Crime, What Crime?

I think this article by Glenn C. Loury misses some very important points and skews some others but we have a Big problem with crime. That problem is that our prison systems are becoming the biggest source of criminals.

We should remember this the next time we think we should have more cops or think it is a good idea when a politician says we need more jails.

...the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck. There's much more here>>>

But Loury, when he looks at reasons for the decline in crime instead of the bloodbath he and others predicted, conveniently avoids mentioning the link between legalized abortion and the fall of crime rates after the nineties. The key thing we should come away with from this article is that we, as a society, will have an even bigger crime rate when the coming wave of prison releases happen unless we drastically change the way we treat people in prison, treat them when they get out and the way we hold the big business of prison/politics responsible and accountable.

With the recent revelations of abuse and horror perpetrated in the Texas Youth Commission prisons, [lots more that Fox like news will never mention here] we should see that many of the so called corrections people we have today spend some time in their own soup. We must address the reasons for crime. It is much harder than just putting everyone behind bars and requires attention spans longer than this blog. But if we don't do it and keep doing it, the biggest terror threat by far to you, me and this nation will come from our very own training camps run by our very own cops.