Elected officials in Chicago are calling for a moratorium on felony charges for prostitution to reduce overcrowding at Cook County jail. The jail now houses 10,008 detainees and is likely to exceed the maximum capacity of 10,150 soon. In a news conference Wednesday, several county commissioners pointed to the law’s disproportionate focus on non-violent felonies like prostitution:

With the Cook County jail nearing capacity, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, backed by Board President Toni Preckwinkle and several other commissioners, is asking State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to place a moratorium on charging suspected prostitutes with a felony. . . .

“Cook County puts too much focus on non-violent felonies,” Preckwinkle said at a news conference Wednesday. “We’re holding people in detention who ultimately will be sentenced to probation and released or have their charges against them dropped.”

“Cook County jail far exceeds the national percentage for people held pre-trial,” she said, citing U.S. Department of Justice statistic showing 48 percent of suspects remain behind bars as their cases wind their way through court.

According to Illinois Department of Corrections records, there were 127 prostitution admissions in 2012, costing $2 million. End Demand Illinois, an advocacy group against sex traffickers, estimates that holding an individual facing felony prostitution charges costs Cook County $5.3 to $9.5 million every year. Illinois has one of the harshest prostitution policies in the nation; only 7 other states still charge prostitution as a felony, and Illinois is the only state to allow felony prosecution after one offense.

At best, targeting sex workers is unproductive; at worst, it discourages these women — most of whom were recruited into the sex trade at age 16 or younger — from leaving or reporting their pimps. Moreover, the criminal justice system tends to dole out sentences with a racial bias. A recent study conducted in Cook County found that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be sent to prison by a judge than white defendants for the same crime.

Cook County may be motivated to relax this draconian policy by budget troubles, if not by compassion. State prison spending has more than tripled over the last 3 decades, making it the second fastest-growing burden on state budgets. The problem has become so unsustainable that even conservative social scientists now recommend alternative sentencing programs that would reduce the prison population by at least one-third. While the moratorium on felony charges is a stopgap measure, the Illinois Senate is also considering a bill to do away with felony sentencing for prostitution entirely.

Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year old Chicagoan recently killed by gunfire.

But Cooke and the other conservatives who will invariably make this argument today are wrong. Chicago’s gun laws aren’t the cause of the recent uptick in violence, nor does it prove that gun regulations are ineffectual. If anything, it underscores the need for tighter federal laws.

Most significantly, it is important to understand that Chicago is not an island. Although Chicago has historically had strict gun laws, laws in the surrounding parts of Illinois were much laxer — enabling middlemen to supply the criminals in Chicago with guns they purchased elsewhere. Forty three percent of the guns seized by law enforcement in Chicago were originally purchased in other parts of Illinois. And even if the state had stricter gun laws, Illinois is not an island either. The remaining fifty seven percent of Chicago guns all came from out of state, most significantly from nearby Indiana and distant Mississippi — neither of which are known for their strict gun laws.

It’s also important to put Chicago’s very recent increase in gun violence in perspective. Data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Harold Pollack shows that this uptick, while certainly worrying, isn’t anything like a return to the historic peaks during America’s crime wave. Pollack notes that “Chicago ranks 79th on Neighborhood Scout’s list of the 100 most dangerous places to live in America…the idea that Chicago faces a unique or unprecedented rise in homicides is incorrect. Our problems are all too familiar and chronic throughout much of urban America.” Chicago, following the national trend, has experienced a significant downturn in homicides in the past decade and a half:

Chicago had an outright ban on handguns from 1982 until 2010, when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. So there’s no reason to believe that strict regulations on gun ownership were responsible for a spike in gun homicides in 2012, two years after Chicago was forced to loosen its gun laws. Moreover, there’s simply no credible evidence that wider gun ownership or looser gun laws reduce crime.

So why did Chicago’s homicide rate increase in 2012? Pollack says “there’s no simple answer.” But he points to three factors are particularly important: escalating gang conflict as a consequence of police crackdowns and shifting gang territory, outdated law enforcement practices, and — yes — access to guns.

