Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state?

Often people yell out for something they are not sure they want but they got it now. People sometimes think from a crime to a jail term with not thought in between. We have too many laws written as a result of fear and over exuberance but wit little thought.

Thanks

Shava- this is quite the conversation starter. One thought that occurs to me is- do we have enough money in the USA to pay to incarcerate one out of 100 of us? That is a crushing expense, removing 1% of us from the world of contribution to society and putting them in the world of being a drag on society.

of course some of them are child molesters, rapists, murderers. but alot of them are drug sellers- who would be guilty if nothing if there were no drug buyers.

I fully support jailing drug dealers but am not so sure about the users. How many fewer people would be in jail, for instance, if all of those sentenced for buying marijuana for personal use were eliminated? How many fewer still were people not abysmally stupid and doing such things as driving a car while high on crack or some other drug?

Why do we have to put drug users in prison, for instance. Why not into less expensive drug camps where there is counseling and treatment? I am not for forgiving crimes associated with drugs or while on drugs, but the crime of being high itself should carry different penalties.

People are, by definition, mostly stupid. So they do drugs. I do agree that were kids better educated, trained to some job skill, etc. that there would be fewer drug users. I disagree that people cannot stop if they wanted to. No matter how addictive anything is, and no matter how bad you feel, in the end the only person who takes a hit off that crack pipe or cigarette for that matter, is you.

There is a misconception common in popular discourse that the use of fear to manipulate public opinion began with the "war on terror". However, long before the events of 9/11, fear of crime was being used to manipulate public opinion, especially by right-wing politicians.

The media (which is very, very right wing for the most part, despite frequent and shrill claims to the contrary) focuses on crime in a very myopic way. As we all know, "if it bleeds it leads" is a dominant philosophy in the lazy, yellow journalism predominant today. The investigative reporter is almost a thing of the past.

This kind of reporting heightens fear of crime, even when the crime rate is dropping. Here in Canada a consistent decline in crime rates has not stopped conservative politicians from trumpeting the "get tough on crime" aspects of their platform. Motivated by fear, people often buy into that kind of policy. It's simple, easy to grasp, requires no knowledge of sociology or other complex ways of looking at human society. It also denies the reality that there will always be some crime and that no amount of law enforcement will overcome the fact that some human being do horrible things to other human beings. With populations as high as they are even a low crime rate will result in many individual instances of horrific crime occuring. Yes, we must punish those individual perpetrators, but increasing application of draconian law enforcement measures in the face of declining crime rates is illogical and counter-productive.

I think in the USA one very serious mistake was to make prisons a private enterprise, motivated by the deep seated conviction that the private sector is always more efficient and cost effective than the public sector. No amount of evidence proving this conviction wrong will ever sway those who are ideologically committed to it.

Industry seeks profit, though, and has a hunger for ever higher profits. If your industry is incarceration, how do you increase profits? You have to increase demand for your services. How do you do that? How do you get more people incarcerated? Well, it is hard to entice people to commit crimes, but you can motivate the public to "get tough on crime" by passing more and more laws for which people can be put away and by insisting that sentences be longer.

Instant increase in profits.

There are some things that must be left to the public sector because we have to protect society from the manipulations of vested interests.

First of all get your numbers straight.

The first figure from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports the population of the nation's state and federal prisons. The second figure reported by Pew is the total number of people incarcerated. The difference between the two is the people incarcerated in county jails

As for drugs, most states do not incarcerate people for "a joint". In most states, simple possession is a misdemeanor.

Which brings us to the topic of drug-convictions, in most cases, people sent to prison for drugs are in reality being sent to prison for a preponderance of criminal behavior or as a plea-bargain from a more serious offense.

In short, the painful reality is that it is a lot easier to convict someone for the crack in their pocket than the for the child they just raped.

Actually Greg, many states have mandatory minimums for very small thresholds of marijuana possession. Even then, prior convictions (which can include misdemeanors) can up mandatory sentences, and invoke atrocities such as the three-strikes law in California. Federal law lists the first offense as 1 year, even though it is a misdemeanor (you can vote when you get out).

Felony convictions serve not only to stock our jails and prisons, but also to remove huge numbers of folks with an inside view, as it were, of the justice system from our voting rolls. Think about 1% of the adult population -- perhaps 5% of the poor or so, on speculation -- removed from the voting rolls.

And, if I got the numbers in the first paragraph off, the "eight times 1970" is apples-to-apples straight from the Reuters report, which also said the population had tripled since 1987. But thanks for the check.

According to the US DOJ, in 2006 about three quarters of a million were incarcerated in local jails, putting this number at 33% of the total incarcerated population, so that is significant.

I'll say that tripling since 1987 and up eight times since 1970 is sufficient for worry, though, wouldn't you?

Some people believe that those who make money off of prisons prey upon those susceptible to simple-minded solutions and encourage politicians to go to idiotic extremes. I agree that such things happen to some extent.

I agree with those who wish to abolish most laws against the use of Marijuana.

I also agree with those who cite statistics related to recidivism as a criticism to the whole 'criminal justice' system, and believe that addressing social problems will eliminate most crime.

by the way, I am not proposing jailing drug users. I am merely pointing out that drug pushers will disappear by magic the minute that nobody buys.

I think that we could probably send home a few drug dealers without causing the collapse of our civilization. perps of violent crime are less likely to catch a break from me, because i could be their next victim.

Why not eliminate drug dealers, and thus drug dealers in prison by simply legalizing the drugs, regulating them as we do alcohol and cigarettes, both drugs controlled by major corporate business concerns. People use drugs responsively, or they will not, the addictive person will abuse something, be it drugs, alcohol or food...for proof of that, look at the obesity rates right now in America. Prohibition was a dismal failure way back when, and America's War on Drugs is not only a dismal failure, but is funding the world wide terrorist network. You want to see funding of terrorist organization drop to a trickle, legalize drugs, control the market, tax the profits.

Sherwood: As an aside, you are aware that many nutritionalists are looking at such things as high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and transfats as major contributing factors to the current obesity escalation. In fact, the upswing in weight coincides almost perfectly with the upswing in the use of these chemicals in our foods. If you add in too much time in front of the television set (parents' fault) or the computer, decline in physical education in schools, and the ready availability of garbage sold in vending machines in school and the picture becomes much clearer.

Yes, overeating is one factor. What you eat is a much larger one.

Felony convictions serve not only to stock our jails and prisons, but also to remove huge numbers of folks with an inside view, as it were, of the justice system from our voting rolls. Think about 1% of the adult population -- perhaps 5% of the poor or so, on speculation -- removed from the voting rolls.

I would prefer that muderers, rapists and child pornographers not vote. Why would any sane person want these people to partake in politics?

There are avenues open to felons who have changed their lives. Most states offer an opportunity to have a record expunged.

I'll say that tripling since 1987 and up eight times since 1970 is sufficient for worry, though, wouldn't you?

Yes, the increase in crime do worry me. The increase in incareration does not.

I agree with Greg, we are lucky enough and civilized enough not to chop people's heads off when they become a problem, or to continue to let them rampage around in society affecting others. Talking about how many people are in prison is a smokescreen saying that you think most people in prison should not be there without having to prove it. What is your alternative?

Greg, bruce,
I agree with the way you frame the issue, its crime and criminals not the numbers.

Suggesting that the change in the numbers is due to the number of people simply smoking a "joint" is a difficult leap for me. Does it seem to you that DUIs, rapes and child molestations, family violence, and habitual criminals have been more agresively procescuted in the past several years? I wonder if that has also contributed to the increased jail population? Locally we have had a few "cold cases" [murders,6] that are over a decade old finally being solved and the people going to jail. I don;t know if this is a change of any significance.

Shava,
I admit to my ignorance of drug use and whehter it is simply a problem for the poor or if it is a personal choice.
If there is anything to what the media reports, over the time period of the increase in the jail population, the changes in drugs has been from LSD to meth, while heroin, marijuana, and cocane have been used and available for a couple hundred years. I wonder if all or the vast majority of the users of the harder drugs, those that impact on people other than the user, simply started with the meth and angels dust?

