New Q&A Series, No. 1: Answering Some Extremely Easy Questions Asked By the Worst-Informed and Most Disingenuous Far-Right Billionaires on Earth

Bill Ackman asks, “How can someone with 53 prior arrests continue to be on the NYC streets?” It’s a child’s question—or anyone with no knowledge of criminal justice—but here an expert answers it.

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QUESTION from far-right billionaire BILL ACKMAN: “How can someone with 53 prior arrests continue to be on the NYC streets?”

We know this question is asked in bad faith, because a billionaire like Ackman has lawyers and other advisers who could answer this extremely basic question for him almost immediately. There’s no reason to broadcast the question to his 1.6 million Twitter followers other than to spread three far-right canards that every criminal justice professional knows to be false: New York City is a dangerous large city (it is actually a very, very safe large city); prosecutors are by and large progressive (by and large, prosecutors are extremely conservative by instinct, politics, and professional-advancement planning); and violent crime is now out of control (it is plummeting).

Nevertheless here’s an ANSWER from criminal defense attorney SETH ABRAMSON (with all legal terms and concepts in the answer in bold to make them easier to spot):

On a criminal record, each charge a person has ever faced is a separate arrest entry—so if, on a single date of offense, a person is arrested on ten charges, that may well show as ten arrests even though all of those arrests were for a single course of conduct.

Because over 95% of criminal cases are resolved by a defendant taking responsibility for their actions and accepting a plea deal—that’s right, the overwhelming majority of those arrested aren’t like Donald Trump, and seek no more than a just punishment for what they’re accused of doing—police and prosecutors prepare in advance for this known eventuality by habitually wildly overcharging cases. The theory behind this is that the more charges you can pile on someone, the more likelihood (because each charge carries its own penalty, which can be assessed consecutively to all other penalties) they will enter into a plea agreement with the government and thus spare taxpayers the cost (and government agents the time) of a full-blown criminal trial.

The result of this is that even a rather minor incident will often lead to a very large number of more-or-less redundant charges and an extremely filled-up arrest record.

I’ve seen and personally represented defendants with 50+ arrests from just two dates of offense—meaning just two actions that were deemed by the arresting officers to be criminal. Bill Ackman is also aware of such a situation, given that his political hero, Donald Trump, technically was arrested on 34 felonies as part of a single course of conduct (though in Trump’s case these crimes spanned months, which is actually far worse than what we see with unpremeditated street crimes born of transient anger).

And of course arrests aren’t convictions. While arrests show up on an arrest record, many arrests result in nolle prosequi withdrawals of the charges by prosecutors for reasons ranging from a witness recantation to a plea deal that involves some charges being withdrawn, from the evidence ultimately gathered by police not sustaining the charges the arresting officers originally believed could be sustained to a prosecutor deciding (this is rare) the case was overcharged and thus is unfair to the defendant.

Short of charges being withdrawn voluntarily by the government, they may also be “kicked” (dismissed) by judges because (say) witnesses fail to appear in court, certain evidence was illegally seized, the government has botched the collection or testing of the evidence in a way that infringes upon the defendant’s constitutional rights, or a whole host of other reasons—including, notably, a “not guilty” verdict by a jury of the defendant’s peers after a trial.

In other words, arrests often don’t end up as convictions—so saying someone has “53 arrests” couldn’t be farther from saying “they committed 53 crimes.” Often the facts on the ground are dramatically different from what an arrest record might make one think.

But of course some arrests do result in convictions, which is why it’s important to know that, contrary to the lies told to American voters for political purposes by far-right propagandists, as a matter of fact the average crime charged in the United States is a misdemeanor (the least serious category of crime) that almost never carries a jail sentence unless the offender has done it many times before.

Consider petty theft, petty vandalism, minor fisticuffs (minor assaults), kiting one small check—these aren’t offenses where the massive expense of a jail or prison bid is seen as necessary or even helpful, as it would toss a low-level offender in with some serious repeat offenders and therefore make it more likely a minor hoodlum will become a major problem for American society (a process experts call brutalization).

