within (or, alternatively, whether they left you cold). Finally, if the former feels true, you could start investigating the belief system intellectually.[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]The three elements of faith can be useful to apply to many parts of life, not just your spiritual quest. Consider marriage, for instance: Without the feelings of love and affection, a relationship is dead; without knowledge and opinions about your spouse, it has no depth; without practicing the rituals of love, your partnership will wither. This same algorithmic progression of faith can also map out your path to marriage. You start out with practice in the form of a date; you continue the relationship if you feel attraction and the beginnings of love; the pairing develops as you gain knowledge and form favorable opinions about your partner.Obviously, this connubial example is not a random one. To find faith is to find a form of love—a love of the divine, or a rapturous spiritual connection with the universe. But like all good and worthwhile things in life, faith and love merit deep thought and serious effort.

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