Pubdate: Mon, 22 Jul 2013
Source: Winnipeg Free Press (CN MB)
Copyright: 2013 Winnipeg Free Press
Contact: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/send_a_letter
Website: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/502
Page: A9

CRIME DECLINE DEFIES LEFT, RIGHT

In the 1990s John DiIulio, a conservative American academic, argued a
new breed of "superpredators... kids that have absolutely no respect
for human life and no sense of the future," would terrorize Americans
almost indefinitely. He was not alone. Experts were convinced crime
would keep rising. Law-abiding citizens would retreat to gated
communities, patrolled by security guards. Politicians and police
chiefs could do little except bluster and try to fiddle the statistics.

DiIulio later recanted, and it is clear the pessimists were wrong.
Even as he was writing, America's crime wave was breaking. Its cities
have become vastly safer, and the rest of the developed world has
followed. From Japan to Estonia, property and people are now safer
than at almost any time since the 1970s. Confounding expectations, the
recession has not interrupted the downward trend. Even as America
furiously debates the shooting of Trayvon Martin, new data show the
homicide rate for young Americans is at a 30-year low. Some crimes
have all but died out. Last year, there were just 69 armed robberies
of banks, building societies and post offices in England and Wales,
compared with 500 a year in the 1990s. In 1990, some 147,000 cars were
stolen in New York. Last year, fewer than 10,000 were. In the
Netherlands and Switzerland, street dealers and hustlers have been
driven out of city centres; addicts there are now elderly men, often
alcoholics, living in state ! hostels. In countries such as Lithuania
and Poland, the gangsters who trafficked people and drugs in the 1990s
have moved into less violent activities like fraud. Cherished social
theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted the decline
of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would
unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people
are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to
have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better-behaved
than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued crime could never
be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.

There is no single cause of the decline; rather, several have
coincided.

Western societies are growing older, and most crimes are committed by
young men. Policing has improved greatly in recent decades, especially
in big cities such as New York and London, with forces using computers
to analyze the incidence of crime. In some parts of Manhattan, this
helped to reduce the robbery rate by more than 95 per cent.

The epidemics of crack cocaine and heroin appear to have burned out.
The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved.
Car immobilizers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security
guards and marked money have all but done in bank robbery. Alarms and
DNA databases have increased the chances a burglar will be caught. At
the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic
gizmos are so cheap. Even small shops now invest in closed-circuit
television cameras and security tags.

Some crimes now look very risky -- and that matters because, as every
survey of criminals shows, the main deterrent for crime is the fear of
being caught. Many conservatives will think this list omits the main
reason crime has declined: the far harsher prison sentences introduced
on both sides of the Atlantic over the past two decades. One in every
100 American adults is now in prison. This has obviously had some
effect -- a young man in prison cannot steal your car -- but if tough
prison sentences were the cause, crime would not be falling in the
Netherlands and Germany, which have reduced their prison populations.
New York's prison population has fallen by a quarter since 1999, yet
its crime rate has dropped faster than that of many other cities.

Harsh punishments, and in particular long mandatory sentences for
certain crimes, increasingly look counterproductive. American prisons
are full of old men, many of whom are well past their criminal years,
and non-violent drug users, who would be better off in treatment. In
California, the pioneer of mandatory sentencing, more than a fifth of
prisoners are older than 50.

To keep each one inside costs taxpayers $47,000 a year. And because
prison stresses punishment rather than rehabilitation, most of what
remains of the crime problem is really a recidivism issue. In England
and Wales, for example, the number of first-time offenders has fallen
by 44 per cent since 2007. The number of offenders with more than 15
convictions has risen.

Politicians seem to have grasped this. In America, the number of new
mandatory sentences enacted by Congress has fallen. Even in the
Republican South, governors such as Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal have
adopted policies favouring treatment over imprisonment for drug users.
Britain has stopped adding to its prison population. But more could be
done to support people when they come out of prison (at the moment, in
Britain, they get 46 pounds) and to help addicts.

In the Netherlands and Switzerland, addiction to hard drugs is being
reduced by treatment rather than by punishment. American addicts, by
contrast, often get little more than counselling. Policing can be
sharpened, too -- and, in an era of austerity, will have to be.

Now that officers are not rushed off their feet responding to car
thefts and burglaries, they can focus on prevention. Predictive
policing, which employs data to try to anticipate crime, is
particularly promising.

More countries could use civilian "community support officers" of the
sort employed in Britain and the Netherlands, who patrol the streets,
freeing up better-paid police officers to solve crimes. Better-trained
police officers could focus on new crimes. Traditional measures tend
not to include financial crimes such as credit card fraud or tax
evasion. Since these are seldom properly recorded, they have not
contributed to the great fall in crime. Unlike rapes and murders, they
do not excite public fear. But as policing adapts to the technological
age, it is as well to remember that criminals are doing so, too.
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MAP posted-by: Matt