Category: Culture

  • 50 years ago tonight

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    Tonight 50 years ago premiered …

    Although Burt Reynolds was a megastar, the more important TV program premiered right now 50 years ago (in the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones) on your favorite NBC station:

    At a minimum, Star Trek was the best non-anthology science fiction TV series to that point, and for years afterward. Other than “The Twilight Zone” (hence my “non-anthology” description), most science fiction on TV was monster-related or rocket-related, each with bad special effects.

    There has been considerable revisionist history in the ramp-up to Star Trek’s 50th anniversary. The hard truth is that Star Trek was not a commercial success in its first iteration. Despite having a lead-in of “Daniel Boone,”  rated 25th, and followed by eventually the color version  of “Dragnet,” rated 21st, and “The  Dean Martin Show,” rated 14th, Star Trek was third in its time period, behind ABC’s “Bewitched,” rated seventh,  and CBS’ “My Three Sons” and “The CBS Thursday Night Movie,” rated 29th. The second-season ratings were bad enough (CBS had “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” rated third) that  NBC considered canceling the series. Star Trek was canceled after its third season, unable to compete against CBS’ Friday movie and ABC’s “Judd for the Defense.”

    Or was it a commercial flop? Star Trek Fact Check suggests otherwise:

    Recently, however, author Marc Cushman has been challenging this account in a series of self-published books and a flurry of interviews promoting them (my review of Cushman’s first volume, These Are The Voyages: TOS – Season One, can be found here). In one of those interviews, at Trek Core, Cushman said:

    Star Trek was not the [ratings] failure that we had been led to believe.

    It was NBC’s top rated Thursday night series and, on many occasions, won its time slot against formidable competition, including Bewitched, ABC’s most popular show. And when they banished it to Friday nights, as Book Two will reveal, it was the network’s top rated Friday night show. Yet NBC wanted to cancel it! Even when they tried to hide it from the fans at 10 p.m., during Season Three, it’s [sic] numbers were not as bad as reported. So, once I made this discovery, then, of course, I needed to find out the real reason for the way the network treated Star Trek, and the documents regarding that, which build as we go from Book One to Two and then Three, are quite fascinating.

    Cushman elaborates upon his argument near the end of his first volume, These Are The Voyages: TOS – Season One:

    One must wonder why a network would even consider cancelling a Top 40 series that was almost always a solid second place in the ratings — often hitting the No. 1 spot in its timeslot — against formidable competition, pulling in, on average, just under 30% of the TVs in use across America. (On the few occasions when it slipped to third place, it was always in a close race for the number two spot.)

    – Marc Cushman with Susan Osborn, These Are The Voyages – TOS: Season One (2013), p. 541

    The views expressed in These Are The Voyages about Star Trek‘s ratings performance are, needless to say, irreconcilable with previous accounts. Either the series was a ratings failure — as has been so often understood — or it was, as Cushman argues, a ratings success. …
    Marc Cushman closes These Are The Voyages – TOS: Season One by asking why NBC would even consider cancelling Star Trek at the end of its first broadcast season. This question, however, is predicated on the assumption that Mr. Cushman’s argument about the ratings is correct. I believe I have pointed out enough flaws in his reasoning and presented enough counter-evidence that such claims should be held in considerable doubt.

    Therefore, I believe a more appropriate question to ask would be this: why was Star Trek renewed for a second season? After all, the show was an expensive one to produce, and following an initial flash of success, its ratings had dropped to a level that was nothing to shout about. I can think of three reasons which may have been the tipping point convincing NBC to go forward with the program – although I hope my readers will be able to come up with others that I haven’t considered.

    First, Star Trek had garnered some awards recognition at the close of its first season, with five Emmy nominations (including the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series) and a Hugo Award (for “The City on the Edge of Forever”). NBC may have hoped the publicity surrounding this recognition would have translated into increased viewership.

    Second, as argued by Solow and Justman in their book, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, at the time the series was produced, RCA was the parent company of NBC, and Star Trek helped sell color television sets for RCA:

    In 1966, NBC, at the behest of RCA, commissioned the A.C. Nielsen Company to do a study on the popularity of color television series as opposed to all television series. The results were expected–and very unexpected.

