When Leniency Is the Goal, a Justice System Breaks Easily

Last week was not a good one for New York’s sense of public safety. That Monday a man with two knives roamed across Manhattan and is now accused of killing three strangers — Angel Gustavo Lata Landi, Chang Wang and Wilma Augustin — in separate attacks. The next day a man with a gun reportedly robbed a Queens bodega and a smoke shop before being fatally shot by the police after he shot and wounded an officer and a bystander.

The episodes exacerbated New Yorkers’ sense that cascading failures of state and city government have left the city out of control. A criminal justice system transformed with a goal of keeping as few people in jail or prison as possible, for as short a time as possible, has no room for error, and yet it keeps making errors. All it takes for a potentially violent suspect to go free is one weak link — and state lawmakers and city officials have constructed a chain of weak links.

Over the past six years, under two supposedly moderate governors, Andrew M. Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, New York’s progressive-dominated State Legislature radically changed the state’s criminal justice system. In 2019, for example, the state eliminated cash bail for misdemeanors and most nonviolent felonies; in 2021 it eased its parole practices to prevent people from being sent back to prison for violations such as missing a parole meeting.

After decades of declining crime and imprisonment, these abrupt changes accelerated the decarceration trend until the state and city could no longer keep reducing crime. From 2019 to 2021, the average daily population in city jails fell to 4,921 from 7,938, a 38 percent drop. The number of people in prison for crimes that took place in New York City fell to 13,020 from 18,903. Prison readmissions for parole violations fell to 2,591 from 7,277.

It’s impossible to prove that New York would have avoided any single crime had its perpetrator been jailed or imprisoned for a previous crime.

But for progressive criminal justice policies to have even a chance of working, the state’s judges, prosecutors and mental health officials would have to be much better at predicting, out of a broad group of people accused or convicted of crimes, who, exactly, is likely to repeat or escalate his behavior.

Last week’s tragedies reveal no evidence that we’ve gotten better at such predictions. Monday’s knife attacks show that even one point of misplaced leniency can undo the protections of the whole criminal justice system.

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