Moderator: Ames Grawert (Brennan Center for Justice)

Speakers: Nazgol Ghandnoosh (The Sentencing Project), Chenjerai Kumanyika (NYU Journalism, Empire City podcast), Mark Joseph Stern (Slate) 

Summary: The panel opened with a frame to focus on fact and fiction around crime, criminal justice policy reform, and what the media’s role in that conversation is and can be. The panel focused on policy—how do media stories create policy? How do media stories impede policy? Panelists offered remarks to situate current policy debates amidst historic declines in crime but also reckoned with the continued prevalence of incarceration. Panelists also spoke about more than a century of media focus on urban decay and how those narratives endlessly repeat and lead to regressive policies and political campaigning, pushing partisans of all stripes to the right to make constituents feel like they are taking the inflated problem of ‘crime’ seriously. Panelists also provided insights into media’s role in specific policy debates, from differential treatment of turnstile jumping and parking in bus lanes in DC to the success of second-look sentencing and the Oklahoma survivor’s justice act. Panelists also spoke about the role of journalism schools in educating the next generation of journalists and funders needing to devolve funding not to media conglomerates but to community-based organizations. 

 

Click here to download the transcript of Panel 3

Highlights from the panel:
 

  • “Between 2009 and now there have been some years, some off years, but there's been a dramatic decline relatively speaking within this period of time. It's been about a 25% decline in the prison population but that's after a 700% growth. Right. And so even as crime rates reached really record lows, we barely made a dent in scaling back the prison population. And now we find ourselves in the situation we're in now, where the kind of crime coverage that we saw really elevated the sort of super-predator type narratives about youth that we saw in the 1990s. Really prevalence of news stories about youth crime. Stories really highlighting particular very emotional cases of carjackings and car thefts which were factually increasing but really giving people a very exaggerated sense of those things. And the response to that, even from elected officials that know better, is in terms of what actually helps to solve these problems and address these problems, is ‘Well I need to do something to address this perceived perception of widespread rampant crime, even if I know the thing I'm doing is not really effective.’” – Nazgol Ghandnoosh
     
  • “Donald Trump's narrative was ‘our cities are in chaos,’ right? And what's intensifying that is the fact that immigrants are coming to our city. ‘Mexican rapists’ and so forth, right? The same discourse. So I found journalism unable to grapple really with those continuities.  And then looking to my work. Why, you could go back to 1897 in New York City and pull out a big page of the New York Times that says, ‘our city is in chaos.’ The reason why is because ‘immigrants are coming in.’” – Chenjerai Kumanyika
     
  • “The question I think you have to ask though is are they actually talking about crime and the economy? Are they, when they say crime, are they talking about public safety, right? When they say the economy, what are the some of the historical discourses that go all the way back to what was said in 1897 and further that are actually operating at work there while being true to what people are saying. We don't want to discount people's interpretation of their own lived experience. But this is for me the question, why history has to be a part of how we're doing this…” – Chenjerai Kumanyika
     
  • “When I look at how our media is handling lawbreaking -- this is lawbreaking across the board, right, whether you're jumping the turnstile or parking in the bus lane, it is against the law. When I look at how the media handles that, what I see is an extraordinary bias toward a very specific kind of narrative, which is that cities are always in decay. Urban centers are always under threat of lawlessness. But lawlessness is never something that rich white people do. It is in fact categorically impossible for rich white people to break the law. If rich white people are doing something, it can't be against the law. That seems to be the presumption from which so much media coverage springs, and I'm only talking about DC.” – Mark Joseph Stern
     
  • “For example, in New York City, I've looked at research on this transit crime -- which people worry about a lot and I understand why they do. You're in a subway in a confined environment. To measure it you have to measure it on the order of offenses per 100 million rides. Y'all might know in ordinary crime research we talk about offenses per 100,000 people, so it's very, very rare. It's just, it's a very hard needle to thread…” – Ames Grawert
     
  • “[W]here is a similar level of interrogation for the lack of infrastructure that we have for preventing crime from happening in the first place? We don't have that and often those kinds of stories and those issues are not even thought about being related to public safety or community safety. So now there's sort of growing research and recognition that access to affordable health care is important and helps to reduce crime. Why aren't we getting the constant drum beat of, ‘Where is this? Why isn't this policy getting passed as a community safety measure?’” – Nazgol Ghandnoosh
     
  • “[W]e have to get in touch with who the real storytellers are in a lot of communities.” – Chenjerai Kumanyika
     
  • “[O]ne of the problems with disinformation and misinformation is that it treats it as a content problem instead of a structure problem. And I, even as someone who makes like podcasts, which I really try to make strong persuasive compelling content, I still think that this we are talking about a structure problem. It's not about getting the right podcast out. … Looking at the NYPD, NYPD has 86 plus PR employees that we know about. Yeah, that's like a massive apparatus. A huge number of resources. …  we talk about the police department and don't acknowledge that as a media institution. These police departments are incredible media producing institutions themselves that -- and I think that they are savvy.” – Chenjerai Kumanyika
     
  • “[T]here's actually a lot of support for alternative solutions to crime. Like voters believe that mental health and drug treatment -- pretty overwhelmingly believe -- that mental health and drug treatment will reduce crime. They believe that better schools will reduce crime. They believe that more housing will reduce crime. But somehow that's not what ends up on the ballot.” – Ames Grawert
     
  • “[I]n a state that just has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world -- it's possible to get people to realize that okay there are certain situations of serious violent crime where maybe we're incarcerating people for longer than we need to be. And so that's some progress and thinking about scaling back sentences for violent crimes.” - Nazgol Ghandnoosh, on the successful campaign for the survivor’s justice act in Oklahoma
     
  • “[T]hat second look bill in DC is really quite a success story. I've looked into the recidivism data and it's shocking, by which I mean it rounds to zero. That the people who come out of this law go on to be members of their community and this is what I think many of us would intuit. But it goes against the public narrative …” – Ames Grawert