    Favorite series were popular whether or not they were viewed in color. For example, NBC’s Bonanza series was a top-rated series on the overall national ratings list as well as on the color ratings list.

    However, in December 1966, with Star Trek having been on the air only three months, an NBC executive called with some news. The Nielsen research indicated that Star Trek was the highest-rated color series on television. I distributed the information to the Star Trek staff. We thought it was all very interesting, nothing to write home about, and went back to work. We were wrong; we failed to see the importance of the research

    Perhaps those initial and subsequent Nielsen color series ratings contributed to giving Star Trek a second year of life. Putting aside low national ratings and lack of sponsors, perhaps a reason for renewing Star Trek, other than all the phone calls, letters, and demonstrations at NBC, was its position as the top-rated color series on the ‘full color network.’ NBC’s parent company was RCA. Star Trek sold color television sets and made money for RCA.

    – Herbert F. Solow, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (1996), p.305

    Third, NBC may have simply had nothing better to replace the series with. Star Trekwasn’t generating huge ratings, but the ratings weren’t disastrous, either, at least not during its first season. According to Television Magazine in 1967:

    Disaster…is the shock word in network programming. One of the best ways to avoid it is to put on even a weak grey-area show [a show ranked 30th-70th in the ratings] rather than take a chance with the least promising of the new batch of programs.

    Fourth, renewing the series might have made sense because of the overall younger demographic it appealed to, which even in the late 1960s was becoming more important to advertisers. Paul Klein, the vice president of research for NBC, told Television Magazine in 1967 that “a quality audience – lots of young adult buyers – provides a high level that may make it worth holding onto a program despite low over-all [sic] ratings.” He went on to tell the magazine that, “‘quality audiences’ are what helped both Mission Impossible and Star Trek survive another season.” In a later TV Guide interview, Klein specifically mentioned Star Trek again, telling the magazine that the series was renewed in spite of weak ratings, “because it delivers a quality, salable audience…[in particular] upper-income, better-educated males.”

    Even one of the writers most recognized for the series, David Gerrold, called “The Man Trap” “The Giant Salt Vampire.” It was not the best first episode the series could have begun with; the first filmed episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” would have been better.

    At least the series got going by halfway through the first season, unlike Star Trek: The Next Generation, which took two seasons. (No series with episodes as poor as some of TNG’s were would have survived to two years had it not been for TOS’ post-cancellation popularity.)

    Certainly TV critics weren’t fans, as StarTrek.com reveals from newspaper clippings:

    They may not have been fans because of what had passed for sci-fi on TV before then, including CBS’ “Lost in Space,” the supposed reason CBS rejected Star Trek. (Interestingly, CBS now owns the Star Trek franchise thanks to being part of the Paramount world; Paramount purchased Lucille Ball’s Desilu studio, the original producer.)

    Everything seems obvious in retrospect, and it’s obvious why Star Trek should have been able to be on the air longer. What creator Gene Roddenberry described as “‘Wagon Train‘ to the stars” (referring to an eight-season Western) was an ideal format for whatever kind of episode you wanted — adventure, action, drama, comedy, romance, camp, and whatever “Spock’s Brain” was. The format also allowed old stories (Moby Dick) and movies (“The Enemy Below”) to be recast as outstanding episodes (“The Doomsday Machine” and “Balance of Terror,” respectively). Roddenberry also demonstrated rare (for the period) ingenuity and courage in using the format to explore contemporary issues, including racism and war. (Not sexism, because this was the swinging ’60s.)

    The series worked because of the characters Roddenberry created — characters that haven’t been equaled in any Star Trek iteration since then. James T. Kirk is one of the ultimate commanders in fiction. There was no character in fiction like Spock before Spock. In Kirk’s world Spock was his brain and McCoy was his heart. And the other characters as well — the always-loyal and inventive engineer Mr. Scott, Lt. Uhura, whose impact exceeded her role, and the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or they could have been had they been used more together), Sulu and Chekov  — if Roddenberry’s work before and after Star Trek left a mixed record (quick: name something else Roddenberry did), Roddenberry hit a grand slam with Star Trek’s characters. (Which is one reason for the negative reaction to the J.J. Abrams reboots — he screwed around with the characters.)