For information on the breakdown of the US prison population by charge type, look here. 53.6% of the population are in for drug charges.

In 2006, the government says:

About half of all probationers had been convicted of a felony (49 percent), about half were convicted of a misdemeanor (49 percent), and 2 percent were convicted of other infractions. More than 7 in 10 were on probation for a non-violent offense, including more than a quarter for a drug law violation and a sixth for driving while intoxicated.

Here's a fun fact from the feds: "If incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6% of U.S. residents born in 2001 will go to prison at some time during their lifetime."

One in eight prisoners has a current or prior drug offense only.

You can find a million sources on the web that show that there are disproportionate incarcerations by class and race. Is that even in dispute these days? You can mine source data here.

Whether you are liberal or conservative it should be obvious that what we are doing now is simply not working.

From the liberal perspective, we are not remediating the inequities of education, race, and helping the hardships of the poor, addicted and mentally ill.

From the conservative viewpoint, we have a radical failure of the social contract, and an evaporation of personal responsibility on the part of a huge swath of the general population, and the burden of incarceration is becoming uncontrolled.

So regardless of your political bent, shouldn't we be searching for solutions?

Well said, Shava. That report should raise far more questions than it seems to have in the mainstream media.

I like the idea of looking for solutions. The questions is where do you start looking; is it for blame, is it for ways to implement solutions you already know, is it for opportunities for change, or is it simply to throw up our hands and whine about the system, society, and everyone else?

If we believe that it is a rare exception that those in jail are innocent, we can look whether the system made them commit the crimes and why, or we can look at why the individual committed the crimes?

If we believe that it is the laws and their enfocrement that have put all of those people in jail; we can ask why society has chosen the laws and how they are enforced, we can look at what society expects incarceration to do for society and the those people jailed, and we can assess whether it has been effective?

If we believe that it is simply a political ploy that has been played on society for individual politiacians' gains; we can try to understand why we have been so gulible for so many years, and how that this has continued so long and at such an ever increasing volume with so many changes in the politicians perpetuating it?

Once we have answered the why's we can then discuss how might address the changes, and how we could work on implementing it inlur own communities rather then wating for a socal ground swell to make it happen at the natioinal level.

What is you choice?

Hello! Fifty percent of those in prison are there on drug related charges...make drugs legal, that takes care of a large number of them. How many people are in for writing a bad check to feed their families, prostituting to survive, stealing food for their families?

Think about it...even if you are making $10.00 and hour, that is $400 a week, minus 20 percent for taxes, you are down to $320 a week to live on. That's $16,640 dollars a year...if you have a couple of kids, you are LIVING BELOW THE POVERTY RATE! Your kid gets sick, you need some cough medicine and cannot afford it, you are going to try to steal it. Maybe you sell a bit of pot on the side to try to make ends meet, or sell your body to cover your kid's ballet classes.

There are crimes that are serious, and those who commit them should be sent to prison for a long time, and I even support the death penalty for certain crimes against humanity...however, when we force people into committing crimes because they can not earn a living wage, something is seriously wrong with the system.

Sherwood, people who write bad checks, prostitute themselves or steal are usually feeding their addictions, not their families. It is not unusual to find an empty refrigerator, hungry children and tens of thousands of dollars in a crack house.

If you legalize crack, you will still find empty refrigerators, hungry children and money in the home of addicts, because the money only goes to feed addiction.

Prison is not a bad idea, it is one of society's ways of telegraphing to an addict that they have hit rock bottom - a necessary step to recovery.

If you want to discuss reorganizing the prison system to more effectively treat addicts we have a basis to talk - but the concept that drug offenses are victimless is extremely naive.

It is also EXTREMELY naive to believe that people turn to crime for economic reasons.

Criminals rarely steal for "money" what they are stealing for is "time". Even at $10/hr, the economics of crime suggest that one would earn more by working than by criminal activity. The true reality of criminal behavior is that crime does not pay that well.

Then why turn to crime? The answer is simply, if you work eight hours a day, you cannot get high, stay high and party for those eight hours. Most criminals prefer to steal those eight hours of idleness rather than spent it working.

however, when we force people into committing crimes because they can not earn a living wage, something is seriously wrong with the system.

In the 60's and 70's society made the decision that the majority of women should work outside the home. For better or for worse, this decision put an end to the ability of a single wage earner to support a family.

Let's face up to the reality that the consequences of feminism was the two-wage earner family, an arrangement that bid up the price of everything: from food, rent, house prices, cars, to clothes.

Wishing will not change this.

But let's look at your numbers with two incomes. $10/hr * 2 * 2080 hours in a year = $41,600. While that is slightly less than the average 2006 American household income of $48,600, it is more than adequate for a family of four.

The problem is not $10 an hour jobs, it is the impulsiveness of vast segments of our society that leads them to forget the simple secret of success:

1) Stay off drugs.
2) Finish High School.
3) Put off having children.
4) Get married
5) Stay married.

For information on the breakdown of the US prison population by charge type, look here. 53.6% of the population are in for drug charges.

I fail to grasp what you see as a problem.

Drug dealers SHOULD be in prison. Why would an sane society allow people who exploit addiction to gain unearned wealth to walk the streets?

Are you pretending that people in federal prison are simply hapless hippies who lit up a joint? While I am sure that someone can pull such an anecdote out of a hat, it is by no means representative of who is in federal prisons.

The question we need ask ourselves is: what are these people going to do to gain unearned wealth if drugs were legal? Do you honestly think they would find some other line of work?

Greg:

Love the way you want to BLAME everything on the individual...fact, illegal aliens in our work force have driven down wages to the tune of $200 Billion a year, the average lower and middleclass workers wages suppressed by over seven percent...using your own numbers if both husband and wife are working, that gives you lost income of $2800. Lot of money at that step in the economic ladder.

Two workers, income of $40K is not take home. $8K goes to takes, so right there you are down to $32K. 10 gallons of gas a week is $35 times fifty two weeks is $1800 a year, so now the family has $30K to live on. $1200 a month for rent (CHEAP around here) rounded off short is $14K which brings money to live on down to $16K.

Of course, we have utilities (heat, electric, phone, cable, online) and will peg that all at $500 month...my own combined bill for these items including heating oil is almost $1000, so feel half of that is more than fair for an average. That's $6K a year, so now the family is down to $10K for everything else.

Everything else includes shopping for those two kids school clothes, medical and dental expenses, a car payment, car insurance, car repairs, oh, and LETS NOT FORGET FOOD. So, that average family of four living on $40K a year has about $844 each month to cover all of this. To put this in perspective, this family has $192.00 a week to cover all these remaining expenses, and FEED THE FAMILY.

You State: Drug Dealers SHOULD be in prison. Why would an sane society allow people who exploit addition to gain unearned wealth to walk the streets?

Ever seen how much advertising the drug, beer and alcoholic beverage companies do? Tobacco companies? Our government, big business are fine with us having additions, as long as those additions are to their PRODUCTS. I made it very clear in my post that there are people in prison who deserve to be there, who should remain there. There are also hundreds of thousands of people who DO NOT DESERVE to be there, and it costs us as tax payers BIG DOLLARS to keep them there. Face it, our prison our full because it has BECOME BIG BUSINESS. As for Federal Prisons...most of those are a bit more cushy and reserved for our nations White Collar criminals when they get caught bilking average Americans out of their pensions and savings...think Enron as example.

Just as example...Upper Middleclass, and the rich and elite do cocaine because they can afford. When they get caught and prosecuted they get probation. The poor man does crack, and if they get caught, prosecuted they get prison time....guess you do not see and injustice there?

Greg: Having lived through the 60s and 70s as an adult, I assure you that "society" didn't make any decision that most women had to work outside of the home. What actually happened is that the cost of things such as housing and other critical items started escalating faster than the ability of a single earner to keep up. On top of that people started wanting more faster. When I was growing up it was expected you'd save for a house, car, etc. By the 70s people expected to have these things right away.

I would estimate that fully half of men and women working today would not do so if there were some way to allow them to remain home and still have enough money to pay bills, mortgage, etc. The average wage earner cannot make it on one salary today.

