Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts

The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.
NY Times Link

Now lets follow the stats on the left coast when they furlough 40,000 "non-violent" felons.

[This message was edited by JohnR on 05-25-11 at .]

Good post, JR.

I do feel sorry for the law abiding folks in California who will be flooded with parolees over the next few years.

I do confess I'm not really sure why California didn't want to release this guy. I am not a sympathetic person when it comes to kidnappers and rapists, but this guy is still going to be in a prison of sorts. Not really sure how he's going to pose an unreasonable threat as a quadriplegic.

Quadriplegic denied medical parole

BAR,

I guess it depends on your goals for sending people to prison. I do not believe it is society's job to rehabilitate, or give opportunities to people just because they have been sentenced to prison. These are things people are free to attain after they serve the punitive time for committing a crime (and, of course, were available to the people BEFORE they committed crimes as well). I'm not opposed to rehab and job training programs--if they're available and the cons are successful, great but I just don't believe that's the goal of prison, nor is prison the optimal place for these things to occur. Attempting to say the purpose of prisons is to make better people just muddies the waters, in my opinion. Does anyone REALLY believe that prison is a rehabilitative place first and foremost?

Why can't it just be simple? Prison is where people go as the result of their choice to commit a crime? If a person commits a worse crime, they stay longer. If they commit a crime that a jury finds especially reprehensible, they stay in jail forever.

I'm guessing the "overcrowding" is less than the numbers of people who live together in plenty of these trailers, apartments, and houses that hold an astonishing number of extended family members...and the electricity probably works, too.

couldn't have been said better, suzanne.

Computer errors prompted California prison officials to mistakenly release an estimated 450 inmates with "a high risk for violence" as unsupervised parolees in a program meant to ease overcrowding, according to the state's inspector general.

Article

What the program was supposed to do is identify those inmates who are not a threat to society, so they can be released early AND not be on supervised parole. The article states that the only way they can re-incarcerate those inmates mistakenly released is if they commit a new crime.

In short, the program was supposed to identify all the inmates who were actually just errant Boy Scouts, and didn't really need to be locked up. This was supposed to save a lot of taxpayers' money.

The problem, of course, is that there are not very many errant Boy Scouts in prison. In fact, there may not be any, but in any case their numbers are exceedingly low. So if the program is to work, you have to manipulate the criteria for deciding who to release. Hey! I have an idea! Let's just look at their rap sheets, & ignore all their infractions while in the joint! Let's ignore all the prison intel we have that they have joined a dangerous prison gang! And let's only count actual convictions on their rap sheets! When you do that, you can find 450 psuedo-errant Boy Scouts out of 160K inmates.

But because they aren't really errant Boy Scouts, they'll probably do poorly on parole, and be right back in the joint in no time. Therefore, let's excuse them from parole.

And that, my friends, is what the Texas Legislature calls, "being smart on crime."

So what do you guys suggest be done?

More importantly, how do you propose to pay for it all?

The economic realities are what they are. Texas, California, and 42 other states are facing HUGE billion dollar budget deficits. Saying that the cost should not matter is part of what got us into this mess to begin with.

Who here feels that their office is not getting all of the money it should in order to function properly?

Who here feels that they are not paying enough taxes and wishes that they could pay more?

My wife's hospital just cut the work week from 40 hrs to 32 hrs, with the feeling being that some of a job is better then none, so nobody would get laid off.

Schools are important because they, hopefully, prevent crime by teaching people job and life skills.

Hospitals and Medicare programs are important because they help save peoples lives.

Roads and bridges are important because, well, until they develop the flying cars that they promised us in the 60's we are dependant upon them to get where we need to go.

USDA and FDA guys are pretty important so we don't get poisoned by bad stuff.

I don't know about you guys, but I kinda like going to State and National parks every so often instead of just staring at concrete and asphalt.

Oh, and I kinda like having the military around to keep the commies and terrorists away, too.

And cops and fire fighters are nice, too, for all the obvious reasons.

So now we have are little list of absolutely vital things, vital things that we can all agree are pretty important, but no way to pay for all of it.

So how do all you lock 'em up types propose to pay for all of the incarceration that you want?

Texas spends about 6-1/2% of her state budget on TDC. Education gets over 50% of the state budget, most of it going to primary and secondary education. Even so, most schools get most of their money not from the state, but from local taxes. If you want to cut the budget, the answer is obvious.

"But . . . but . . . but--don't you care about THE CHILDREN?" I hear a tremulous voice asking.

Yes, I do. I think cutting education may be a way to improve education. Much of the extra expense of education is due to the apparently massive amount of paper work Austin demands from the schools. One way to save money is to cut out that kind of micro-management that the legislature loves to create.

Another thing is to allow local school boards to run their schools, including allowing them to fire administrators.

For example, one school I know of has an elementary school, an intermediate school, and a middle school, which collectively cover kindergarten thru 8th grade, and collectively have aprox. 900 students. Each "school" has a well paid principal, and a well paid asst. principal, and of course they have secretaries, etc. The principals are only responsible for managing the teaching staff. The school buses, the cafeteria, and the custodians are managed further up the food chain.