    I have written a lot about Star Trek on this blog, including about its failings, including bad economics and an excessively Utopian view of human nature. Another problem specific to the series that premiered 50 years ago tonight was the realities of 1960s TV. NBC at the time was the second-place network unwilling to devote enormous resources to something the suits probably didn’t understand. By the third season Star Trek was already recycling tropes from the first two seasons’ episodes, leading to Gerrold’s description of …

    “The Enterprise approaches a planet (…) Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get captured by 6-ft green women in steel brassieres.
    “They take away the spacemen’s communicators because they offend the computer-god these women worship.”
    “Meanwhile, Scotty discovers that he’s having trouble with the doubletalk generator, and he can’t fix it. The Enterprise will shrivel into a prune in 2 hours unless something is done immediately. But Scotty can’t get in touch with the Captain.”

    “Of course he can’t. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have been brought before the high priest of the cosmic computer, who decides that they are unfit to live. All except the Vulcan, who has such interesting ears. She puts Spock in a mind-zapping machine which leaves him quoting 17-syllable Japanese haiku for the next 2 acts.

    “McCoy can’t do a damn thing for him. “I’m a doctor, not a critic!” he grumbles. Kirk seduces the cute priestess.”
    “On the ship, sparks fly from Chekov’s control panel, and everyone falls out of their chairs. Uhura tries opening the hailing frequencies, and when she can’t, she admits to being frightened… Scotty figures there’s only 15 minutes left. Already the crew members are wrinkling as the starship begins to prune.”

    “Down on the planet, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are being held in a dungeon.”
    “The girl Kirk’s seduced decides that she has never had it so good in her life and discards all of her years-long training and lifetime-held beliefs to rescue him, conveniently remembering to bring him his communicator and phaser. Abruptly, Spock reveals how hard he has been working to hide his emotions and then snaps back to normal. Thinking logically, he and Kirk then drive the computer crazy with illogic.
    “Naturally, it can’t cope, its designers not having been as smart as our Earthmen. (…) It shorts out all its fuses and releases the Enterprise just in time for the last commercial. For a tag, the seduced priestess promises Kirk that she will work to build a new civilization on her planet – just for Kirk – one where steel brassieres are illegal.”

    “GREEN PRIESTESSES OF THE COSMIC COMPUTER has no internal conflict; it’s all formula. Kirk doesn’t have a decision to make (…) It’s a compendium of all the bad plot devices that wore out their welcome on too many Star Trek episodes. It’s all excitement, very little story. (…) FORMULA occurs when FORMAT starts to repeat itself. Or when writers are giving less than their best. (…) Flashy devices can conceal the lack for awhile, but ultimately, the lack of any real meat in the story will leave the viewers hungry and unsatisfied.”

    By that point Roddenberry was Executive Producer In Name Only, already thinking of his next project. Star Trek’s current existence may be to the credit, almost as much as Roddenberry, as Lucille Ball, whose Desilu Studios produced Star Trek until Paramount purchased Desilu. From all indications, Ball was as ardent a supporter of the series as anyone. (Which makes it too bad that there was never an on-camera role for Ball during the series, though screwball comedy was probably one of the few formats that didn’t fit into the series.)

    It should be obvious that Star Trek went far beyond what even its creator, Roddenberry, thought it was capable of doing. Roddenberry was certainly a visionary, but necessarily imperfect, because the future is very difficult to predict, as the fact that we already have communicator- and tricorder-like devices, but we haven’t had a third world war, nor a eugenics war. As I’ve stated before, Roddenberry was, and Star Trek’s most ardent fans are, wrong about at least two things — (1) the idea that economic realities will go away in 300 years even if everything can be made in a replicator, and, even more importantly, (2) the fairytale that human nature will be overcome 300 years from now.
    Given all of that, what has happened after Star Trek’s cancellation is nothing short of remarkable. Had you told me upon my fourth birthday, when the last (and arguably worst) TOS episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” aired, that the canceled series would be remade into six movies, four spinoff series (and three movies from the original spinoff), remade in its original premise into three movies, and spawn an entire universe of fan fiction, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about, and neither would have anyone else with more knowledge than a 4-year-old has about the TV business.

