Mixed Martial Messages: What kind of violence is acceptable?.

• Author: Riggs, Mike
• Position: BOOKS - Alan Sklansky's "A Pattern of Violence"

FOR ROUGHLY HALF a decade, a small contingent of criminal justice reformers has beseeched Americans to divert some of our attention from opposition to the drug war to mercy for violent offenders.

"We can't get from where we are to where we need to be just by releasing the innocent and harmless," the late criminologist Mark Kleiman wrote in 2015. "More than half of today's prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, and even those now in prison for nonviolent crimes often have violent histories. Solving mass incarceration requires releasing some seriously guilty and dangerous people. The problem is how to do that while also protecting public safety by turning ex-criminals into productive, free citizens." The Fordham law professor John Pfaff made a similar argument in 2017's Locked In (Basic Books), which rejected what Pfaff calls the "standard story" blaming the drug war for mass incarceration.

The latest contribution to this genre is David Alan Sklansky's A Pattern of Violence. A former prosecutor, Sklansky argues that "violent crime" is a fluid and relatively recent legal construct. "We take it for granted that violent crimes are the serious crimes, the ones that deserve stiffer sentences," he writes. In an era when no one seems able to agree on anything, many Americans and nearly all of our political elites agree that violent offenders should be "remove[d]...from our midst," as Vice President Kamala Harris put it when she was a district attorney in the early 2000s.

This consensus has various implications. One is the stark distinction between criminal law, where statutes categorize behaviors as either violent or nonviolent, and criminal procedure, where the "use of force" by police ranges from necessary to unnecessary. The book also covers violence by and against minors, violence in prisons, the law's evolving treatment of rape and domestic violence, and the ways America's deference to free speech, private gun ownership, and self-defense has undermined both left-wing and right-wing efforts to expand the legal definition of violence.

U.S. laws governing violence vary from place to place and era to era. They're influenced by race, class, social mores, and social upheaval, and as a result they're far from standard.

There is, however, a tendency across jurisdictions to widen the concept of "violence" to include ever more offenses.

One other common thread identified in Sklansky's book--a reform-minded text that makes very few reform...