All that feminism really did was give women the same choices that men have always had. For some women as for some men, staying home, tending the kids, etc. is a happy and fulfilling life. I personally know a lot of women and some men who would be happy and content to do that today if they could manage financially. For others, both male and female, staying home and doing nothing but housework and changing diapers is a ready road to the funny farm. Being born female doesn't mean that you don't have other drives, are not talented, intelligent, ambitious, etc. Woman are actually as individual as are men and I am not sure why the one size fits all mindset continued to exist beyond the industrial revolution other than the male need to dominate (in some cases, not all).

Women are not inferior to men in general. We are different. If men were measured by the standards of women, they too would be found wanting in almost every regard. Isn't it time we got rid of these outdated and outmoded stereotypes and accept people as they are. There is nothing wrong with a woman who chooses to remain home and be a housewife. There is also nothing wrong with a woman who does not.

Whatever the reason(s), the US federal/state/local prison systems are not rehabilitative and recidivism is a major issue. Most other progressive nations make a greater attempt to move persons toward reassimilation upon release. We need to revisit "why" we incarcerate ... and we need to revisit "what now" when we release.

Love the way you want to BLAME everything on the individual...fact, illegal aliens in our work force have driven down wages to the tune of $200 Billion a year

I would be curious where you got that figure - but still it is utterly meaningless. The U.S. GDP is $13.79 Trillion. A $200 Billion reduction amounts to 1.45% - well under the rate of wage inflation.

I hardly see how a 1.45% reduction in wages would force anyone into a life of crime.

As for your family budget calculations - I hardly see what the problem is. Most people deal with those expenses quite effectively.

Greg: Having lived through the 60s and 70s as an adult, I assure you that "society" didn't make any decision that most women had to work outside of the home. What actually happened is that the cost of things such as housing and other critical items started escalating faster than the ability of a single earner to keep up.

You would be hard pressed to find an economist who does not believe that women entering the work force (two family incomes) drove inflation. While it may be accurate to suggest that many women who did not want to work, were forced to work by their sisters who did -- the two-income family came first.

The point is simple.

There is no way that one average income earner is going to support a family. The only way to bring this about is limit families to one income.

I doubt that is ever going to happen.

Again, crime is mostly driven by toxic culture and addiction - almost never economics.

In fact, in America crime was at it LOWEST during the Great Depression and hit its HIGHEST during the affluent 90's.

By the way Carolyn, I think equality for women in the work force was one of the great achievements in our society. But so often, things that are good for some, are not so good for others.

Women in the work place means the luxury of two income families but it also means life is tougher on single parent households. We take the good with the bad.

The answer is not to turn back the clock to the age of single income families - it is to turn forward the clock to a time where the vast majority of people are educated, married and mature when they have children - and they stay married.

Now THAT would have a positive effect on the crime rate.

Just think - functional families!!! Healthy kids!!!

Greg...over all crime might drop, but murder rates could ZOAR.....LOL

Carolyn:
> What actually happened is that the cost of things such
> as housing and other critical items started escalating
> faster than the ability of a single earner to keep up.

My comment on this is off topic, but I hope to show the
relevence of it. Our whole modeling of the world by which
most of us think of the world and how to affect it for the
better is a total fiction.

Greg is touting an economic view of the world, which I think
has the most hope of being useful, but which has serious
drawbacks:

1) Economists themselves have not developed these ideas
to the point they are proven, or can be applied with certainty.
This is bascically another faith-based religion with some
simple mostly linear theories applied to a non-linear world
and with a hidden agenda of the practitioner behind it.

2) If we are a democracy, or a republic for that matter, a
theory that people do not understand and that cannot be
explained to them is not different that another religion, say
Islam.

To throw out the whole idea though would be incorrect.
Long term the soluion has to be education, but we can easily
see that this country is far from going anywhere near the
right direction if we want to have inteligent debates about
economics in the public forum.

Getting back to Carolyn's statement, it is not hard for us
all the see, and maybe even agree on some long term
negative trends in US society.

It is the mechanics and symbolism that gets in the way
of solving that, or even agreeing on what can be solved
by government. For instance during Gov. Mitt Romnery's
campaign I kept hearing he was going to fix the American
family. Ha!

But also wanted to throw in an opinion, and that is that
economists can predict things like if you lower taxes prices
will rise as much as possible to suck up any additional
income that families have, just like Carolyn's additional
comment. While most families benefit from having more
money when both parents work, some of that is just
because consumers have more money, period.

The idea that getting rid of taxes is going to make people
substantially richer is a fiction promoted by the right, of
that redirecting a large amount of money from taxes
to buisness is going to solve problems because money
is diverted to the private sector, look at the energy
companies, or the car companies, are we seeing problems
solved by big business?

Back to crime, I do agree with what Greg says, our justice
system works. It does not work perfectly, but Americans
have to get over the lazy idea that finding different ways
to talk about things and pretending like what is out there is
idiotic, attacking a straw man is not going to move us
forward in any way.

Greg: If you will permit me a bit of analysis on my thinking that might add some perspective. I believe the entry of women into the workforce is probably one of the most important and major changes in the last thousand years socially. As with any huge social change, the pendulum tends to swing wildly for a while causing all sorts of excesses as people adapt to the new way of things.

For some this means clinging desperately to the old ways and trying hard not to accept the change. You see this in the macho culture and in what I call redneck recidivism. Others embrace and then take the changes to extremes. Radical feminism was a good example of that. I tried burning my bra and trust me it was a flop. Still others take a middle approach. One group or the other gains ascendancy then drops and another rises.

Look at this objectively for a moment. You might find yourself understanding to some extent the anger and backlash of men against these changes. They played by the rules then just as they reached for that gold ring, someone slapped their hand away. The changes brought about by female emancipation are enormous and we are not beginning to see the end. It will take many more generations before equilibrium is reached.

Just think about it. Women no longer need men to survive. How huge is that? The entire social contract rested on that leg. Women agreed to keep house, bear and raise children, and accept a lot of things in exchange for financial and social security (not the checks but the network). One of the most damaging changes in our society is that because of this people are much less willing to work out their differences and fight to remain together. Women were expected to accept a lot of things in exchange for their security.

Please understand that I am not entirely blaming men. This is a huge social change that is still working its way out. I read a statistic recently that says that women are marrying later and many are refusing to marry at all. Another extreme. We have, as Bruce points out, far too many single parent families which makes things even rougher.

My point in all this is that the transition is still happening. Women in general have come a long way, but society still has a long way to go until these huge changes are incorporated and some sort of equilibrium is reached that is fair to both men and to women. I will not see that in my lifetime. I'm not sure my daughter will either.

> I tried burning my bra and trust me it was a flop.

I hope you don't mean that literally ;-)

The idea that women no longer need men to survive, I just
wonder what that is supposed to mean or project?

The main thing that has changed is the division of labor
within a relationship, and the nature of that relationship.

I do think there is something that is key to your post
Carolyn. It is about the nature of society and men.

Dominance in the society is not about sex anymore, it is
about money, power, earnings ability. The nature of power
strategy and politics is really being screwed up.

It may be that it is in the nature of men to be dominant,
or to see things in that way. A book I recently read said
that what might have given human beings the edge in
evolution was the division of labor.

If you look into ancient sites you see neanderthals were
in a troup, like chimps and the great apes are today.
What may have made human beings so much more
efficient and set us on the road to dominance (there's
that word) is the economic division of labor.

That has led in many ways to what we have today.

Also it has led to the formation of power stratified
away from sexes and more on classes.

The class of CEO's, investors, lawyers, politicians,
rich folk is not so much of an open class, ie. the wealth
and power of the country.

These people are the leadership class, and like the
differences in men and women that occurred from
prehistory when we were unconscious of it, we are
now consscious of the other classes who depend
on the management class, as groups of early humans
depended on the male hunter class to supplement
their diets and keep them secure, a culture is being
evolved, that is not equal. It is not what we have in
the consitution or declaration of all men being equal.

You do not have to invoke or want communism to
socialism to desire to keep the levels of society
in flux instead of static.