    At an absolute minimum, Star Trek was entertaining TV, and TV that even in its original iteration stands up better than most of what else was on TV in the late 1960s. Regardless of the series, there is no substitute for good characters and good stories.

     

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  • What didn’t happen 50 years ago tonight

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    Reason TV:

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  • Taco trucks everywhere!

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    Nick Gillespie comments on whatever Donald Trump’s immigration beliefs were last week (which are not necessarily what they will be at any one point this week):

    Like war, a political campaign is a series of brief, clarifying moments larded up with endless stretches of boredom and waiting. There was a lightning strike last night on MSNBC, when the founder of the group Latinos For Trump defended the Republican presidential nominee’s anti-immigration policies and anti-Mexican animus last night on MSNBC.

    “My culture is a very dominant culture,” said Marco Guiterrez. “If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” …

    To the extent that Guiterrez is speaking for Donald Trump, he shares his boss-man’s near-complete lack of understanding about food, America, and entrepreneurship. And, we might add, the overwhelmingly positive feelings that most Americans have toward immigrants. Indeed, one of the great mysteries of this election cycle is how illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, ever was mistaken for a pressing concern. As it happens, over three-quarters of Americans believe current illegals should be given a path to full citizenship (63 percent) or to legal status (15 percent), while only 18 percent think they should be identified and deported. FFS, 52 percent of REPUBLICANS believe illegal immigrants should be given a path to citizenship after meeting certain requirements. Except for the Obama administration, which has deported a record number of immigrants, Hillary Clinton, who was “missing in action on immigration,” and a small group of conservatives—including the nativists at National Review, who attacked Donald Trump for being soft on legal and illegal immigration—immigration isn’t a problem.

    What Trump and Guiterrez don’t seem to appreciate is that people like immigration because it brings new possibilities into the country. Latino or Mexican culture isn’t any more “dominant” than past immigrant cultures. The clearest markers of a culture are language and food. It turns out that Spanish-speaking immigrant households are learning English in precisely the same generational pattern that held for Jews, Italians, Poles, and previous newcomers. Eighty percent of third-generation folks from Spanish speaking households speak English as their dominant language while 0 percent speak Spanish, says Pew Research. As for food, today’s Mexican food is as American as apple pie, pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, sushi, and chop suey. As Gustavo Arrellano argued in a June 2012 Reason magazine cover story, it might even be more American.

    Precisely who, other than direct competitors with bricks-and-mortar restaurants, doesn’t like food trucks? That’s not simply because, as we’ve documented endlessly here at Reason over the years, they are bringing tasty and delightful food to underserved areas from Los Angeles to downtown Washington, D.C. It’s because the food-truck revolution, every bit as much as Uber or Airbnb or Tesla or any other hipper and more cutting-edge business, exemplifies something primal in America’s cultural DNA. They are small businesses first and foremost, typically run on shoestring budgets, sweat equity, and family-based micro-loans. They experiment and mongrelize and are desperate to please customers. They are mobile and fast-changing, they take risks and they live with booms or busts. Forget the Okies driving pickup trucks across the barren plains in the Dust Bowl era or even the garlic-and-bagel eaters disembarking at Ellis Island in the late 19th- and early-20th centuries. These days, if you want to see not just the American Dream made flesh, but the American future incarnated, head down to wherever food trucks congregate and take a bite of the best this goddamn country has to offer. Typically on some sort of once-weird bread or pasta or pastry—pizza dough, pita, tortilla, bao, whatever—and crammed with odd-ball meats, vegetables, and sauces.

    As someone who is the grandchild of immigrants from old Europe who has lived all over the country (New York City, New Jersey, Philly, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Texas, small-town Ohio, D.C.), I can tell nativists that however much you fear immigrants, you don’t want to live in a part of the country where they are few and far between. They take less welfare, they cause less crime, they start more businesses, they breathe new life into a tired body politic, and more. You will lose more than elections, amigos. You will lose out on being able to enjoy a vibrant America that will be different from the one you grew up in, yes, but also better and more future-oriented.

