Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today's near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling" (1997), "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" (1998), "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" (2000) and "More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime" (2003).
If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue -- the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.
Last July, Obama said that "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:
"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."
So let me ask Mr. Progressive out there. Are these life time criminals living in the suburbs or are they living in the cities where they continue to victimize the poor and less fortunate?
4 comments:
I know many cops here in Cincinnati who feel like they are in a no win situation within the African American community.
Here in Cincinnati the victims of crime are disproportunatly African American. So if the white and black cops don't enforce the laws in the African American communities they are accused of being racist by neglect. But the victimizers of blacks are disproportunately black as well. So enforcement involves arrest and conviction of blacks, which leads to accusations of police racism.
In the middle of all this, the progressives sit behind their mahogany desks and try to find the cause of all this racism. They look in every crack and crevasse in society for the evil culprit. They usually come to the conclusion that society's producers, i.e. suburban families and employers are to blame. Yet some how their Ivy league socialogy textbooks never instruct them to look in the mirror. This is the case, even considering that progressive leadership has been the one constant force at work in the inner cities for the last 40years.
If keeping young black men out of prison were the real goal of progressives, they would have observed failure and changed their playbook by 1972.
But the real goal of progressivism has nothing to do with solving society's problems. It has to do with obtaining a full monopoly of power of few over the many. Once they achieve that they can simply declare all problems "solved".
You need your own blog dude.
Over the top? My bad. I will refrain from future comment.
Over the top? No way. It was spot on.
But with that kind of common sense, you'll probably have a hard time making friends with "progressives".
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