This article suffers from a credulous belief in the efficacy of criminal courts which, in addition to not being borne out by any data, is harmful and regressive. I am disappointed that it has a Pro Publica byline and I wonder how that happened.

First of all, criminal courts do not (and are not supposed to) lower crime. In their current form, the criminal courts are a principal agent of mass incarceration. Their existence perpetuates the social stratification and economic disparities created by chattel slavery.

In law school, they used to teach that criminal punishment has four fundamental rationale: retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Of those, deterrence has long been considered debunked. There's some debate about it, but here's the rub: the debate usually involves a researcher claiming that very short sentences or non-incarceration outcomes (like mandatory engagement of services) can lower recidivism. I'm not aware of anyone seriously arguing in the 21st century that violent crime sentencing has a material deterrent effect.

Even if deterrence is wholly debunked, it's not surprising that folks like judges and prosecutors constantly cite it because it's the only rationale which supports the false narrative that criminal prosecution makes society safer. That narrative has been a key strategy in mobilizing votes for those officials, who are usually elected in contests with very low voter turnout.

Yet this is a whole article about "the violent crime wave" and the only primary source cited is Mark Kleiman, who was a vocal advocate for alternatives to incarceration (and against long prison sentences), but also whose primary work was about marijuana anyway. Everyone else is a stakeholder who has interest in keeping courts open and getting them "back to normal" rather than reconsidering the system.

To reframe this article honestly, we should look to the quotation from the Seattle public defender, who said that the solution is actually to charge fewer crimes. The hook the reporter uses is the story of a man who was arrested for armed robbery, a felony that carries a nine year prison sentence, and incarcerated pretrial. Then he was murdered by another incarcerated person.

This man never should have been charged with armed robbery--it was a stretch given the facts. The way to prevent this crime would be to have offered him substance abuse, housing, and/or employment assistance before he resorted to desperation. Once he was arrested and charged, the government had a duty to keep him safe. During the pandemic, all jailers have known that they cannot keep incarcerated people safe, but they largely have not consented to or allowed release for both political and existential reasons. Therefore, to blame here are:
1) The state for not funding basic services,
2) The prosecutor for charging a felony and arguing for detention,
3) The judge for allowing detention while knowing the prisons are unsafe,
4) The sheriff for architecting deadly confinement conditions in the pandemic,
5) The Atlantic (which never seems to know better) and Pro Publica (which really should) for printing this piss-poor article.

It's also worth mentioning that court delay is the norm, rather than some artifact of the pandemic. The article imagines a prior state in which people had confidence they would be swiftly brought to trial, but that's never been true in the modern age. It's a canard. It is true that court delays increased in the pandemic, but irresponsible in the extreme to draw a causal link with the increase in murders and other violent crime during the pandemic.