What good is it if men and women are equal -
horizontally, but people even more unequal
vertically?

Carolyn, Greg, bruce,

I really can't disagree [as much as I would like to] with many of your points, you simply take a broader view than I can.

I personlize each of your points, and that limits my perspective to seeing the issues through the individual and their actions. Individual's develop expectations for themselves and make the choices how to achieve them and take actions on those choices.

I expect it is rare where a person is forced to commit a crime by others. It seems that they do it because they feel it is easy (less effort) than the alternatives (school), it will give them quick tangible results (money in hand), and the risk of getting caught seems remote. THey also have the time to do the crime. IN Greg's example of the Depression, I expect that people were spending so much time and effort to survive they couldn't do crimes.
I dare say that since the 50's the technology changed us away from the strong back to the strong mind, the our country has mde every effort to give everyone in society a lesser burden of survival, giving them more time. With time we can make choices.

The freedom of choice for women that Carolyn talks about happen in the same time frame. Individual women had more time, more choices, and the jobs were less dependent on physical strength.

bruce yuor example about division of labor fits, but rahter than it being society driven, I see it as individually driven. The individual gains more from speicalizing so they choose it, society doesn;t tell them.

The resistance isn;t to any group or class it is individual resistance to change, the greater expectations competition creates and what is necessary to meet them.

bruce it isn;t equality of people it is equality of opportunity. The skills may create an economic stratification, but it doesn;t create classes. If yuo have the skills and the ability to execute, you can change your status.

India has the cass society and yet it is creating a new economic stratification that breaks the cass ssytem. IN China, they have had the single class by need, and yet today it individuals are changing the sytem by ability and effort.

I look at society, culture, and the world as individual choices and try to percieve why they are making the choices. If it were simply about money and power, and the need to survive we wouldn;t have the single income families, the "soccer moms", stay at home dads, and even multi-children families, we are not spending our time just for survival we have time for choices.

> The individual gains more from speicalizing so they
> choose it, society doesn;t tell them.

> bruce it isn;t equality of people it is equality of opportunity.

> India has the cass society

caste society.

I guess my point is that if I specialize my skills I lose some
choices. There is something we do when we specialize.
If I am an artist, it is likely that I do not understand math
very well, or science. What we have is a vertical power
struggle between the leadership classes who rig the system
to be friendly to them and against others.

No one should lose or be eternally stuck in one track
because they have specialized to help meet societies
needs.

I think a lot of people reject society and become criminals
because the demands of society are strict, rigid, and not
pay off relative to the freedom one gets by rejecting all
of that and taking an oppositional tack to being exploited.
The labor market, especially the labor market opened up
all over the world is a really losing propostion that will
and already is disenfranchising much of the American
middle class

The war on terror could partly be about criminalizing
the laboring classes while maintaining schools and
educational opportunities at barely sufficient to get
by and keep prices high. Imagine how many people
are marginalized by this system, and how much
potential productivity is wasted, all in the name of
keeping things in order under one system that
functions.

Thank you for an excellent comment Carolyn. one line stood out for me:

Just think about it. Women no longer need men to survive.

I know you were speaking of economics, but the point is key.

My grandparents had a ritual, every other friday at the supper table, my grandfather would present his pay check to my grandmother. It was more than a symbol of unity and respect. It was the economics of the family. He earned, she made the financial decisions. Interestingly, women control the checkbook in 80% of U.S. homes.

An interesting fact, by 1954 more women were in the work place than were working at the height of female employment during WWII. In effect, the modern feminist movement was surfing a wave that already existed.

Sadly, the modern feminist message radicalized from "you too can do it" to "you don't need men".

The reality then, and the reality now is men and women need each other, as they have always needed each other. They desperatly need each other economically, socially, and as partners in the raising of children.

Today the poverty of children is driven by single parenthood. If we are going to do anything about crime we need to address social dysfunction, and the best place to do that is to focus on family formation.

The war on terror could partly be about criminalizing the laboring classes while maintaining schools and educational opportunities at barely sufficient to get
by and keep prices high.

Good Lord Bruce.

If you take the budget of the Minneapolis School District and divide it by the number of children enrolled, you get a figure of $19,200 per year and we still have a 40% drop rate.

Where does "the war on terror" fit into this picture?

Let me be blunt. For 75 years, the left has focused on spending astronomical sums of money for the stated purpose of "solving social problem". In reality, those dollars have been spent on building a vast poverty and educational industry which did little more than foster dependency. What those dollars did do was build a liberal constituency.

The result has been growing crime and dysfunction.

I grew up in a poor mixed race neighborhood. As poor as it was, families were intact and kids did reasonably well in school. The black families in that neighborhood, despite chronic unemployment, were more intact than suburban families are today.

Crime in that neighborhood was lower than in modern suburbs.

When someone tries to blame crime, poverty, and dysfunction on recent economic developments, I ask them to go back and study the statistic then, and compare them to now, and then tell me again what caused the problem.

It has absolutely nothing to do with economics – the problem is toxic culture plain and simple --- one could say, the devastation of our urban cores was caused by four things – sex, drugs, rock'n roll and The Great Society that fostered dependency as an alternative to a sane stable life-style.

I can't help but wonder if we are seeing an increase in crime, or an increase in prosecution of crime.

I am not buying the assumption that in the article that the people in China or Russia are more law abiding or moral that here in the states.

Pat,

We have been counting crime incidents since the 1930's. All agencies are required by federal law to submit Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), this will soon be replaced by the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

In addition, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does annual crime victimization surveys to measure the instance of unreported crime.

In other words, "crime" is very different from prosecution.

One of the things that pops out when you look at crime statistics is that violent crime has increased by a factor of 20 in most metropolitan areas since the 1950's.

But you are right in a way. For instance when we look at homicide, are we really looking at murder or are we looking at the effectiveness of our emergency care? In other words, the difference between aggravated assault and homicide is how fast the victim gets to the emergency room, and how effective the ER is.

On the other hand when you measure aggravated assault, you see an arc starting in the 1950's peaking in the 1990's and falling off in the last decade.

See Aggravated assault and Motor vehicle theft rate

Notice how the trends run completely counter to economic indicators. One could suggest that the better a society does economically, the more crime.

I for one, love that little dip in crime during the "Reagan Recession".

Greg, I was not saying the failure of schools is due to economics,
though most things are related to economics. The comment you
are quoting was a reply to Duane.

I do not know what your statistic has to do with schools or how
it relates to students. That $19,200 covers what?

You can blame toxic culture, but what does that mean?

This was just at the time when everything in our culture
really changed? How are you going to control for multiple
variables.

Vietnam and the assassinations?

Watergate, disrespect for authority?

Movies, TV, violence and sex going up, lack of morality?

Catering or pandering to the individual in products, but
also in morality, if it feels good do it?

The lowering of standards and prison terms?

The rise is gangs and organized crime?

The rise of conservatism, and the fall of liberalism?

Music being more sexual and violent and less political?

Many more immigrants let into the country from all over?

Lowering wages?

Rising real estate prices?

Lowered expectations?

Cheating in schools and business uncontrolled?

No funding for mental hospitals, in CA closed down and
patients put on the street?

Cocaine/crack epidemic?

AIDS?

Rising class sizes?

The numbers in your graph can also represent the shifting of the increase in population to the poor. The general increase in population and the increase of crime in poor and immigrant communities.

Bruce, your shotgun approach to societal problems does not speak to the rise of crime. I see little causality other than the causes of angst on the left.

Societies will always have problems. Some of these problem will have measurable impacts on crime other will not. For instance, I am not sure how AIDS affects crime. Nor am I sure how "rising class size" affects crime or learning for that matter, when you consider that class sizes in the 1950's and 1960's ran close to 40 students per class but did not produce social upheaval.

Other things that you mentioned like "lowering wages" make no sense since median household income has been on the rise for 40 years. See Real Median Household Income

The only thing that has changed a great deal over the last 50 years is family formation. Today, the rise of single-parent households through the choice not to marry and divorce is the single largest factor contributing to the much heralded "decline of the middle-class". It far outstrips the relatively minor impacts of outsourcing, down-sizing and wage deflation as a factor in moving households below the threshhold of the middle-class.

