My Rants on Crime and Punishment

To Tell the Truth on Crime, or to Win the Votes

As the mayoral races in both Minneapolis and St. Paul heat up, crime is becoming an increasingly hot topic. Candidates grow more strident every day in their attempts to label opponents as soft on crime. John Derus calls for more police. Sharon Sayles Belton calls for more police, more prison space, and more prosecutors. Derus is quoted as saying "all I care about is that if you break the law, you commit violence, you go to jail." Over in St. Paul, Andy Dawkins claims that Norm Coleman "is using outright lies to label me as soft on crime." Both Dawkins and Coleman would like to be seen as tough on crime.

What the voters are being offered, for the most part, is more and surer punishment for violations of the law. This is certainly an accepted approach to dealing with criminal behavior but, if it were effective, the crime rate would have been going down, not up, since this is exactly the approach we have been using for generations. The U.S. now has a greater proportion of its population in prison than any other industrialized nation. Common sense would tell us that this should give us a very low crime rate. So much for common sense.

To judge the effectiveness of an increased police presence, one need only look to New York City. Former Minneapolis Police Chief Tony Bouza compared the New York City police force to an army of occupation. In many parts of New York City it is not uncommon to see more police than civilians on the street. Needless to say, this level of police visibility has not made New York one of our safer cities.

The fact is that any practical approach to crime prevention that is based on punishment will not be very successful. Researchers in the area of human and animal behavior have known since the nineteen-fifties that punishment, in order to be effective, must be immediate, consistent, and unpleasant. This tells us unequivocally that prison can never be effective in preventing crime. We can make it unpleasant, but no amount of police, prosecutors, or prison space will allow us to catch a criminal every time they commit a crime and deliver the punishment immediately.

One of the many failures of our educational system is that it has failed to rid people of the common sense notion that punishment, in the form of prison is, or can be, an effective deterrent to crime. Firm in their belief that punishment is the answer, Americans look at the ever-rising crime rate and assume that there must be something wrong with the way we are implementing this solution: the punishment is not severe enough, it doesn't last long enough, too many criminals avoid it, etc. So strong is the attachment to the idea that punishment is the answer that anyone suggesting alternative approaches (often ones that have been proven effective) is called soft on crime and laughed out of town (or out of office). When one politician says, "I'd like to spend your money on social programs that have been shown to reduce the crime rate" and another says "My opponent is soft on crime; I hate criminals and I'm going to use your money to make sure that every criminal gets as much punishment as possible," you don't need to be a political insider to predict which one will be elected.

Sadly, most people are more than happy to have billions of their tax dollars spent on punishment but balk whenever someone suggests programs that have been shown to be effective in fighting crime and that are less expensive in the long run: counseling for families of juvenile offenders, child-abuse prevention, drug treatment, Head Start, Big Brother and Big Sister Programs, inner-city youth clubs, job-training, education, and many others. Curiously, anyone who proposes these as the primary means to fight criminal behavior is branded soft on crime, as though supporting methods that are inexpensive and effective is something only a bleeding-heart liberal would do.

A few years ago, the City of Duluth had a 23% drop in juvenile crime in one year after requiring mandatory family counseling for juvenile offenders. Was this an expensive program? Not compared to the cost of hiring enough extra police officers to achieve the same results; not compared to the cost of imprisonment; and certainly not compared to the astronomical cost of letting the offenders become hardened criminals.

Certainly there are dangerous criminals that need to be locked up but let's not imagine that this practice will do much to lower the crime rate. Extra police on the street may deter crimes in their immediate vicinity and adding prison space and prosecutors will make punishment slightly surer and swifter but the punishment will never be consistent or immediate enough to be effective.

Most of us would be happy to have our tax money go to support programs that would result in a lower crime rate for us and for our children. Some of the mayoral candidates clearly know enough about criminology to understand what it actually takes to bring crime rates down. It's sad that almost any intelligent statement by a candidate about crime triggers a vicious attack from their opponent and results in a loss of votes.

Crime Efforts Misdirected

The state planning agency's recent poll indicates that over half of the people polled thought that crime would get worse in the future. They are probably right since much of the anti-crime effort is completely misdirected.

The facts are simple enough. If you spend the majority of your crime-prevention dollars on punishment by giving longer and surer sentences, (a very expensive proposition) the crime rate goes up. If, on the other hand, you spend the majority of the money on true crime prevention with programs that promote employment, fight homelessness, prevent child abuse, keep kids in school, counsel offenders and their families, and avoid sending juvenile offenders to prison whenever possible, the crime rate goes down.

Unfortunately, the press and most politicians are doing their best to convince the public that the opposite is true. Governor Carlson's staff actually bragged about the fact that the governor wouldn't have "experts" on crime at his recent crime conference, preferring victims and people who dealt directly with victims. This is like suggesting that cars be designed by people who have been in car accidents and by tow-truck drivers.

Apparently, the governor feels that spreading the traditional misinformation about crime and its solutions will help his campaign more than actually fighting crime with programs that have been proven to work.

Punishment and Retribution Not the Way to Go

A letter in the Sunday Pioneer Press suggests that "just punishment and retribution should be a civilized society's No. 1 concern." Perhaps the author would be happier in some of the totalitarian dictatorships where those goals are at or near the top of the list. In the United States, we've concentrated on giving our citizens the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and so far it's worked out fairly well.

Punishment, as anyone who has studied it can tell you, is not, and never will be, an effective way of improving society. The United States is now, with the possible exception of Russia, the most punitive country on earth. Unfortunately, the more punishment fails to be effective, the more people insist we're not doing enough of it.

There are effective ways of preventing crime and, for the most part, we know what they are. Punishment is not one of them. Minnesota has had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation mainly because of our wisdom in avoiding punishment whenever possible in dealing with juvenile offenders. Let's not let our anger at criminals stampede us into using methods of crime prevention that are known to be more expensive and less effective.

The views and opinions expressed on this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Anoka-Ramsey Community College.
	Comments or Problems: Robin Raygor (E-mail)		Last Updated - 13-Nov-2003
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