Philadelphia Murders to Hit All-Time High as Jail Pop. Down to 1985 Level

Philadelphia recently re-elected its "progressive reformer," District Attorney Larry Krasner, an advocate for freeing prisoners and ending cash bail. In a July interview with Vox, Krasner bragged about pushing Philadelphia's jail population down to its 1985 level:

So [Philadelphia] is a city where, not so many years ago, there were 15,000 people in county custody. By the time I took office, there had been some good efforts to reduce it. When I took office in January 2018, we had 6,500. That number was down to about 4,800 before the pandemic hit.

The pandemic hits, and we and other criminal justice partners, including the public defender’s office, we make very concerted efforts to reduce the jail population even further, so it won’t become a superspreader. And we got those levels down to 3,800, the lowest level of incarceration in Philly since 1985.

People end up in jail because they commit crimes, as a rule of thumb, so it is logical that cutting the jail population by 75% will have pernicious effects on the community. Indeed, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Philadelphia is more violent under Krasner than ever before. "Nearly 500 people have been killed in Philadelphia in 2021, putting the city on pace to surpass the record for annual homicides in the coming days," reports the Inquirer.

Larry Krasner

The paper continues: "Driven largely by skyrocketing rates of gun violence, the number of killings this year will be the highest since at least 1960, which is as far back as the Police Department said it kept statistics on homicides. [. . .] With nearly six weeks remaining in the year, the number of lives lost will likely far exceed the 500 people who were killed in 1990 at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic — the previous record, and the only other time the city has seen 500 killings in a year."

Krasner frames his reform policies through a racial-justice lens, but Philadelphia's "violence has struck overwhelmingly in underserved communities of color," observes the Inquirer.

A brave journalist might ask Krasner whether he is concerned about his policies' impact on human life and racial equity.

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