We hear an awful lot about “the 1 percent” in American politics.
Usually, that means billionaires, Wall Street executives and people with private jets. But there is another 1 percent that arguably deserves a lot more attention from policymakers: the tiny share of habitual offenders responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of violent crime.
A study circulating again this week provides a striking illustration. Researchers examining the entire Swedish population born between 1958 and 1980 — nearly 2.4 million people — found that roughly 1 percent of the population accounted for 63 percent of all violent-crime convictions recorded between 1973 and 2004. The persistent-offender group was defined as people with at least three violent convictions.
That study was published more than a decade ago, involved Sweden rather than the United States, and measured convictions rather than every crime actually committed. So it shouldn't simply be transplanted into an American argument as if it were a current U.S. statistic. But the underlying phenomenon is very real here.
The United States has spent decades gathering evidence that serious crime is heavily concentrated among a small population of repeat offenders.
One of the classic American studies came from criminologist Marvin Wolfgang's Philadelphia birth cohort. Researchers followed roughly 10,000 boys and found that just 6 percent of the cohort accounted for 52 percent of all offenses and 83 percent of serious felonies.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics studied 369,200 people admitted to state prisons across 34 states in 2014. Collectively, they already had an estimated 4.2 million previous arrests in their criminal histories. The median state-prison entrant had been arrested nine times before. Nine.
And putting repeat offenders back onto the street frequently produces exactly what common sense would suggest. BJS followed another group of state prisoners released in 24 states in 2008. Within three years, 66 percent had been arrested again. Within 10 years, that number reached 82 percent, while 61 percent had returned to prison for a new sentence or a probation or parole violation. The prisoners in that study also entered the follow-up period with a median of nine prior arrests and five prior convictions.
A separate BJS examination of people entering state prison in 2014 found that, among those released by the end of the following year, 59 percent were arrested again within just two years, including 16 percent arrested for a violent offense.
Murder isn't merely concentrated among offenders; it is extraordinarily concentrated geographically. New 2026 research by John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center found that the 31 counties with the highest murder rates — just 1 percent of America's counties — accounted for 41 percent of murders in 2024 despite containing about 20 percent of the population.
The worst 2 percent of counties accounted for 54 percent of murders. Meanwhile, 53 percent of American counties recorded no murders at all, and another 16 percent recorded only one.
America has a relatively small population of people committing an enormous amount of crime. Which makes some of the changes to the criminal-justice system over the past decade difficult to understand.
An entire progressive-prosecutor movement has emerged around reducing incarceration, restricting cash bail, declining certain prosecutions, eliminating sentencing enhancements and treating the criminal-justice system itself as the primary social problem.
George Soros put serious money behind that movement. A 2022 Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report identified at least 75 prosecutors it classified as Soros-backed or connected to Soros-funded organizations. At the time, those prosecutors had jurisdiction over more than 72 million Americans.
The report calculated more than $40 million in direct Soros-linked campaign spending on prosecutor races over roughly a decade, including millions supporting George Gascón in Los Angeles, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Kim Foxx in Chicago.
The report argued that many of these prosecutors pursued policies including eliminating bail, dismissing felony cases and seeking more lenient sentences. It also noted the enormous practical power district attorneys possess through charging decisions, plea bargains and sentencing recommendations. What has resulted is that America’s cities have remained the central hubs of violent crime in America.
Commentator Will Tanner pointed to the Swedish study and argued that Western societies historically dealt far more ruthlessly with persistent offenders. Tanner goes considerably further, arguing that centuries of capital punishment effectively removed violent tendencies from European populations.
1% of the population is responsible for essentially all of the violent crime
— Will Tanner (@Will_Tanner_1) August 27, 2026
In the centuries leading up to Europe's heyday, it hanged 1% of each generation
Practically every crime beyond the most petty minor offenses were capital crimes, and that was rigorously enforced. Horse… pic.twitter.com/jLn72BUIOW
America's own death penalty has become dramatically less common over the modern era, although executions temporarily jumped to 47 in 2025.
Elon Musk put it much more simply last year: “Incarcerating a small number of repeat violent criminals would vastly improve public safety.”
Criminals are the root cause of crime.
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole) September 9, 2025
El Salvador under @nayibbukele realized this and locked them up.
And guess what? It worked: pic.twitter.com/iHfhMPbAmz
It is unmistakable that how murder rates in El Salvador cratered after President Nayib Bukele got tough on violent criminals. He locked up murderers, and the murder rate went down. Fascinating how that happens.
America itself is seeing a decline in violent crime, continuing a general trend that goes back decades.
The nation’s violent crime rate fell 9.3% in 2025, marking the largest year-to-year decline since the FBI began estimating crime trends in 1936, according to newly released FBI data.
The decrease was broad. The estimated number of violent crime offenses fell from 2024, with murder and nonnegligent manslaughter down 18.1%, robbery down 18.5%, rape down 7.6%, and aggravated assault down 7.2%.
The estimated murder rate fell to 4.1 per 100,000 inhabitants—the same rate recorded in 1955 and 1956 and the lowest since the FBI began keeping national estimates.
While America is seeing a decrease in violent crime, the country could do even better.
If major cities cracked down on repeat violent offenders, and kept criminal aliens out of the country, the nation could be the safest it has been in its history.