Still we are talking about crime.

None of the factors you mentioned other than the rise of drugs and subsequent rise of drug-dealing gangs affects crime. What you did not mention is cultural expectations.

I am not sure your "lower expectations" really covers the expectation of the under-class to live a life of crime and dependency.

The numbers in your graph can also represent the shifting of the increase in population to the poor. The general increase in population and the increase of crime in poor and immigrant communities.

So you are saying that a shift in population to poor immigrants REDUCES crime?

The graph shows an increase in crime as poverty dropped and a decrease in crime in the last decade as the immigrant communities have grown.

I am not sure what you are trying to say.

Are you actually saying that the rise of conservativism, Bush and immigration has dramatically reduced crime?

Greg, I think what I see happening is the US is not problems, but a sustained lost of the country's culture for reasons that you seem to label "left-wing angst".

These simple graphs of numbers do not prove the causalities you seem to want to infer from them.

Greg, you are just thinking linearly, latching onto one view of things and making a hit and run statement about it. That really does not take much though, or lead to any great conclusions or prove anything.

There is not one cause for all of this, or just rising crime.

If you want to say that divorce and the rise in single head of
household families is your single cause, then I would say the
rise in divorce happened for a reason, any number of the
reasons I cited.

Of course I am not saying that Conservatism reduced crime,
are you saying that divorce increases crime?

Greg, I think what I see happening is the US is not problems, but a sustained lost of the country's culture for reasons that you seem to label "left-wing angst"

We are not really that far apart. We both agree the problem is loss of the "country's culture". If you want to read a good book on the problem, read The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama.

He refers to a loss of "social capital". This can be everything from simple courtesy to community participation.

Fukuyama points to a number of things, but mostly points to the decline in family formation.

And yes, divorce does increase crime. Not all divorce increases crime, but divorce that results in children being raised in a single parent home has a direct measurable impact on crime.

Here is the result of a quick Google search. I cannot vouch for the site, but the text agrees with most widely accepted views on the matter.

Source

iMAPP: New Research on Married Parents and Crime: Are children raised outside of intact marriages at increased risk for crime and delinquency? iMAPP's latest policy brief "Can Married Parents Prevent Crime? Recent Research on Family Structure and Delinquency 2000-2005" looks at empirical research from the United States published in peer-reviewed journals since 2000.

September 21, 2005
http://www.marriagedebate.com/pdf/imapp.crimefamstructure.pdf

All but three of 23 recent studies found some family structure effect on
crime or delinquency. Seven of the eight studies that used nationally
representative data, for example, found that children in single-parent or
other non-intact family structures were at greater risk of committing criminal or
delinquent acts. For example: A study using Add-Health data found that even after controlling for race, parents' education, and income, adolescents in single-parent families were almost two times more likely to have pulled a knife or a gun on someone in the past year. (Todd Michael Franke 2000)

Six of seven studies that looked at whether overall rates of single parenthood affected average crime rates found that changes in family structure were related to increases in crime. For example:

· A study that looked at the relation between divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birthrates and violent crime between 1973 and 1995 found that nearly 90% of the change in violent crime rates can be accounted for by the change in percentages of out-of-wedlock births. (Mackey and Coney 2000, p. 352)

· A study that looked at crime in rural counties in four states concluded,
"[A]n increase of 13% in female-headed households would produce a doubling
of the offense rate." (Osgood and Chambers 2000, p. 103)

Even after controlling for income, family structure is an important predictor of crime and delinquency. Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy
says, "Results like these are a reality check for people such as Peggy Drexler ("Raising Boys Without Men") who argue that it is only poverty, and not father absence, that hurts children. Boys are hardwired to grow into men. But they are not hardwired to grow into good family men. That's a job for mothers and fathers working together."
For a copy of the research brief, or to schedule an interview, contact
_Joshua@imapp.org_ (mailto:Joshua@imapp.org) . (202) 374-6333.

Kids twice as likely to be JDs, teen moms if father not in home

A survey of 108 rapists undertaken by Raymond A. Knight and Robert A. Prentky revealed the 60 percent came from female-headed homes,. 70 percent of those describable as 'violent' came from female-headed homes. 80 percent of those motivated by 'displaced anger' came from female-headed (single-parent) homes.
"No-Fault Divorce: Proposed Solutions to a National Tragedy," 1993 Journal of Legal Studies 2, 19, citing R. Knight and R. Prentky, The Developmental Antecedents and Adult Adaptations of Rapist Subtypes, 14 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR 403-426 (1987).

Rapists, murderers, lifers, dropouts, abuse victims: mostly from broken homes

Effects of divorce on low-income boys (1994 Cornell U. study)

Of the juvenile criminals who are a threat to the public, three-fourths came from broken homes. Ramsey Clark, Crime in America: Observations on Its Nature, Causes, Prevention and Control (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), p.39. Cited in Amneus, The Garbage Generation

A 1987 study found that divorce - regardless of the economic status of the disrupted family - posed the strongest correlation with robbery rates in American cities larger than 100,000 population.

Brian Willats, Breaking Up is Easy To Do, available from Michigan Family Forum, citing R.J. Sampson, "Crime in Cities: The Effects of Formal and Informal Social Control," Crime and Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Cited in "Divorce: A Hazard to Your Health?" p. 16.

Fatherless youth at higher risk for jail - study
Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families, according to a new study released Thursday. Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University tracked a sample of 6,000 males aged 14-22 from 1979-93.

They found that those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated - even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant. See http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2555648262-e68
[if link doesn't work, copy and paste URL]
(quoted here from Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC's news listserv)

Studies have shown that there is a strong correlation with the number of single parent families and the crime rate in a cities with a population over 100,000 regardless of the socioeconomics or racial composition of the city.

"No-Fault Divorce: Proposed Solutions to a National Tragedy," 1993 Journal of Legal Studies 2, 19 citing R. Sampson, Crime in Cities: The Effects of Formal and Informal Social Control. In M. Tonry & Morris, Crime and Justice 271-301 (1987).

The rate of violent crime and burglary is related to the number of single parent households with children aged twelve to twenty.
"No-Fault Divorce: Proposed Solutions to a National Tragedy," 1993 Journal of Legal Studies 2, 19, citing Douglas A. Smith, G. and Roger Jarjoura, Social Structure and Criminal Victimiazation, 25 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 27-52 (1988).

A study showed that over half (53 percent) of the inmates of state correctional facilities had grown up without the benefits of a two parent household.
"No-Fault Divorce: Proposed Solutions to a National Tragedy," 1993 Journal of Legal Studies 2, 19, citing B. Chapman, Fairness For Families: An Organing Theme for the Administration's Social Policies, 2 The Journal of Family and Culture 23 (1986).

Delinquency rates are 10 to 15 percent higher in broken homes than in intact ones.
Brian Willats, Breaking Up is Easy To Do, available from Michigan Family Forum, citing Edward L. Wells and Joseph H. Rankin, "Families and Delinquency: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Broken Homes," Social Problems, 38:1, p. 87.

"The greater the proportion of single-mother families in a neighborhood, the higher the delinquency rate."
Don Terry, "Killed by Her Friends, Sons of the Heartland," New York Times, 18 May 1994, A1. Cited on page48 ofThe Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

Also another Source

Consider the link between crime rates and family structure. You can actually use the divorce rate in a given area to predict its level of crime, according to University of Chicago sociology professor Robert Sampson, who studied 171 U.S. cities with populations above 100,000 and found that the lower a city's divorce rate, the lower its crime rate.

Another study tracked 6,400 boys over 20 years and found those who grew up without fathers in the home were two to three times more likely to commit crimes. In Wisconsin (the only state to release government data on the link between divorce and crime), children of divorced parents are 12 times more likely to serve time in jail than are children from intact, two-parent families.