So most criminal cases, even ones that began with an on-scene arrest rather than a warrant, are resolved with fines, probation, community service, a suspended or deferred jail sentence held back on demonstrated “good behavior” (a term that has a very specific definition), some sort of rehabilitation or educational programming (e.g., for drug possession or DUIs), or some other type of penalty that’s proven to cost taxpayers little, reflect the rather modest “moral turpitude” involved in the situation, minimize recidivism (the likelihood of re-offense), and keep lesser offenders from the company of greater ones. It is worth remembering, too, that arrestees are often their family’s breadwinner, so severe penalties assessed against certain persons can have outsized deleterious effects to innocents—and in ways that destabilize whole locales.

In other words, 53 arrests could easily come from just (say) four dates of offense; those four alleged offenses that spawned so many charges might easily then result in only two courses of conduct that led to a conviction; and those two convictions—or two acts that led to some number of convictions—are quite likely to lead to either no jail at all (not because our system is lenient, as in fact it’s infamously draconian, but because the behavior being policed is actually considered comparatively minor even by tough-on-crime types) or a minor jail sentence of a few weeks or months. Crimes that result in convictions carrying prison terms (generally a year or more) are very, very rare.

But even if we find that in a given case—not that this would be typical—53 arrests does mean a large number of dates of offense and individual criminal actions, we still have a system that punishes people proportionately.

Murder and Rape may often see an offender put away for decades—unless you’re Bill Ackman’s favorite politician, Donald Trump, who has been credibly accused of sex crimes that in total would have put him in prison for hundreds of years (yes, really)—but even aggravated assaults are likely only to see someone put in a cage for a few years at a time. And since most crimes are committed by younger people—for psychological, sociological, physiological, economic, and logistical reasons—it’s not at all uncommon for a person who is 35 or 45 or 55 and has a major criminal record to have already served multiple past multi-year stints for somewhat serious conduct but still be out and about now. (Criminal conduct decreases with age, so even many hardened criminals will “age out” of offending at anything like their prior rate, or perhaps offending at all.)

Far-right radicals like Ackman have tried in the past to prevent the above scenario with “three strikes and you’re out” laws in California and elsewhere that were intended to inhumanely issue life sentences to people for minor offenses. But such horrifically bad public policy pushes—again, engineered by people, like Ackman, who don’t understand our criminal justice system, would never deign to work in it, and refuse to educate themselves about it because doing so would make it harder to use it to score political points and win elections—have ultimately failed because they bilk taxpayers of public monies unreasonably, destroy entire families in ways that increase crime in the following generations, dole our life sentences over minor third offenses that no one thinks should warrant prolonged (let alone lifetime) incarceration, take authority out of the hands of the nation’s conservative judicial and prosecutorial class, endanger police by dramatically increasing resentment of them (and unwillingness to cooperate with them) in communities where such cooperation is absolutely essential to effective community policing, and quite frankly are simply so wildly inhumane that even most tough-on-crime folks don’t want to have anything to do with them. They were and are the creation of political creatures with eldritch political motives, not criminal justice experts. It’s like letting a plumber do your taxes or your roofer be your doctor.

Generally speaking, the most draconian criminal justice policies are advocated for and forced into usage and misuse by wealthy men who have never themselves lived in highly policed environments, do not understand either poverty or crime or drug addiction, have no empathy for their fellow man, wildly inaccurately think of our justice system as “progressive”—when every extant internal institutional motivator in fact pushes actors in the system to be ultra-conservative—and who candidly want to use the criminal justice system as a means of managing poverty and the poor rather than creating a more healthy civil society. These are very bad men writing very bad policy.

So it’s not in the least surprising that someone with 53 prior arrests might be on the streets and not in a cell—and anyone who thinks otherwise should stop publicly opining about the criminal justice system and spend some time, instead, educating themselves about how it actually works.

But sadly, convincing billionaires to talk less and listen more is apparently impossible.