"Tough on Crime"

One of the most successful pieces of copaganda in modern history.

Most of us don’t even think twice about using the phrase “tough on crime” to describe policies that promote investments in police, prosecutors, and prisons. I hadn’t thought about it much myself until recently. But this post is an urgent call for journalists to stop using the term to describe politicians or policies that increase human caging or other forms of state surveillance and violence.

One of the most consistent features of media coverage and popular discourse for the past five decades has been referring to policies that promote investments in police, prosecutors, and prisons as “tough on crime.” Either explicitly (in right-wing media) or by implication (in mainstream media), politicians or judges who advocate less human caging are seen as “soft on crime.”

I have come to the view that this terminology has played—and continues to play—an enormous role in the normalization of this country’s anti-science obsession with mass surveillance and human caging. As I explained recently, one of the most remarkable aspects of modern news media reporting is the constant explicit link it suggests between “crime” and carceral bureaucracies. This link is contrary to everything we know about the structural and environmental determinants of interpersonal harm. But on a more pervasive and subliminal level, the very words we use to describe the issue may be even more important. The wholesale equation in our discourse between increased punishment and being against crime is a foundational myth.

Why does this matter? Much of the rest of our work fighting against terrible policies that have no support in evidence will fail because, at a deep, intuitive level, people connect crime prevention with increased police, prosecutors, and prisons.

As an initial matter, let me give you a few examples. Although this framing really became popular through Richard Nixon’s infamous campaign speeches about liberals being “soft” on crime, politicians have weaponized the “tough on crime” rhetoric throughout the contemporary era. Ronald Reagan explicitly weaponized the term to expand punishment for drugs after the death of basketball played Len Bias. Bill Clinton weaponized the term to promote his infamous 1994 crime bill that led to a prison boom and added 100,000 more police. Democratic political strategists deliberately weaponized the terms to change the entire nature of the party’s political platform in the 1990s.¹ We now properly recognize those political strategies as grotesque, but our everyday media discourse still preserves some of its worst vestiges.

The association of “toughness” on crime with more punishment has become a ubiquitous feature of our media discourse. Here are a few recent representative examples from the New York Times that came up when I searched:

And here is how the Editorial Board of the right-wing New York Post described Biden’s frightening plan to add another 100,000 cops at a time of rising fascism and imminent expansion of the criminalization of reproductive health. The NY Post viewed Biden’s plan as insufficiently “tough” because some of the funding was going to “public health,” which that paper apparently opposes.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand that this framing was always intended to be a political propaganda slogan is to see how the corollary “soft on crime” epithet is used by the right. Again, the NY Post Editorial Board: “Biden’s plan wouldn’t do anything to address soft-on-crime district attorneys like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.” Or, consider the title of a recent article in the right-wing Washington Examiner:

There are so many problems with this framing.

First, having people think more police, prosecutors, and prisons is "tough on crime" is factually wrong. Here is what the most widely regarded literature review (conducted by the Department of Justice) of all the existing decades of scientific research concluded about human caging: “Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior.” Translation: sentencing someone to jail or prison has no benefit on future crime and probably increases it.²

More importantly, the scientific consensus is that addressing root causes of violence through housing, early childhood education, medical care, mental health, arts, child lead exposure abatement, etc. is how we reduce what police report as “crime.”

Given this scientific consensus, suggesting that pro-punishment people are actually being “tough on crime” is like climate science denial. It subtly suggests to hundreds of millions of news consumers the opposite of what we know is true: There is no scientific dispute that reducing inequality and investing in things families and communities need is the most significant thing we can do to improve safety across the board. People advocating for those investments are actually the ones being "tough on crime."

It is thus one of the great public relations coups of the modern era that the constellation of police, prosecutors, prison guard unions, bail bond companies, private equity firms, surveillance corporations, for-profit prisons, and their obedient politicians have convinced the news media to call the policies that benefit them "tough on crime."

But it gets even worse. As I show at length with hundreds of examples in my prior scholarship, these powerful interests who the media calls “tough on crime” actually ignore *most* crimes committed by *most* people. They only choose to harshly enforce *some* crimes by *some* people, almost all of whom are poor.

So, it’s also highly misleading for the news media to call them “tough on crime” generally when what the media is really referring to are punishment of certain behaviors of poor people, while the same “tough on crime” interests routinely ignore millions of crimes by police, astonishing rates of wage theft and tax evasion, rampant environmental crimes, littering crimes involving trillions of pieces of plastic, etc.

Let’s look at another recent example from the New York Times in which pro-human caging positions are portrayed as being “tougher” on crime. In discussing Mayor Eric Adams’ alarming anti-science calls to jail more presumed innocent people prior to trial, the New York Times says: “But Mr. Adams said tougher revisions are still needed.” This is subtle. But notice that “tougher” is not in quotes. I suspect that Adams didn’t use that word, and that this is the New York Times editorializing. Now, if the NYT was following the empirical research in recent years, it would know that increased pretrial detention actually increases future crime. (This is through a variety of mechanisms that involve not losing jobs, housing, children as well as not having medication interrupted and being subjected to additional violence and trauma in jail.) So, the “tough on crime” approach would actually be to release more people from jail. Instead, the Times uses the description “tougher” to refer to laws that would jail more people, letting Adams portray himself as “tougher” on crime to readers, even though that impression is false.

Second, using "tough on crime" to describe anti-science human caging policies has devastating consequences. Although scientists agree that harsher sentences don't deter crime, they do kill people. The U.S. has a total life expectancy for *all people* of two years lower than if it imprisoned people like other comparable countries! These "tough on crime" politicians have cost us hundreds of millions of years of human life. But the “tough on crime” allows them to portray themselves or their policies as deeply concerned with our safety.

A final note: calling right-wing policies that selectively use state violence against powerless people "tough on crime" is a major strategic blunder for people of good will who care about preventing the rise of fascism. The same applies to the even more insidious habit of major outlets describing Biden’s 100,000 cops plan as for “crime prevention” and “for fighting and preventing crime” as Reuters and the Associated Press did. This is merely the news disseminating some of the deepest, most effective government propaganda in our society.

It is absolutely essential that ordinary members of the public not automatically associate dangerous, ineffective right-wing state violence--largely against the poor, the working class, and people building power for social movements--as necessary for their own safety.

If people associate right-wing state violence with their own safety, no matter how much this resembles flat-earth superstition and science denial, the right-wing movement of overt fascism will be hard to stop. Journalists must see this and be more objective about how they use these words.

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1. Take a look at how a Democratic political consultant described his role in the 1990s helping to entrench this association in the discourse:

2. From the very beginning, the policies linked with “tough on crime” like mandatory minimum sentences were not offered because anyone thought they would actually reduce crime. Here is how a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee would describe the mood among Democrats over a decade later in terms of whether they pursued these policies because they actually had good results or not.