I was a single mother for seven years, and I have to agree with Greg, for the most part on the single parent issue. As a single mom, I not only had to drop my kid at a program before school, and pick him up at 6pm after school -- so really, I only saw him for breakfast and dinner/bedtime -- I was also exhausted much of the time trying to support us, keep the house by myself, and keep some tiny modicum of social life and social engagement for myself. Without good social engagement in my family of origin (church was a huge lifeline for me while Joseph was little -- and as soon as he was old enough to stuff envelopes, he got to come with me on volunteer gigs) I'd have ended up a TV zombie, completely disengaged from my community, raising a second-generation zombie.

Not every kid in a single parent household grows up without an investment in the social contract, but there's a far higher chance. It's not the fault of the single parents or the divorce laws per se, I think -- but it is the fault of all of us, that we take relationships (even those that involve kids) casually.

For example, if you go back a couple generations, my family is very "old country." I have two ex-husbands who both left me for younger women. In days of old, my older relatives and in-laws would have had a pretty un-gentle talk with my husband if he wandered. These days people just say "oh, well, he was following his bliss!"

It's not our business to interfere with the breakup of a marriage, any more than in previous years it was anyone's business to interfere if a husband beat the living crap out of his wife and/or kids. Well, the liberalization of divorce laws was supposed to give women the freedom to escape bad relationships, to a large extent. But what it has done, to a large extent, is been co-opted by men to preserve their freedom from having to cope with personal responsibility.

Although I consider myself left of center, I am socially conservative in that I believe we have issues with the culture and family that have destroyed social capital and the integrity of the social fabric. Our social contract is under attack from media-dazed generations who have no social skill, and only feel that they need to do what is required to get paid, not what is best for their communities. In this, I will say that the kids in jail are no more culpable than many suburban yuppies who give minimum effort at their work, no contribution to their community, and just add to the burden of the ecosystem disproportionally without giving back squat.

Unfortunately most liberal and conservative strategies are firmly planted in symptoms rather than causes -- because you can measure symptoms. So we incarcerate people, but we don't try to determine why they behave poorly. If we do, we say "product of divorce" as though that were the last step -- or go one step further to say "product of liberalization of divorce laws."

What we don't do is ask, "How can we reach young people and get them plugged back into community?"

I teach a class at MIT's Educational Studies Program called "How to Save the World in Your Spare Time." It's a non-ideological course on community engagement, community organizing, and applied civics.

The first image the kids see is a little stick figure at the base of a brick wall, and behind the wall a menacing gray cloud labeled "Government." I ask, "How many of you think this is the world you live in?" Generally every hand goes up.

I tell them, "My job in the next two hours is to teach you how illusory this is." And in two hours I can take a classroom of 7th-12th graders, and show them how society really works -- interested parties engaging in dialogue, media, and politics to change the world in the way they want to see it change.

We think it's terrible that we don't teach kids to balance a checkbook, but we don't think twice about the fact that children have NEVER learned real civic engagement in school (even my 1960's civics classes were taxonomic -- 50 states, 100 Senators, 9 justices,...).

But so long as we produce poor kids for incarceration and well-off kids as Enron employees, the system will be rotten to the core, and deteriorating.

So what can you do to change that? Do you volunteer in the schools? Do you go to city council meetings? Participate in a political party, or at least issue-related nonprofits, in your community (and don't start me on MoveOn and such -- that's an illusion of engagement -- connect with people who are already plugged into your community, please!) Do you even vote?

bruce k,
I am not sold on the view that education is be undermined by the war on terror, or that people are being marginalized.
There are people coming out of this educational system that are achieveing financial and personal success, while others are struggling to meet a common view of minimal needs. a significant difference between these two apths has more to do with the expectations each person has for themwelves and the choices they make to meet those expectatoins. There are kids living in the same neighborhoods, going to the same schools, and are achiving different results. What is the diference, the individuals, not some distant organizatoin.

Sheva,
The way I look at change is starting with that is closest to me [I can touch], second I don;t look for others to make the change for me.

Engaging the issues here [on Gather], offering your perspective and mehtods addrssing the issues, listening to others ideas, and discussing the differnece and the results we would like to see.

The difference from your youth is the accountablility of the individual, and with the loss of that accountability has been a strong infleunce on the changes in our society.

The discussion here is about the numbers and how bad htat is, there is little ineterst in the individuals and their respsobilities for the those numbers.
The feeling that events and organizations are the cause for individuals situation is a symptom of the move away from person control of their lives, and when people are excused from their control of their lives it is easier to give up on making the effort.
If bruce paused for only a moment thinking that whether the individual has some control of their lives, no accpeting that simply thinkng about it would justify all this discussion. [Since you don't know me well, a clarification, this is a humorous comment because bruce is thouhgtful.]

Back to what can we do, I have moved beyond my family and most recently been part of a program that talked to 8th graders about how a stronger high school curriculm will give them choices.

What people expect of themselves has more to do with what they achieve than it is given credit for achievement.

It's not our business to interfere with the breakup of a marriage, any more than in previous years it was anyone's business to interfere if a husband beat the living crap out of his wife and/or kids. Well, the liberalization of divorce laws was supposed to give women the freedom to escape bad relationships, to a large extent. But what it has done, to a large extent, is been co-opted by men to preserve their freedom from having to cope with personal responsibility.

Well, actually Sheva, it is our business because society created this problem.

Let's start with the facts. Women are the ones who initiate divorce 80% of the time (Brinig & Allen 2000). Not oddly women receive custody of minor children well over 80% of the time. In fact, grandparents receive custody of young children more often than fathers.

You mention men beating women and men abandoning women. The facts are that the four "A" of divorce: Abuse, Addiction, Abandonment and Adultry are only cited for the reason in 13% of all divorces. We know this because of numerious surveys and the four states who require the reason to be given for separation.

So what is the most often cited reason for divorce? It is "personal growth" on the part of the wife, not "my husband is a bad guy". In surveys, most divorced women do not fault their husband at all for the failure of the marriage.

So?

So what we are finding is that main driver for divorce among married people with children is the expectation of the wife that she will retain physical custody of the children - and in the case of middle-class divorces, that she will benefit from generous child support.

So what can we do?

Reform divorce and reform child custody and support by following the simple legal principle of gender equality.

When women have the expectation that they will have to share custody and share the expense of paying child support divorce drops like a stone.

Here is a great article on Wealth, Poverty and Marriage;

The Economist: The Frayed Knot

In her book "Marriage and Caste in America", she argues that the "marriage gap" is the chief source of the country's notorious and widening inequality. Middle-class kids growing up with two biological parents are "socialised for success". They do better in school, get better jobs and go on to create intact families of their own. Children of single parents or broken families do worse in school, get worse jobs and go on to have children out of wedlock. This makes it more likely that those born near the top or the bottom will stay where they started. America, argues Ms Hymowitz, is turning into "a nation of separate and unequal families".

A large majority—92%—of children whose families make more than $75,000 a year live with two parents (including step-parents). At the bottom of the income scale—families earning less than $15,000—only 20% of children live with two parents. One might imagine that this gap arises simply because two breadwinners earn more than one. A single mother would have to be unusually talented and diligent to make as much as $75,000 while also raising children on her own. And it is impossible in America for two full-time, year-round workers to earn less than $15,000 between them, unless they are (illegally) paid less than the minimum wage.

I found this segment especially sad.

Consider the home life of Lisa Ballard, a 26-year-old single mother in Morgantown. She strains every nerve to give her children the best upbringing she can, while also looking for a job. Her four-year-old son Alex loves the Dr Seuss book "Green Eggs and Ham", so she reads it to him, and once put green food colouring in his breakfast eggs, which delighted him. But the sheer complexity of her domestic arrangements makes life "very challenging", she says.

She has four children by three different men. Two were planned, two were not. Two live with her; she has shared custody of one and no custody of another. One of the fathers was "a butthole" who hit her, she says, and is no longer around. The other two are "good fathers", in that they have steady jobs, pay maintenance, make their children laugh and do not spank them. But none of them still lives with her.

Miss Ballard now thinks that having children before getting married was "not a good idea". She says she would like to get married some day, though she finds the idea of long-term commitment scary. "You've got to definitely make sure it's the person you want to grow old with. You know, sitting on rocking chairs giggling at the comics. I want to find the right one. I ask God: 'What does he look like? Can you give me a little hint?'"

