What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime

 by Eve Fisher

On May 2, 2025, The New Yorker posted an article by Malcolm Gladwell, "What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime".  (LINK) Now I'll read about anything by MG - don't always agree with him, but he's generally interesting - and this was worth it.  

Here's the official story that sparks it:

"Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.

When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.

In the remarkable new book “Unforgiving Places” (Chicago), Jens Ludwig breaks down the Brown killing, moment by moment. Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking."

System 1 - "Expressive Violence" - fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional:  hurting someone in a sudden burst of frustration, anger, confusion, or drug addled state.

System 2 - "Instrumental violence", acts such as a carefully planned robbery, whether of an individual or a bank. Or a serial killer. 

Now, according to Ludwig, our criminal justice system is largely based on the idea that most violence is System 2, instrumental, i.e., planned, BUT the real problem is System 1, expressive violence, i.e., spontaneous. "The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again."  I totally agree.

South Dakota's incarceration rate is 370 per 100,000 residents, which is higher than the national average, and higher than any other democratic country in the world.  We are, as all our gubernatorial and legislative candidates are proud to say, "tough on crime."  Most inmates (around 80%) are in for non-violent crimes, mostly drugs and/or DUIs.*  Of the violent crimes, most are (in percentage order) in for assault, sexual assault, manslaughter, sexual assault of a child, robbery, first degree murder, burglary, kidnapping, child abuse, 2nd degree murder, weapons charges, arson, and stalking.  If you added up all the sex crimes, they'd outnumber assault, but that's another blogpost. Let's just say that there's a lot of sex crimes in South Dakota, and every week someone is arrested for one, but no one really talks about it.

*Sentences are harsh up here, and very little in the way of drug and alcohol treatment or rehabilitation is provided.  So a significant number are revolving door inmates - they get out, they come back, they get out, they come back...  

In my years volunteering in prison, I've met inmates convicted of any and all of the above.  And heard a lot of stories.  

The inmate who'd served 30+ years for a drunken teenaged bar brawl that got taken outside.  Both tried to kill the other, and one succeeded.  

The middle-aged inmate who'd tweaked out so often on meth that his brain was still addled after 20 years hard time, but he could clearly remember the time he was tweaked out, and his meth buddy was grabbing a beer that he thought was his, and he went ballistic and stabbed him.  

The inmate who killed his wife because he couldn't take one more minute of living with her. "What's wrong with divorce?" I asked. "Too damn expensive," he said.

The inmate who killed someone in a drug deal gone bad and left him in a car in the middle of winter outside of town...  Took a long time for that body to be found. 

The inmate who assaulted and damn near killed a guy who owed him 6 soups (Ramen, the prison favorite and a form of currency).  "What was I supposed to do, let him get away with disrespecting me like that?"

BTW, much of the violent crime in the prison is based on someone's perceived disrespect - which must be instantly dealt with, before other inmates start perceiving you as weak, i.e., prey.  

And many more.

Basically, almost all of the violent criminals I've met are System 1 criminals.  As Ludwig writes, 

"System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst."

I ran into this all the time in our AVP (Alternative to Violence Project) workshops.  We'd be doing exercises on the root causes of violence, on anger (which is always a masking emotion - no one runs out and gets angry because it's fun), on act/react, etc.  A lot of responses were, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do when someone disrespects me?" "You let someone take your stuff, you'd better get them right away, or everyone'll think you're just a punk." "You HAVE to react, around here."  

Thankfully, we always had inmate facilitators who would explain that you didn't HAVE to do anything you didn't want to.  But first you had to learn to slow that reaction, that anger down...  Deep breaths. What's going on? Is this worth time in the SHU?* What would really happen if I just walked away?  

*Segregated Housing Unit, i.e., The Hole.

It didn't always work, and it often took a long time to become part of someone's way of thinking and acting, but when it did... it was remarkable.  Our facilitators, and our inmate graduates, stayed out of the SHU, and stayed out of gang wars.  Which were always based on respect/disrespect issues, i.e., System 1.

"Brown’s encounter with Carlishia Hood pushed him into System 1 mode. He made an immediate egocentric assumption: if he knew that special orders were a norm violation, then Hood must know, too. “Given that System 1 assumption,” Ludwig explains, “from there it is natural that Brown believed the person in front of him was deliberately holding things up.”

