Police are unfairly criticized as heavy-handed and long prison sentences are reserved for hardened criminals, says a new book that takes aim at liberal calls to empty prisons and defund the police.Author Rafael Mangual says his study, Criminal (In)Justice, debunks ‘dominant narratives’ that ‘black and brown men’ unduly suffer at the hands of police and a criminal justice system that is stacked against them.
It runs counter to dozens of studies that have found that black people disproportionately suffer from police stops, searches and deaths in custody. A recent opinion poll found that 89 percent of Americans wanted police reforms.
Mangual, however, says he has crunched the numbers and found a ‘glaring incongruity between what the harshest critics of law enforcement were saying — about imprisonment and police use of force — and reality’.
‘A sober examination of the data on who goes to prison reveals that lengthy terms of incarceration are reserved for chronic, violent offenders who’ve already been given multiple “second chances”,’ said Mangual.