According to Pollack, access to guns significantly increase the risk that a conflict between two gang members escalates to homicide, as weapons designed to kill people (shockingly) make it easier to kill people. Chicago’s streets are flooded with guns: it has roughly six times as many guns as New York City per capita, despite its restrictive laws. So if gang conflict escalates, and the gangs have easy access to guns, the homicide rate should rise. This explanation fits with the fact that 87 percent of Chicago homicides in 2012 were gun-related. New York, by contrast, did not experience a surge in homicides in 2012.
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The 15-year-old girl who was killed just days after performing at President Obama’s second inauguration was a victim of Chicago’s rampant gang violence, authorities told the AP on Tuesday.

Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed on January 29 in a case of mistaken identity; her murderers, 18-year-old Michael Ward, and 20-year-old Kenneth Williams, thought that Pendleton was a girl in a rival gang:

Pendleton, a popular high school majorette, was with a group of friends who took cover during a rainstorm under a canopy in a park about a mile from the Obama home on the city’s South Side. Police said a man hopped a fence, ran toward them and opened fire with a handgun before fleeing in a waiting car. Pendleton was struck in the back and died later that day. Two others were injured.

McCarthy said Ward told investigators he thought he was shooting into the crowd of a rival gang, and that the shooting was meant as retaliation for Williams being shot in the arm in July. Police said neither Pendleton nor her friends were affiliated with gangs.

Gang violence has plagued Chicago over the last year. In January of 2013 alone, the city reported more than 40 homicides.

Pendleton’s parents will be attending the State of the Union on Tuesday night, where the President will likely discuss his recent initiatives to curb gun violence. Among those initiatives is an effort to close the gun show loophole. Criminals in Chicago, and other cities facing the horrors of gang violence, can easily obtain weapons thanks to federal gun loopholes that allow anyone to buy a gun from a private seller without a background check.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cherry picked data and misled the public about gun research in a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday, painting a picture of America’s gun problem entirely at odds with reality. Cruz made two false arguments when questioning US Attorney Tim Heaphy — first, that gun regulations resulted in higher crime rates in American cities; second, that there was no empirical evidence that gun law reform would reduce crime:

CRUZ: San Antonio has 7 murders per 100,000 people. Austin has four murders per 100,00 people. El Paso has two murders per 100,000 people. That means Detroit, the murder rate is 24 times higher than it is in El Paso…None of those cities I discussed, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, are isolated islands. Indeed, in the entire state [of Texas] you can purchase firearms and what we see with the murder rates is that the murder rates are consistently lower. My question to you, is not your subjective beliefs, but are you aware of any empirical data — every one of us wants to reduce murder rates — my question to you is there any basis to say that stripping the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens would result in decreasing murder rates rather than increasing them which, unfortunately, is the pattern I think we’ve seen.

Watch it:

State level data contradicts Cruz’s assertion. The two states with the highest per capita murder rates in 2011, Louisiana and Mississippi, received F ratings from the pro-reform Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (the third highest, South Carolina, has a D-). Louisiana and Mississippi don’t require background checks on private sales, demand that firearm dealers acquire licenses in order to sell guns legally, or limit the number of guns any one person can purchase at once.

Moreover, there are many factors that go into total homicide rates beyond gun laws, like lead saturation or gang violence) in addition to gun laws. Indeed, a recent crime spike in Chicago (one of Cruz’s examples of places with firearm regulation and high rates of death) predated gun regulations, indicating that the cause of the recent increase in violence isn’t the result of a change in gun laws.

So the question isn’t simply whether we can point to cities or states with lax gun regulation that have higher gun murder rates than those that don’t; it’s whether stricter regulations in any given city would reduce that particular city’s homicide rate relative to its current baseline. That’s something that’s best tested by empirical evidence that takes into account confounding factors.

And this systematic evidence suggests that gun regulations save live and that there is no real proof for Cruz’s suggestion that more guns lead to less crime. Three papers that studied homicides by county found that, when you control for factors like poverty, counties with more guns have more gun deaths. Another study found that, at the state level, stronger gun regulations are reasonably well correlated with fewer gun deaths. And research comparing the United States to other countries found that America’s greater access to guns contributes to higher murder rates.