Hosted by Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo, in Salt Lake City, national and state leaders came together on Tuesday night to discuss the most effective approaches to crime — and whether that means decreasing sentencing lengths.
The event, which highlighted Clancy’s bipartisan bill HB137, featured Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman; criminal justice vice president of Arnold Ventures Jennifer Doleac; Utah Attorney General Derek Brown; Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason; Executive Director of the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice Tom Ross; Sherry Black Foundation Executive Director Erin Ryan; and others.
Utah law enforcement is about 10% better at solving violent crime than the nation’s average. The state’s violent crime clearance is currently about 53%, ahead of the country’s 44%. Utah’s murder case clearance is similarly higher than the U.S. average at about 72%.
Ryan, who has worked with the Sherry Black Foundation since its inception in 2017, said the homicide cases that go unsolved in Utah are “super complex” and include “a lot of random acts of horrific violence and at times repeat offenders.”
Several speakers discuss decreasing sentence length
Doleac, who presented her research ahead of the panel, said that adding more time to already-long sentences “doesn’t improve the deterrent effect.”
She reasoned, “People become less reckless and impulsive as they grow up,” and no one committing violent crimes “is thinking past this week or tomorrow.”
If states begin offering shorter sentences, as Doleac suggested, she said they should also increase law enforcement’s contact with offenders after they’ve been released.
Ideas she presented included requiring 24/7 sobriety, with the post-sentence offenders wearing blood alcohol content monitors, and keeping their DNA in a database to easily connect them with other crime scenes.
During the panel discussion, Utah’s Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice executive director Ross paralleled Doleac’s idea.
“In the ’90s, the idea was that if we just lock more people up and make their lives miserable, it’ll change everyone’s behavior,” Ross said. “And I believed that when I started for a period of time. Then I started questioning myself, because I felt like the outcomes weren’t changing.”
He said over the past few years, Utah has implemented more post-crime programs to help keep offenders accountable.
‘Utah is doing extremely well’ with crime
Lehman praised Utah’s post-crime programs, which target destructive behaviors like untreated addiction. Compared to the rest of the country, “Utah is doing extremely well” in tackling destructive, cyclical behavior, he said.
“So many crime problems in general come down to the same groups of people engaging in the same patterns of problematic behavior, sometimes shooting each other, sometimes consuming drugs, sometimes cycles of violence, whatever it may be,” Lehman said.
Successful reentry into society requires consistent support and accountability, and connecting former offenders to people who can help them is monumental, Ross added. Without it, they return to “no foundation and a broken home environment,” which leads them to slowly fall back into the same patterns.
The state’s public safety commissioner, Mason, added that increasing on-foot police presences in high-risk areas has “made the biggest difference in decreasing crime.”
He also said it’s been helpful for Utah’s law enforcement officers to separate issues. “Homelessness is not the criminal issue, right? It’s separating the open drug markets, the prostitution, all those other things, and the best way to do that is to be present,” Mason said.
CCJJ executive director says he wants to ‘give hope to victims’
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox appointed Ross as executive director of the Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice at the beginning of 2021, even though Ross didn’t fit the typical criteria.
Most former executive directors have spent their careers as attorneys, while Ross had spent the previous three decades in law enforcement.
On Tuesday night, Ross said his previous work in law enforcement has fortified his two main goals in his new position: to do a great job as an investigator and to “give hope to the victims.”