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  • The oxymoron of mandatory voting

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    Who better to comment on Labor Day (which as always is a work day, as are all of the Monday “holidays”) than Mike Rowe, in this case about voting in November:

    I also share your concern for our country, and agree wholeheartedly that every vote counts. However, I’m afraid I can’t encourage millions of people whom I’ve never met to just run out and cast a ballot, simply because they have the right to vote. That would be like encouraging everyone to buy an AR-15, simply because they have the right to bear arms. I would need to know a few things about them before offering that kind of encouragement. For instance, do they know how to care for a weapon? Can they afford the cost of the weapon? Do they have a history of violence? Are they mentally stable? In short, are they responsible citizens?

    Casting a ballot is not so different. It’s an important right that we all share, and one that impacts our society in dramatic fashion. But it’s one thing to respect and acknowledge our collective rights, and quite another thing to affirmatively encourage people I’ve never met to exercise them. And yet, my friends in Hollywood do that very thing, and they’re at it again.

    Every four years, celebrities and movie stars look earnestly into the camera and tell the country to “get out and vote.” They tell us it’s our “most important civic duty,” and they speak as if the very act of casting a ballot is more important than the outcome of the election. This strikes me as somewhat hysterical. Does anyone actually believe that Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ed Norton would encourage the “masses” to vote, if they believed the “masses” would elect Donald Trump?

    Regardless of their political agenda, my celebrity pals are fundamentally mistaken about our “civic duty” to vote. There is simply no such thing. Voting is a right, not a duty, and not a moral obligation. Like all rights, the right to vote comes with some responsibilities, but lets face it – the bar is not set very high. If you believe aliens from another planet walk among us, you are welcome at the polls. If you believe the world is flat, and the moon landing was completely staged, you are invited to cast a ballot. Astrologists, racists, ghost-hunters, sexists, and people who rely upon a Magic 8 Ball to determine their daily wardrobe are all allowed to participate. In fact, and to your point, they’re encouraged.

    The undeniable reality is this: our right to vote does not require any understanding of current events, or any awareness of how our government works. So, when a celebrity reminds the country that “everybody’s vote counts,” they are absolutely correct. But when they tell us that “everybody in the country should get out there and vote,” regardless of what they think or believe, I gotta wonder what they’re smoking.

    Look at our current candidates. No one appears to like either one of them. Their approval ratings are at record lows. It’s not about who you like more, it’s about who you hate less. Sure, we can blame the media, the system, and the candidates themselves, but let’s be honest – Donald and Hillary are there because we put them there. The electorate has tolerated the intolerable. We’ve treated this entire process like the final episode of American Idol. What did we expect?

    So no, Jeremy – I can’t personally encourage everyone in the country to run out and vote. I wouldn’t do it, even if I thought it would benefit my personal choice. Because the truth is, the country doesn’t need voters who have to be cajoled, enticed, or persuaded to cast a ballot. We need voters who wish to participate in the process. So if you really want me to say something political, how about this – read more.

    Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with Economics in One Lesson. Then try Keynes. Then Hayek. Then Marx. Then Hegel. Develop a worldview that you can articulate as well as defend. Test your theory with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy as necessary. Then, when the next election comes around, cast a vote for the candidate whose worldview seems most in line with your own.

    Or, don’t. None of the freedoms spelled out in our Constitution were put there so people could cast uninformed ballots out of some misplaced sense of civic duty brought on by a celebrity guilt-trip. The right to assemble, to protest, to speak freely – these rights were included to help assure that the best ideas and the best candidates would emerge from the most transparent process possible.

    Remember – there’s nothing virtuous or patriotic about voting just for the sake of voting, and the next time someone tells you otherwise, do me a favor – ask them who they’re voting for. Then tell them you’re voting for their opponent. Then, see if they’ll give you a ride to the polls.

    In the meantime, dig into Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt. It sounds like a snooze but it really is a page turner, and you can download it for free.

     

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  • Crime and victim punishment

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    Heather Mac Donald, who unlike most commentators about urban crime knows something about urban crime, testified before a Congressional committee:

    We are in the midst of a national movement for deincarceration and decriminalization. That movement rests on the following narrative: America’s criminal justice system, it is said, has become irrationally draconian, ushering in an era of so-called “mass incarceration.” The driving force behind “mass incarceration,” the story goes, is a misconceived war on drugs. As President Barack Obama said in July in Philadelphia: “The real reason our prison population is so high” is that we have “locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” In popular understanding, prisons and jails are filled with harmless pot smokers.

