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Media-bashers often complain that newspapers, TV broadcasts and radio programs pay far too much attention to bad news and avoid the positive.
Much as I hate to agree with these critics, I've seen
their point in the past couple of days. The lead story on
every outlet has been some variant of Crime dropping in
the United States.
In a sane society, perhaps, this would be good news. But we live in America, and it's hard to see who will benefit from this downward trend.
Republicans certainly won't. They campaign on law and
order,
and that they're several orders of magnitude
tougher than those bleeding-heart knee-jerk card-carrying
ACLU-member soft-on-crime criminal-coddling pinkos in the
other party.
They call for trying 14-year-olds as adults (maybe those rioting kids in Boulder last month had a point -- if you're mature enough to a lethal injection when you're a teenager, why aren't you mature enough to order a drink in a tavern?) and for the death penalty for any and all drug transactions (which illustrates the real horror of marijuana -- if you quit smoking it and go into politics, then in 25 years or so, you become a sanctimonious hypocrite).
And yet the preliminary 1996 figures released Sunday represented a five-year trend, which means that this continued decline in crime has occurred during the presidency of Bond-market Bill Clinton, a fellow frequently accused (although without much evidence, to be sure) of being a Democrat.
It's not real clear to me what any president can do about the crime rate (aside from direct personal contributions, of course, and there it appears that Clinton has not contributed to the decline), but Republicans are quick to blame Democrats if the crime rate goes up (recall Richard Nixon in 1968?) and so they ought to give credit when it drops.
Thus the Republicans could be losing one of their best campaign issues, which means they will be looking for something else to scare us with: uppity women, hip-hop music, environmentalists, citizens who resemble immigrants, drop-outs, PhD's in the academic elite -- the possibilities are frightening.
At least cracking down on crime in the streets
was predictable in election years, and didn't lead to an
undue amount of civic pogroms and divisiveness.
Nor is a drop in crime good news for one of our major industries -- prisons.
If there are fewer murders, robberies and rapes, then fewer people go to prison, which would be a switch. In 1970, there were 196,429 inmates in federal and state prisons. The general population rose by 31 percent from then to 1994, but the prison population rose by 418 percent, to 1,016,720.
The drop in the crime rate means less prison construction, and thus fewer jobs in the building trades. It means fewer prison guards, and that's been a growth sector of the economy lately; before these numbers came out, the experts predicted that we'd go from 310,000 correction officers in 1994 to 468,000 in 2005.
Plus, with fewer prisoners to work for 30 cents an hour, America won't be as competitive in the emerging global marketplace.
Clearly, that's a problem, but as I've noted before, my little town of Salida is on the leading edge. And here, whenever we're in danger of running short on criminals, the city government increases the supply by adding to the list of crimes.
Just a month ago, I could walk to the neighbor's house while carrying a half-empty can of beer -- now it's a crime. It's also a crime now if we stand on the sidewalk and gossip for more than five minutes -- in some parts of town, it's only a crime late at night, but here it's a crime during the day, too, since we're within 1,000 feet of a school. A kid walking home from a movie or poetry reading, if it gets out after 11 p.m., is a criminal, and so are his parents, who are presumed to have consented to this monstrous misbehavior.
In this county, the sheriff wants a new 100-bed jail to replace the current 20-bed facility, and it might have been hard to justify without an increase in the supply of criminals.
And that, I suspect, is what will happen as the rest of the nation again follows the lead of progressive Salida. The drop in crime rate will be a fleeting phenomenon. Our rulers will respond by criminalizing an increasing numbers of everyday actions, and thus our economic and political systems will preserved.
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