If she does find and wed the man of her dreams, Miss Ballard will encounter a problem. She has never seen her own father. Having never observed a stable marriage close-up, she will have to guess how to make one work. By contrast, Ashley, the criminology student at the nearby university, has never seen a divorce in her family. This makes it much more likely that, when the time is right, she will get married and stay that way. And that, in turn, makes it more likely that her children will follow her to college.

This is an interesting discussion Shava.

Busy all day and unable to get back to read this alot has been said.

Greg, true we see different sides of the same issue and different
ways to affect it.

> He refers to a loss of "social capital".

This is essentially why I support what is called "socialism".
Not because I am not a capitalist, or do not love freedom,
or like communism (I don't) but because I see the failure
of our system in maintaining a society that is socially
sustainable when money and power is the bottom line
and human values are only given lip service.

I see the people from all over the world come here to
the US. Why are some many coming from Europe, India
and China? Why are Americans coming from a totally
different place inside a business than these people.

We have a model of the world that does not work.
It destroys cooperation, breeds chaos and cheating.
In high tech and science we are not suceeding because
our society is better, we are succeeding because we
pay better. We do this by shorting our own country in
a way.

No one wants the government to be oppressive or over
regulated, but those in the US who cry most about it are
the ones who as soon as they get some freedom screw
the country out of billions of dollars and head overseas.

Citizens in Europe feel the support they get from their
societies, it is not lip service. Here in America we put
anxiety and fear and people that is measurable, we make
people's lives so unnecessarily hard and full of friction
that they are measurably more likely to succumb to
certain diseases, and we do this in the name of freedom.

The mental contradictions of this country I think also
contribute to things like crime and shootings, but I'm not
a sociologist. Our popular mind is full of violence and
crime.

I have not had a chance to read the subsequent comments
but did see Mrs. Ballard. The problem is that the mathematics
of the underlying reality of the lives of peolpe in these situations
is never going to be analyzed by them.

I don't mean this to be condescending, but for women to have
children at an age where the consequence of that decision are
largely imagined by what they think they seee in the media and
around them but do not really understand is killing the country.

I remember when I was in high-school there was a woman who
got pregnant and had the child. She went on welfare and acted
the victim mother. She had parties for all the burnouts in the
school drinking and drugtaking while her kid would crawl on the
floor in front of blaring speakers and navigating the garbage on
the floor. Multiply this by thousands or millions and the money
that is burned up by this stuff is staggering. I still want to puke
thinking about that to this day.

Citizens in Europe feel the support they get from their societies, it is not lip service. Here in America we put anxiety and fear and people that is measurable, we make people's lives so unnecessarily hard and full of friction that they are measurably more likely to succumb to certain diseases, and we do this in the name of freedom.

Good Lord Bruce,

Either you have not been to Europe or you have spent too much time at the tourist attractions. Crime in Britian, France, and Germany is rampant. Europe has always had a much higher crime rate than in the United States. The majority of that has been property crime but in recent years, violent crime, especially assault and rape have passed the U.S.

One, of many sources

As for the justice and wisdom of Socialism forget it. Most of Europe has a multi-tiered society where some groups have social protections and others do not. This is especially true in France and Germany who have racial tiering that would make an old Southern segragationist blush.

In France, if you are white you probably have a subsidized rent controlled apartment, a job for life and access to clean, modern schools and healthcare facilities. On the other hand, if you are of Algerian or Mali descent, you live in a Stalinist apartment block that makes Cabrini-Green look like heaven. Your job is not protected, the school is crowded and ill equiped, and god help you if you have to go to the hospital or clinic.

Why do you think the French suburbs burn every few years?

If you are going to talk European Socialism, you better brush up on their class-system first. Yup, even the Socialists are class-driven.

Now let's talk about what supports Socialism in Europe. The answer is unbridled, brass-knuckles, no holds barred capitalism run by a wealthy elite who is limited to the graduates of a single elite university whose entry is strictly controlled by class and family connections.

Want to know why the French opposed the U.S. intervention in Iraq. It had NOTHING to do with "working through the UN" or morality or fear of George Bush. The French foreign policy is driven by TOTAL S. A. (the French version of hybrid between Exxon and Haliburton).

In Germany, its worse.

Greg, I have been in France, away from the tourist attractions, and I dispute several points of your comment, including the elite being from one University (easy to dispute, as the elite come from many countries with many institutions in their local countries they graduate from). And Frances objections to the Iraq war were never monolithic -- anyone who tells you an entire country or even a faction has a single focused casus belli is either willfully simplifying or a conspiracy theorist at heart.

The class system you are describing is largely based on immigration policy, which is orthagonal to class. Socialist systems are easily overwhelmed by refugees and such, so there is a structural reason for them to be shy to accept immigration regardless of race/origin. There are shortcuts for skilled and educated workers regardless of skin color or origin; those people are highly respected, even when their French is mediocre. ;)

Crime stats information I find varies from your a lot, perhaps because yours talks about rate of growth and mine talks about rate of crime per thousands of people.

I invite you to consider that your sources may not be as balanced as you think.

Greg, I have been in France, away from the tourist attractions, and I dispute several points of your comment, including the elite being from one University (easy to dispute, as the elite come from many countries with many institutions in their local countries they graduate from). And Frances objections to the Iraq war were never monolithic -- anyone who tells you an entire country or even a faction has a single focused casus belli is either willfully simplifying or a conspiracy theorist at heart.

New York Times: Elite French Schools Block the Poor's Path to Power

Most of the country's political leaders, on both the right and the left, come from the grandes écoles. President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, studied at the National School of Administration, which has produced most of the technocrats who have run France for the last 30 years. Two opposition leaders, François Hollande and Laurent Fabius, did, too.

"It's as if in the U.S., 80 percent of the heads of major corporations or top government officials came from Harvard Law School," said François Dubet, a sociologist at the University of Bordeaux.

I could not disagree with you more on your statement "The class system you are describing is largely based on immigration policy" The problem is race not immigration. Most of the people burning the suburbs of Paris were born in those suburbs - not abroad. Many of those people are children born of parents, born in those suburbs.

The suburbs of Paris burn for a reason.

Among the "white" population - class is still strong. It is very difficult for children of "lower classes" to gain entrance to elite school, see article above.

As for the crime statistic, look again at your graph. The United States comes in at the middle of the range of crimes per captia. Sadly, the graph does not include the heavy hitters of France, Germany, Spain or Italy.

Here is another article on the crime rate of Europe.

Again from The Weekly Standard: A Continent of Broken Windows

RIOTERS IN FRANCE HAVE TORCHED thousands of cars, injured scores of police, burned and shattered dozens of buildings, and killed at least one person. Not knowing what to make of it all, Americans may be forgiven if they file this away as an event that has nothing to do with normal life in France in particular and Europe in general. After all, U.S. media coverage routinely portrays Western Europe as a much more civil place than America. But that stereotype is badly out of date. Granted, riots like these are unusual, but they are taking place amidst rising crime that has left many European countries more uncivil than we often think, much more dangerous than in the past, and in important ways more crime-ridden than the United States. Europeans are now saddled with a crime problem that has been building for years and isn't disappearing anytime soon--alongside their high unemployment, slower growth, and social strains that were evident long before the recent round of rioting.

European crime rates have been converging with U.S. rates for years and have now overtaken them in several categories. This is partly the result of the decline in U.S. crime rates since the start of the 1990s, a decline that has taken rates below the levels that once kept Dirty Harry busy at home and gave America a violent reputation abroad. But the real story is relentlessly rising crime in Europe. Any serious report has to say from the start that the headline crime of homicide remains
rarer in Western Europe than in the United States. But most other crimes have reached distressing levels across the continent. However dicey it is to use cross-national crime statistics, several major trends are clear.

