Reimagining Public Safety

Abstract

The ascendance of a narrow definition of public safety that recognizes just one threat to public safety, the risk of interpersonal violence, was the result of an eminently useful political strategy employed by conservative (and, increasingly, liberal) political actors in recent decades. Yet the institutional expression of this political strategy—mass incarceration—has been a colossal policy failure. Mass incarceration does not make us safer. In fact, by consuming scarce public resources, substituting for meaningful assistance for people who have experienced crime and violence, and reinforcing poverty and racial inequality, mass incarceration has failed us all. It has particularly failed communities of color and low-income families by ensnaring, traumatizing, and stigmatizing millions. In seeking to end mass incarceration, our efforts to reduce the state’s power to punish must be tethered to policies and practices that reduce and ameliorate all forms of harm and suffering. True public safety requires no less.