You may have heard my name recently. I’m being attacked by the right-wing media for making what they believe is a radical claim — no one should be jailed for stealing toothpaste.
I stand by those comments, but not because I believe in lawlessness. I care just as deeply about delivering compassionate justice as I do about using our resources effectively. Criminalizing poverty accomplishes neither goal.
Even one night in jail can mean someone loses their housing or employment. It might be satisfying to say that someone should consider that before getting arrested, but our society is safer when people get resources, not punishment. The data backs this up.
A 2022 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that choosing not to prosecute someone for a nonviolent misdemeanor led to dramatic reductions in new complaints. After examining the data, Suffolk County in Massachusetts adopted a policy of non-prosecution for low-level misdemeanors. This policy change led to less crime, not more. Conversely, a 2019 study found that arresting teenagers led to an increase in future offenses and arrests.
These studies make intuitive sense: when someone gets marked by the criminal legal system, they end up increasingly policed and surveilled. They receive fewer opportunities and are more likely to be incarcerated with people who committed more serious crimes. It reinforces, rather than disrupts, cycles of crime and poverty.
A city comptroller report found that it cost $507,000 to jail someone for a year. NYC Department of Correction’s annual budget is an eye-popping $2.6 billion. This is an astounding amount of taxpayer money to spend on approaches that don’t improve safety.
Consider that a year’s worth of supportive housing in NYC costs $24,480. For the price of sending someone to Rikers Island for a year, you could house more than 20 people.
The costs of this system aren’t just financial. When our criminal justice system is clogged full of low level cases, it means our cops and our courts are not free to pursue serious cases.
According to Data Collaborative for Justice, there is a growing racial disparity in incarceration rates between Black and white New Yorkers. Citywide, Black people are sent to jail 12 times as often as white people. In Manhattan, that ratio is 29.5 to one.
These disparities don’t reflect inherent differences between races. They reflect a racial wealth gap, exacerbated by disparate concentrations of surveillance. A history of redlined communities now manifests in neighborhoods where people of color are over-policed and under-resourced.
Our society is well-versed in punishing low income and communities of color. But we rarely hold people accountable at the top — white collar criminals routinely get away with stealing millions. For context, roughly $15 billion is lost to shoplifting each year. That number is dwarfed by the amount lost to wage theft ($50 billion) or unpaid taxes ($695 billion).
This is a bleak picture, but there are reasons to be hopeful. Investing in support services — treatment for substance use and mental health disorders, food banks, housing-first approaches, and universal basic income — costs less and demonstrably reduces crime.
As public servants, we must hold ourselves accountable to ensure that each person moving through our systems gets the services they need. We need better coordination across agencies and more individualized support ensuring people don’t fall through the cracks.
What if we gave more resources to our systems of care than we do to our systems of punishment? The data is clear, that is what effective safety looks like. We don’t need more studies, just the political will to make it happen.
Gallagher is a Brooklyn assemblywoman.