How to quickly end the mass incarceration of black Americans while reducing inner city crime at the same time.

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Explicit racism is a problem. This I do not deny. But explicit racism is a relatively small part of the persecution many blacks suffer under today. We had decades where racism was uncool, an ideology for losers, yet during those decades the black prison population exploded, and driving while black remained effectively a crime is many parts of this country.

The unjust situation has triggered riots. This inspires some to call for criminal justice reform. Others focus on the looters and call for sterner measures.

Meanwhile, Social Justice Warriors have gone over the top trying to root out the last vestiges of racism, creating a sunk cost situation. If being white makes one an a priori racist, why not go for it? Racism is becoming cool again. Not good!

It is long past time to focus on the bigger underlying problems, on the implicitly racist laws and policies still on the books, to turn racism into a bad, but dim, memory, and put the "Us" into U.S.

Some Ugly Positive Feedback Loops

Where should the police spend most of their time? How about areas where there is the most crime? The idea is reasonable, and oft intended to be benevolent. Residents of high crime areas suffer.

Throw in Broken Windows policing and Stop and Frisk: things get ugly. Those who live in the wrong neighborhoods get busted for petty crimes, and are frequently frisked for the lamest excuses for probable cause.

Such injustice inspires resentment towards law enforcement. Cooperation with the police declines. Local kingpins and gang leaders gain respect. Jail time becomes a right of passage. Crime goes up.

And thus calls for even more heavy-handed law enforcement go up.

The police become an occupying army.

And there are yet more feedback effects:

• When fathers are locked up, children suffer, oft becoming emotionally damaged, semi-feral.
• Gang ruled neighborhoods are poor places to study; student achievement suffers.
• Poor student achievement leads to yet more poverty.
• Poverty makes retail crime more attractive as a career option.
• High crime drives away potential employers, making crime the only career option.

Thanks to past explicit racism, many of these out of control neighborhoods happen to be heavily black. Thanks to these ugly feedback loops, the scars of past intentional injustice continue to fester a half century after the Civil Rights Act.

One solution is obvious: actually obey the Bill of Rights, even in areas where crime is high. There is much to be said for it, but alas, it is impractical on its own. When crime is out of control, criminals are the primary violators of individual liberty. Bill Clinton signed the largest federal crime bill in U.S. history and yet remained popular among black voters. Protecting the innocent is part of making black lives matter.

To restore civil liberties in poor black neighborhoods, we need to be a bit more strategic and subtle. We need to answer two questions:

1. How do we reign in heavy handed law enforcement without unleashing yet more crime?
2. How can we reduce crime without resorting to yet more punishment and/or police harassment?

I could list dozens of answers, but I will focus on two, the biggies. Fix these and the rest is downhill.

Dial Down the Drug War

The War on Drugs is primarily a war on the poor -- and black. Back in the days of Nancy Reagan, I had the luxury of attending an expensive private university. The illegal drugs flowed freely. I do not recall a single bust. The campus cops were focused on enforcing the drinking age and protecting university property. Somehow learning happened, and people I saw toking heavily went on to become businessmen, lawyers, politicians, etc.

Maybe enforcement is more even now, but I still read reports of higher enforcement against black drug users than white.

Explicit racism may be involved, but I suspect the bigger factor is Broken Windows policing: if a bit of recreational toking is the primary crime in the area, law enforcement often lets it go; no point in going full-on Broken Window where crime is low. When worse crime is a problem, and the police do across-the-board enforcement, tokers and dealers get busted. Some have their lives ruined.

Here's the deal: you cannot effectively enforce victimless crime laws without breaking the Bill of Rights. Without a victim, there is no one to notify the police. Spying, entrapment, and no-knock warrant serving are required to make a dent in the recreational drug market. It's fascism or failure; take your pick.

Drug law enforcement creates other crimes, crimes with real victims. A drug dealer must deal in cash, and cannot call the police if robbed. So a drug dealer must resort to armed protection or even creating an armed gang. Contract enforcement is difficult. Drug laws create anarchy.

Top criminal bosses serve as a shadow government. When the police go after those on the top, they create wars on the street. The violence becomes a matter of honor and revenge. This appears to be going on in Chicago today. Not good.

The relatively safer drugs like cannabis should be legalized outright, and treated like alcohol. More problematic drugs could still be more tightly restricted, much as we restrict casino gambling to certain areas. We can end the Drug War without having junkies littering the parks with needles, or having a crack house in every neighborhood. Drug abuse could still be a crime of sorts. Neglect your family or other basic social obligations due to taking too much drugs, and you have victims who will call the cops. Evidence can be gathered in a civilized fashion.

Dial back the Drug War, and the police can do their job while behaving nicer. And crime in poor inner city neighborhoods will go down dramatically. This one measure deals with several of the ugly feedback loops.

Fix the Welfare System

Welfare is really handy when you are poor. It's double-plus handy when everyone you know -- friends, family, relatives -- is also poor. But when you make welfare conditional, when you limit welfare to the unemployed, the broke, or to unwed parents, you end up paying people to avoid employment, saving money, and marriage. This perpetuates poverty.

Worse yet, it isolates children from fathers. Also, it requires adults to skip rungs of the career ladder for work to pay more than welfare. This is difficult. Criminal activities (including victimless crimes like drug dealing) don't count against need for welfare. For many of the poor yet ambitious, crime pays better than available legal work.

Milton Friedman suggested a remedy many years ago: a negative income tax. We have a tiny sample of his idea in effect: the Earned Income Credit. But, alas, the EIC is tiny and the rules are ridiculously complicated.

These days I'm pushing for something far simpler: free money for everyone. If you take away most of the tax deductions, and make the income tax flat for the first couple hundred thousand dollars, you end up with enough savings to give all adults a monthly stipend, enough to turn today's minimum wage into a living wage.

And since employers won't have to deal with multiple tax brackets or unemployment insurance, doing payroll becomes trivial. All employees could have the same fraction deducted from their paychecks. The result would be more entry level jobs -- and less overhead for budding entrepreneurs. (Furthermore, we could replace part of the payroll taxes with a carbon tax and get the market hunting down some global warming solutions.)

Under such a system some people would choose to smoke dope and be lazy hippies. So what! It's the ambitious I'm worried about. They need a reasonable non-criminal path to economic betterment, and free money instead of need based welfare does the trick.

There is More, But...

The two measures above are just a start, but they are a big start. They should be enough to dampen the cycle of crime and injustice enough in many neighborhoods to turn police back into peace officers instead of occupying soldiers.

From there we can embark on a more comprehensive set of criminal justice reforms. With fewer people thrown in jail to start with, we can fix overcrowding and make prison life safe instead of traumatic. We could get back in the business of attempting rehabilitation.

With more fathers out of jail and living with their children, schools in these poor neighborhoods will become more functional. We widen the road towards economic equality.

We can move towards the day when "Black Lives Matter" becomes simply a reminder to take enough vitamin D if you have really dark skin.

Authors Bio:

Carl Milsted is a physicist by day and dabbles in economics and political activism in his spare time. For a quarter century he was a member of the Libertarian Party, but has since realized that narrowing the wealth gap and preserving the environment are as important as constraining excessive government. Today he works on recreating the original liberal alliance, between those who despise oligarchy and those who dislike excessive government. For the past few years he has been collecting an eclectic assortment of ideas to more economically accomplish modern liberal ends while maintaining the sparse, and accountable government sought by the early liberals.