Posts Tagged ‘Crime’

Where is the Crime Wave?

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

One of the conservative justifications for Arizona’s new immigration law, which enables the police to roust undocumented immigrants just for being undocumented, is that Arizona is suffering under a crushing crime wave instigated by the influx from Mexico. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) called these crimes “terrorist attacks.”

last week, the FBI released its preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2009; it is hard to find evidence of such a crime wave. As reported in the Wall St. Journal:

Violent crime fell significantly last year in cities across the U.S., according to preliminary federal statistics, challenging the widely held belief that recessions drive up crime rates.

The incidence of violent crimes such as murder, rape and aggravated assault was down 5.5% from 2008, and 6.9% in big cities. It fell 2.4% in long-troubled Detroit and plunged 16.6% in Phoenix, despite a perception of rising crime that has fueled an immigration backlash.

The early figures, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, indicate a third straight year of decreases, along with a sharply accelerating rate of decline.

And the report shows many other cities in the Southwest have seen similar reductions, including El Paso Texas which is just across the border from the drug war in Juarez.

Last week, The Arizona Department of Public Safety released its crime report as well. The trend toward decreasing crime rates includes 3 of the 4 counties that border Mexico. The trend holds even along the border: three of Arizona’s four border counties reported less violent crime in 2009 than they did in 2002, when crime statistics were first made available on the Internet.

One exception is Maricopa County where Joe Arpaio   “America’s Toughest Sheriff” resides. Arpaio is famous for making immigration enforcement a priority and using violence and intimidation to get results.

Some results. Via Dara Lind, although crime in Maricopa dropped from 2008 levels, since 2002 it has increased 58%!

One of the arguments against Arizona’s new immigration law is that making immigration enforcement a priority will actually increase crime because anyone who looks Latino (or Latina) will avoid cooperating with police. In fact, many police chiefs and sheriffs in Arizona were opposed to the law for that reason.

Sheriff Joe may be making their argument for them. And if crime goes up subsequent to the law being enforced, what conclusion should we draw?

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Posted in Immigration, Prisons and Crime, Watching the Conservatives | No Comments »

American Justice

Monday, January 25th, 2010

NPR’s story on our bail system in the U.S. is fascinating and disgusting.

If you are charged with a crime and you have the money for the bondsman you go free. If you don’t have the funds you languish in jail—guilty or not.

And when you are in jail you can’t do the work necessary to defend yourself—guilty or not—and you can’t hold down a job that would convince a judge or jury that you deserve parole rather than a jail sentence.

For some defendants, for lack of a few hundred dollars, they spend years in jail and have an incentive to plead guilty just to minimize jail time—even if not guilty.

And why do we still have this obviously unjust system in place? Because of the political bribes paid by bail bondsmen.

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Posted in Prisons and Crime | No Comments »

A New Day?

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

It really is a new political climate. 

Jim Webb, a centrist Democrat from Virginia, introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to thoroughly re-examine the justice system to address the excessive levels of incarceration and the lack of effective rehabilitation in our prisons.

As Webb’s bill pointed out:

  • With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses 25% of the world’s reported prisoners.
  • Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.
  • Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.
  • Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.
  • Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

Incredibly, Ryan Grim reports that:

Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more…

The bill was cosponsored by the entire Senate Democratic leadership and enthusiastically welcomed by prominent liberal bloggers. The blogosphere, dominated by younger activists, has been particularly open to calls for drug and criminal justice policy reform.

Support for the proposal has come in from the right, too. The Lynchburg News and Advance a conservative paper that publishes in the hometown of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, weighed in favorably.

I have been following politics for over 40 years. During that time,  anyone who raised the issues of excessive incarceration and lack of rehabilitation would have immediately been branded as a simpering fool, too weak willed to stand up to criminals who threaten the fabric of society.

Our prison system is a national scandal, and has been dysfunctional for decades.

The fact that a Democrat can introduce a bill like this without conservative demagogues trying to take advantage is a powerful indicator that political winds have indeed shifted.

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Posted in Politics, Prisons and Crime | No Comments »