In a post on X.com, Heath Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains the “Butterfield Fallacy” and why putting criminals behind bars is the best way to keep Americans safe.
New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield amused conservative crime analysts in the late 1990s and early 2000s by writing articles under headlines such as:
“Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”
“Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.”
“Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.”
To Butterfield, a simultaneous crime drop and incarceration increase was a paradox. The possibility that locking up criminals would help lower crime was all but inconceivable.
The liberal policy world is still in the grips of what become known as the Butterfield Fallacy. An article this week in Stateline, a left-leaning news website, puzzles over the fact that low-level arrests are rising “despite national crime declines.” Such contrasting trend lines are precisely what Broken Windows theory predicts. Criminals are polymorphous offenders; if they break one law, they will likely break others as well. Because they commit low-level offenses more frequently than homicide, robbery, and other felonies, focusing on misdemeanor crime is an efficient way to reduce all crime, besides providing the orderly streets that the public cares the most about.
The study on which Stateline reports focused on vagrancy, drug possession, and immigration arrests. The latter nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025. Vagrant encampments are a hotbed of crime. They also signal to other would-be criminals that no one is in control of the streets. Dismantling them accomplishes numerous salutary goals. Arrests for drug possession are almost always a proxy for street drug trafficking. The latter routinely leads to drive-by shootings.
I had been skeptical of Trump’s claims to own the felony crime drop but the data on immigration arrests and the fall in index crime suggest a credible connection. As newly emboldened Democrats seek to further emasculate immigration enforcement and to fortify sanctuary jurisdictions against the rule of law, we can expect a natural experiment testing that connection.
Stateline and the anti-incarceration group that did the misdemeanor study are already playing the race card, warning that increases in enforcement will widen racial disparities in the criminal justice system. This, too, is a harbinger of the discourse under an increasingly Democratic-run polity.
Those racial disparities reflect different rates of offending and different rates of 911 calls for service. The disparities that should be the focus of law enforcement are those in victimization rates, something that progressives almost universally refuse to acknowledge. That massive victimization gap will also widen if enforcement is cut back, but at least the police won’t be accosting black criminals.— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) November 12, 2026