"Hood, meanwhile, didn’t know about the special-order taboo, so she was operating under her own egocentric assumptions. She “knew she wasn’t being disrespectful and deliberately trying to hold up everyone else in line, so the curse of knowledge led her System 1 to assume that Brown surely also knew that,” Ludwig writes. “So why was he getting so bent out of shape? She didn’t mean to be inconsiderate to the people behind her in line; she just wanted the Maxwell Street Express people to change whatever it was that she wanted changed on the burger.” Neither had the cognitive space to consider that they were caught in a misunderstanding. They were in binary mode: I’m right, so you must be wrong. From there, things escalated: 

Hood says to her son, who’s standing behind Brown, “Get in the car.”

Brown seems to think that comment is directed at him—another misreading of the situation.“WHO?!?” he says. “Get in the CAR?!?”

Hood says something that’s hard to make out from the video.

Brown says, “Hey lady, lady, lady, lady. GET YOUR FOOD. GET YOUR FOOD. If you say one more thing, I’m going to KNOCK YOU OUT.” You can see his right fist, clenching and unclenching, over and over.

She says something that is again hard to make out on the video.

He says, “Oh my God I SAID if you say one more thing, I’m going to knock you out.”

At which point he punches her—hard.

Hood’s son is standing in the doorway, watching the assault of his mother. Had he been in System 2 mode, he might have paused. He might have asked for help. He might have called 911. He could have weighed the trade-offs and thought, Yes, it’s unbearable to watch my mother being beaten. But, if I kill this man, I could spend years in prison. But he’s filled with adrenaline. He shifts into catastrophizing mode: There is nothing worse than seeing my mother get pummelled by a stranger. Brown punches her again—and again. The boy shoots him in the back. Brown runs. Hood tells her son to follow him. There is nothing worse than letting him get away. Still in System 1, the boy fires again. Brown collapses in the street."

And that, my friends, is what most homicides look like. Out of nowhere. No good reason. Shit happens.  

BTW, this is one of my favorite parts:  

"Much of what gets labelled gang violence, Ludwig says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants. Imagine, he suggests, if we did this for everyone: “ ‘This morning by Buckingham Fountain, a financial analyst at Morningstar killed a mechanic for United Airlines.’ Naturally you’d think the place of employment must be relevant to understanding the shooting, otherwise why mention it at all?”

"The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. The numbers for Philadelphia and Milwaukee are similar. And that proportion has held remarkably steady over time. Drawing on data from Houston in 1969, the sociologist Donald Black concluded that barely more than a tenth of homicides occurred during predatory crimes like burglary or robbery. The rest, he found, arose from emotionally charged disputes—over infidelity, household finances, drinking, child custody. Not calculated acts of gain, in other words, but eruptions rooted in contested ideas of right and wrong."

Meanwhile, our criminal justice system is designed with the idea that people weigh the costs of their actions and act accordingly.  In the heat of the moment, especially if alcohol, drugs, and/or mental disturbances are involved, no one thinks about "Well, I'll go to prison for life if I do this", especially if they're young. Teenagers run on surging tsunamis of emotions that wipe out all sense of sense.  Too many adults - in and out of prison - are still emotionally teenagers, because they've never been taught how to deal with their emotions.  And these days our entire advertising system is aimed at getting you to buy (products, ideas, politics, wars) without thinking. We have got to spend time and energy training children, teenagers, and adults how to navigate life the way it is: constantly changing, often volatile, and sometimes downright violent and dangerous. We live in a world full of drugs, alcohol, guns, and violent social media content, and we're still commonly assuming our towns are Mayberry, and everyone's the Waltons. Gotta cut that OUT.  

Three other things we've got to cut out, according to Ludwig is to 

(1) "stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category." As I tell people when I've done presentations about AVP and prisons, everyone is one bad decision, one bad night, one bad choice, away from going to prison.  Everyone.

(2) "stop locking up so many people for long prison terms." Mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods and their families, and the longer you keep someone in prison, without rehabilitation or education, the less able they're going to be to deal with the world outside.

(3) "spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe." Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that upgrading outdoor lighting experienced a 35% decrease in serious crimes. Help bad neighborhoods clean up.  

"[Ludwig] describes one of the program’s exercises, in which students are paired off. One is given a ball; the other is told he has thirty seconds to take it.

"Almost all of them rely on force to try to complete the assignment; they try to pry the other person’s hand open, or wrestle or even pummel the other person. During the debrief that follows, a counselor asks why no one asked for the ball. Most youths respond by saying their partner would have thought they were a punk (or something worse—you can imagine). The counselor then asks the partner what he would have done if asked. The usual answer: “I would have given it, it’s just a stupid ball.”  Exactly. It’s almost always a stupid ball."

Now to just convince them - and us - that almost everything is almost always a stupid ball.