An impressive rise in theft, robbery, and burglary began in several European countries in the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the rates at which English, Swedes, French, Italians, Spaniards, and Dutch reported being victims of nonviolent crimes was in the same neighborhood as American rates. These crimes, and violent ones as well, kept climbing into the 1990s. By the end of that decade, when the United States was finally getting a handle on its problem and U.S. rates were heading downward, European crime stabilized at its new, high rates. Some countries, like Britain and Denmark, have since managed to nudge several categories of crime downward through expanded and improved police efforts. But the crimes they proved best at containing were often not violent crimes. Worse, violent crime continued to rise sharply into the early 2000s in France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The latest figures, scattered from 2000 to 2005, suggest that more assaults are committed per capita in England than in America, while Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch experience roughly the same assault rates as Americans. Robberies (which involve force or the threat of force) are as common in England and the Netherlands as in the United States. Theft rates have surged ahead of the United States in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway. Separately, auto thefts are now a European specialty, with Scandinavians, Brits, French, and Italians worse off than Americans. And the U.S. burglary rate is now lower than those in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Britain.

Of course, to be perfectly honest (and as a polite bow to Sheva), the Europeans have a slightly higher rate of crime reporting than does the United States.

See THE 2004/05 INTERNATIONAL CRIME VICTIMS SURVEY

Programs are wonderful if you can find the money to pay for them, and the bureaucracies they would create. I prefer a simple formula: This the law, if you break it, you go to prison, and you are punished. If more people were actually punished in prison, you would not want to return. We have to many people performing psycho-analysis on individuals who are simply predators in our society; I support the victims of their crimes, and want programs for them.

Greg, how many of the recent administration honchos have come from Ivy League schools? They say "grandes ecoles" -- that's not one school, it's plural. It refers to a system cognate to the Ivy League here.

Add folks like Brown, MIT and the military academies (elite schools, but not traditional "Ivies") and it's well over 80% for US presidents, going all the way back to Harding.

The only relatively recent exceptions are Reagan and Truman.

I'm sorry, that's just not compelling, as a comparison. We do not so much better. Yale Law School, Harvard Law, Annapolis, all have their elite status, and are not so integrated. I live a stone's throw from Harvard, and have known students who felt more pressured by the culture of conformity than by the academic demands. Even the Harvard Crimson documents the less lockstep but still strong admissions of the elite 16 prep schools in the northeast, here.

I was a scholarship student at Bryn Mawr College, and my dorm mate first semester was a "legacy." We had disagreements, and although it was proven that she was breaking every rule in the book, she got the favorable outcome -- because she was a legacy. This was 1977, which isn't quite ancient history.

There is *plenty* of elitism and classism in the good universities in the US, although it is somewhat fading.

Sheva, I have no doubts that elitism exists in the U.S. but from my experience, it is institutionalized in Europe.

Let's forget the elite schools for a moment. Me, I am a high school drop out. I stun my European counter-parts when I tell them that at conferences. I also stun people I met in bars when I tell them what I do. Most of them never had a chance to make it to college or a good school because they were "tracked" into their stations in life by a simple test in what we would know as "grade school".

In the U.S. our class system is soft. In Europe it is as hard as a rock. In Germany, if you did not get into the Gynasium, your not going to a good college, and what I mean by good college is what most Americans would know as State University.

Good help you if you are Algerian or a Turk.

I have to admit my lack of homework, thus can't contribute to the dicussion Euorpean society and their social system.

I rather look at where we are and look for ways we might change to improve peoples chances for a better life.

I look to the individual and how to influence them rather than defer to government or some other structure that takes the responsibility for peoples lives.

Do we feel that we have unjustifiedly jail too many people, or do we feel the cost of the incarceration is too much? ONce we have decide between the two we can then look at how to address the isssues to change it.

My view on laws and jails; laws are designed to facility people to live in close prozimty with others and not infringe on their pursuit of happiness or it is to capture the current thinking of the majority of society. ENforcement/confinement of those laws is designed to provide a means for discouraging the violation of the laws, at least while they are in jail the opportunity for violation is severely limited.

SInce I believe people make a personal choice to break a law, we might also may want to discuss how to help people to make the choice not to break laws.

There was a great experiment with the "three strikes" and "mandatory minimums." This has clearly not deterred crime, unless you think crime would be that much worse without them. It seems to me we need a clear re-examination of these laws which, along with bad fiscal policy, a huge debt, trade imbalances, and a terrifically expensive war, are draining us dry -- often for no clear reasons.

Perhaps if we put more subprime lenders in jail, and fewer pot smokers, we'd be better off as a society? ;)

This has clearly not deterred crime

Sure it has, it deters the people who are in jail.

The purpose for three-strikes is to cut-off the usual long, long, long list of felonies – at three.

It seems to me we need a clear re-examination of these laws which, along with bad fiscal policy, a huge debt, trade imbalances, and a terrifically expensive war, are draining us dry -- often for no clear reasons.

From what I have seen over my twenty years in criminal justice, most criminals live lives utterly oblivious to fiscal policy, social policy, the war - or much else.

It is stunning to walk into a crime scene and note that there is not a single printed word in the entire house. All too often there is not even a television or radio. There is usually a boom box - but that is a device to isolate the household from the outside world rather than to assimulate it.

Considering that crime has DROPPED significantly since the 1990's, may I suggest with tongue firmly placed in cheek, that bad fiscal policy, high debt, trade imbalance and an expensive war have dramatically REDUCED crime?

Shava,

You overwhelm me, all of a sudden you have all the social and governmentlal at once to be addressed. Its like yuo have asked us to set done to eat and yuo have served up an elephant. For me even to think about eating it, I need to start with one small bit, for this discussion it can be laws and there enforcement or reducing the numbers of incarcerated people.
What do you think the purpose of our laws should be? IS it to protect people from others violent actions, is it capture the common will of society at that point in time, is it to provide fairness to all, it to protect people from their own bad judgement, is it facilitate more and more people to live together will each makes their choices in life, or is there something else yuo feel laws should do?

It could be reducing the number of people in jails, it could be reducing the cost of the jails, it could be some other facet of enforcement and consequences, what are yuo mst concern with?

I feel that there are at least a few people reading that are giving some real thought to this article and the thread, if we pick a single point to focus on we will get some really good thoughts and comments.

Government brings in illegal drugs, according to documentaries I have seen. Assorted government programs mandate that people be on drugs prescribed by expensive doctors. Sometimes people are kept on so many drugs, they have what we used to call in the social-work trade, "excess disability." Some people on public assistance are drugged to the point where they cannot walk.

When the U.S. government decided to spray Monsanto chemicals in the highlands of Columbia, the choice of upper on the U.S. street moved to meth, which is really not controllable because it can be made out of easily obtained things.

Meanwhile, Americans still seem to believe the FDA protects them from things. Why would anyone believe such a thing?

Citizens are not afraid of libraries. There are some functions of government that are not easily corrupted and made menacing.

As for who is in prison, it's the same as the dog pound, I think. Largely the docile guys smoking pot who were easy to catch and slap cuffs on. Meth dealers, no, they are too dangerous to intercept. It's easier to just let them prey on the meek.

Also, please understand that the oil industry has the lobbyists to make sure that marijuana is classified as a more dangerous drug than meth. This is because the hemp plant could supply enough energy and other industrial chemicals and products to compete seriously with oil.

Organic companies like Dr. Bronner's have taken on the oil industry on this issue. Their products are popular enough that they could afford the legal cost of doing this. The oil fat cats are having trouble suppressing everything that could compete, even with the huge subsidies and tax breaks they have historically gotten from Congress.

Someone close to me worked for a defense contractor. The weapon he worked on never passed performance tests. That way they got more money every year.

The level of crass unpunished corruption in government trickles down. It's just that the poor can easily be set up to take the falls.

Make no mistake about it, that an easily grown plant is serious contraband means that any official grabbing some from an evidence room or anywhere else can plant it on your property or person and have you busted. This happened to a state legislator in Oregon when her marriage went bad.

Those who believe people do not get busted for one joint are the naive ones.

Mary,

I can believe that people get busted for the one (even their first) joint. I also belie that they know it is illegal, so they make a choice knowing full well wha the consequecnes can be.
I am a bit more sketical about govenrment setting up people is a major reason for the size of the prison population. Iknow each time I have recieved a ticket that it was legitimate.

Was the Oregon legislator set up by the govenrment or a pissed off spouse?