Charles Fain Lehman
Fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on crime, drugs and policing; writes The Causal Fallacy.
Charles Fain Lehman did not write this page. What is this?
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Where they publish
Newsletter The Causal Fallacy His newsletter on crime, drug policy and what the data supports. Has a feed.
Open thecausalfallacy.substack.com
Link verified 20 Sept 2026.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 8 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
That a ban creates a black market is not by itself an argument against the ban.
What’s fallacious is to argue that this fact necessarily means the prohibition does not “work,” or is not better than legalization.
The Black Markets Fallacy Said 13 Jul 2026
Prohibition reduces how much of a product is consumed rather than merely moving the same consumption underground.
Quantity consumed under prohibition is almost always smaller than quantity consumed under legalization.
The Black Markets Fallacy Said 13 Jul 2026
Putting people into temporary shelter cuts crime and psychiatric emergencies without waiting for permanent housing to be built.
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
You Don't Have to End Homelessness To Make Cities Safer Said 22 Oct 2025
Show 5 more
The social harms attributed to homelessness come from people being unsheltered, not from their lacking a permanent home.
Read this in the context of Christopher et al., and the reasonable conclusion is that many of the problems associated with homelessness are the result of unsheltered homelessness.
You Don't Have to End Homelessness To Make Cities Safer Said 22 Oct 2025
Criminal justice reform has already diverted nearly everyone who can be diverted, so further decarceration means releasing people charged with violence.
Years of reform mean that almost everyone who can be diverted from Rikers already is.
Prison Abolition in New York? Said 21 Aug 2025
The war on drugs is not the main cause of American mass incarceration, because drug offenders were never a large share of the prison population.
Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part V Said 28 May 2025
Drug enforcement cut casual use and barely touched heavy users, who account for most of the drugs consumed.
But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part V Said 28 May 2025
After two decades of the war on drugs, drugs were cheaper and more potent than when it began.
After two decades of the War on Drugs, in other words, drugs were much cheaper and more potent than they were when the War on Drugs began.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part V Said 28 May 2025
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