Quote from: Laura Squirrel on August 09, 2014, 08:15:30 PM
So, what is the correct way?
Good question. This is going to require some soul searching that we as a society are long overdue for engaging in. Why is our homicide rate so much higher than the rest of the first world? Why is our prison population so much higher than the rest of the first world, in addition to being the worlds highest? We are jailing more people for longer than anyone else and it is not getting us results. Something else we are doing is not working.
At the same time, crime on wall street, which has global consequence with reach and scale far greater than any death row inmate or supermax felon could dream of goes on with impunity, with crimes they commit essentially made legal through their access to our political leaders. These people turn our water flammable, crash the economy, launder money for drug lords, hired mercenaries to kill third world labor organizers, and have golden parachutes to not suffer consequences which often amount to a fine levied against a bottomless bank account that is less than what they made breaking the law in the first place or what they spent in bribing politicians.
When it comes to street crime, which is actually on a downward trend, I believe what it comes down to is our unwillingness to provide meaningful safety nets, or the free healthcare and mandatory vacation time that much of the rest of the world demands of their employers. I believe it comes down to the dismantling of tariffs and "barriers" to trade and by extension our industrial infrastructure for the sake of "free" trade, negotiated at the behest of the super rich, to make themselves richer by moving jobs overseas. I believe it comes down to the lack of will on the part of the political class to do what is right, to really declare war on poverty rather than what makes getting elected easier. All of these things come down to poverty.
Poverty has a measurable and significant destructive impact on the development of children. The stress of growing up in this environment, stressed out parents, parents who are working three minimum wage jobs rather than good union jobs, the trauma of hearing gun shots out of your window, of authority figures that you can't trust, lack of an ability to just go to the doctor, it interferes with their ability to develop executive brain functioning, of working memory and attention, of empathy and social attachment. AS early as kindergarten, children from low SES households come into school at a disadvantage.
Moreover, when you see personality disorders developing in a poor kid, its a conduct disorder. When a similar personality is seen in a rich adult, he is ambitious, an a type, an alpha male, a wall street hot shot. Only one is a "thug," a "criminal."
Tough on crime is not working. The death penalty is not working. We have been tough on crime for decades. We need smart on people. We need to look on our neighbors, our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free as brother, as sister, as comrade. We need safety nets. We need the union jobs back, or a step further, worker ownership. We need a guaranteed standard of living. We need guaranteed single payer healthcare. We need an end to the war on drugs and a new war on poverty, on inequality. We need to reconsider allowing people to become the richest among us, not through working but through owning, through shuffling money from one place to another place in a way that threatens our economy. We need no more of too big to fail or jail but to nationalize those industries that can't behave.
