There Aren’t Enough Criminals
Why Blue-City Crime Policies Make Economic Sense If You See Crime as a Growth Industry
America doesn’t have a crime problem. It has a crime shortage. For all the headlines about rising violence, the real threat is scarcity: too few offenders to keep the criminal-industrial machine running at full capacity. Imagine a city with no criminals—no shoplifters, no drug dealers, no repeat offenders cycling endlessly through arraignment. It sounds idyllic. Until you realize the collateral damage: nonprofits without clients, public defenders without caseloads, police without overtime, grant programs without funding. Crime-free streets would mean mass layoffs across the criminal-industrial economy.
Pundits condemn policies like no cash bail and lenient sentencing as failed experiments. But view these strategies through economics, and they look less like fumbles and more like routine maintenance of a vast criminal-industrial machine. The numbers tell the story.
Most urban crime comes from a small population of repeat offenders. The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows 66% of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, over 82% within a decade. When they disappear behind bars, both street crime and demand shrink for the network that depends on them: public defenders, probation officers, nonprofit programs, private security, and police overtime.
New York City’s 2019 bail reform offers a live example. With cash bail abolished for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, thousands of defendants cycled back to the streets. About 20% of those released were rearrested within a year. California, meanwhile, raised its felony theft threshold to $950 in 2014, and San Francisco has reported double-digit increases in shoplifting incidents, with retail consortiums citing the rash of repeat offenders as a driver for storefront closures (CA Retail Facts).
These numbers are budgets, overtime checks, and jobs. The NYPD spent $740 million on overtime in 2023—nearly doubling projections—with much of that tied directly to street-level crime response and repeat offenders. The federal government distributes billions in justice-related grants; when caseloads drop, so does funding and employment.
If a city actually cracked down, locking up every shoplifter and handing out long sentences, crime would drop—but so would overtime, grant money, and staffing across justice and social sectors. Historical cases like New York City in the 1990s confirm that successful crime reduction means staff cuts, less federal money, and downsized agencies.
This isn’t a conspiracy—it’s economic incentives: thousands of careers and paychecks depend on manageable, repeat street crime. Lenient criminal justice measures, in this light, function less as failed reform and more as a stimulus—ensuring the system never runs out of clients. What looks like dysfunction may actually be the system working exactly as designed. If crime vanished tomorrow, thousands of jobs would vanish with it. That’s the hidden success of leniency: keeping the machine fed.