    The most poisonous claim in the dominant narrative is that our criminal justice system is a product and a source of racial inequity. The drug war in particular is said to be infected by racial bias. “Mass incarceration” is allegedly destroying black communities by taking fathers away from their families and imposing crippling criminal records on released convicts. Finally, prison is condemned as a huge waste of resources.

    Nothing in this dominant narrative is true. Prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Drug enforcement is not the driving factor in the prison system, violent crime is. Even during the most rapid period of prison growth from 1980 to 1990, increased sentences for violent crime played a larger role than drug sentences in the incarceration build up. Since 1999, violent offenders have accounted for all of the increase in the national prison census.

    Today, only 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time for drug offenses—nearly all of them for trafficking. Drug possession accounts for only 3.6 percent of state prisoners. Drug offenders make up a larger portion of the federal prison caseload—about 50 percent—but only 13 percent of the nation’s prisoners are under federal control. In 2014, less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court were convicted of simple drug possession; the rest were convicted of trafficking. The size of America’s prison population is a function of our violent crime rate. The U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher than the combined rate of 21 Western nations plus Japan, according to a 2011 study by researchers of the Harvard School of Public Health and UCLA School of Public Health.

    The most dangerous misconception about our criminal justice system is that it is pervaded by racial bias. For decades, criminologists have tried to find evidence proving that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to systemic racial inequity. That effort has always come up short. In fact, racial differences in offending account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas found that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison, however, due to their more extensive criminal histories and the gravity of their current offense.

    The drug war was not a war on blacks. It was the Congressional Black Caucus that demanded a federal response to the 1980s crack epidemic, including more severe penalties for crack trafficking. The Rockefeller drug laws in New York State were also an outgrowth of black political pressure to eradicate open-air drug markets. This local demand for suppression of the drug trade continues today. Go to any police-community meeting in Harlem, South-Central Los Angeles, or Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and you will hear some variant of the following plea: “We want the dealers off the streets, you arrest them and they are back the next day.” Such voices are rarely heard in the media.

    Incarceration is not destroying the black family. Family breakdown is in fact the country’s most serious social problem, and it is most acute in black communities. But the black marriage rate was collapsing long before incarceration started rising at the end of the 1970s, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz has shown. Indeed, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his prescient call for attention to black out-of-wedlock child-rearing in 1965, just as that era’s deincarceration and decriminalization movement was gaining speed.

    It is crime, not incarceration, that squelches freedom and enterprise in urban areas. And there have been no more successful government programs for liberating inner-city residents from fear and disorder than proactive policing and the incapacitation of criminals.

    Compared with the costs of crime, prison is a bargain. The federal system spends about $6 billion on incarceration; the state system spent $37 billion in 2010 on institutional corrections. The economic, social, and psychological costs of uncontrolled crime and drug trafficking dwarf such outlays. And prison spending is a minute fraction of the $1.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars devoted to means-tested federal welfare programs, as Senator Sessions has documented.

    To be sure, the federal drug penalties are not sacrosanct. But though all sentencing schemes are ultimately arbitrary, our current penalty structure arguably has been arrived at empirically through trial and error. Sentences were increased incrementally in response to the rising crime rates of the 1960s and 1970s. Those rising crime rates were themselves the product of an earlier era of deincarceration and decriminalization. Sentences lengthened until they took a serious bite out of crime, in conjunction with the policing revolution of the 1990s.

    Violent crime is currently shooting up again in cities across the country. Police officers are backing away from proactive enforcement in response to the yearlong campaign that holds that police are the greatest threat facing young black men today. Officers encounter increasing hostility and resistance when they make a lawful arrest. With pedestrian stops, criminal summons, and arrests falling precipitously in urban areas, criminals are becoming emboldened. While I do not think that the current crime increase is a result of previous changes in federal sentencing policy, it behooves the government to tread cautiously in making further changes. However, I unequivocally support the “productive activities” component of Section 202 of the Act, to the extent that it aims to engage all prisoners in work.

    In closing, let me say that the committee would provide an enormous public service if it could rebut the myth that the criminal justice system is racist.

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