The school I attended was 1--8th grade and had a 1,000 students. It had one principal and one asst. principal, and 2 secretaries. In addition to managing the teachers, the principal was responsible for the physical plant, the school bus, and bus driver, the nurse's office, and the cafeteria.

Another thing, my grade school had was one school bus with one mean bus driver. If you rode the bus, you were expected to walk to a bus stop and wait for the bus with other kids in the neighborhood. This other school operates a huge fleet of buses, each manned by a bus driver and someone riding shotgun to maintain order. And they pick up and drop off each kid at his door.

My mother thought our grade school was pretty sorry, but we got a far better education than the kids get at this other school, and I'm sure we were educated at a fraction of the cost.

But there are ways to save money in criminal justice. TDC spends many millions of dollars on psychotropic medications, because it houses so many paranoids, and others who are mentally deranged. In the less enlightened past, Texas housed most of these people in the state hospitals. But in the 1970s Texas, along with the rest of the nation, joined the de-institutional craze. I'm told that legislators, who gained most of their knowledge about mental hospitals from watching "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest," downsized our state hospitals, and upped the requirements for committing someone to them. For example, in 1971, I'm told, the San Antonio State Hospital had 3,000 beds. Today it has, I think 150 beds. Statewide the 12 or so State hospitals have something like 2,440 beds.

So what happened to all those crazy people? Many are in TDC. Probably it would be cheaper to treat them in a state hospital, and certainly it would be more humane.

The only problem is if you don't have statewide standards, there is nothing to compare to, and that is why we will never return to local control of schools.

Running a school is a major undertaking, and I don't think elementary schools could get by without assistant principals. I think most school districts are top-heavy with administration, though. They could use a few more secretaries, and no assistant superintendants (who get REALLY high salaries,relative to the teachers, by the way). Usually one secretary runs the school, but each superintendent gets an assistant sup. and a secretary. To me, that is a huge waste--that the top of the chain gets as much adminstrative help as an entire school.

I would love to see how much of the education budget goes to text books. Technology ought to take over here. It would be cheaper to put a computer on each and every desk with cds of the contents of the books than to replace those books every year. What a waste, and having been a teacher in a previous life I can attest that we didn't use them enough to make them worth while because they were not the best sources of info--we used them as a base some of the time, but used a lot of other sources as well.

Hard Times, Fewer Crimes

The economic downturn has not led to more crime--contrary to the experts' predictions. So what explains the disconnect? Big changes in American culture, says James Q. Wilson

(FYI, Wilson is one of our leading criminologists, but I like him because of his ability to think outside the box.)

The school I am thinking of does very well on the TAKS test. They are rated "Exemplary," which I suppose is top notch. On any subject outside the TAKS test, the kids are very uneducated.

I taught 8th grade CCD (Sunday school) at a Catholic parish for a couple of years. Once I asked the kids if they knew anything about the Roman Empire. Half said they had heard of it, but otherwise hadn't a clue. The other half had never heard of the Roman Empire.

How can you know anything about European history if you don't know anything about the Roman Empire, I asked. They said they had world history in the 6th grade, but spent most of their time on China, and a little on Iran & Afghanistan. "We ran out of time before we reached Europe," one boy explained.

Another time I asked them if they knew where North Carolina was located. "Isn't it near Montana?" one replied. I asked: is N.C. in the North or the South? Another said, "Well . . . it's called NORTH Carolina, I guess . . ." and one of his classmates then interjected, "naw, that doesn't mean anything." They hadn't a clue where N.C. is.

You ought to know where every state in the union is by the time you get to 8th grade. On top of that, you should know that NC was one of the original 13 states, and an ally of Texas in the Civil War. Their ignorance of N.C. told me they knew nothing about American history.

All this school worries about is the TAKS test. A Co. Atty. I know even told me a school counselor called him up and asked if he could give a JD who was due to be released from detention, an extra day of detention, so he would not be able to take the TAKS test. She was concerned that if he took the TAKS test, he'd lower the school's collective score.

At least at this particular school, the TAKS test has completely subverted real education.

Instead of a TAKS test, there should be a general knowledge test to graduate from the 8th grade and from high school. These tests would be like the DPS drivers license written test. You get so many points off for each missed question, and if you fall below so many points, you fail. Otherwise you pass. Some questions are automatic failure questions. Don't know who George Washington was? Sorry, you fail. Never heard of Abe Lincoln? Too bad, you fail. If you fail, you can come back in a week and take the test again. It might be 100 questions long, and the questions are drawn from a possible 1,000 question bank of questions.

The point of the test is just to certify that an 8th grade grad or a high school grad meets certain min. standards. It is not hard. Then the school could spend the rest of the time teaching.

We Southerners perfer the term War of Northern Aggression as opposed to Civil War.

California Governor's opinion of standardized testing

Not everything can be completely formulaic in life. It sets our youths' expectations that there is nothing for them to think about - just memorize and you're fine. Someone else will always be there to think for them and dictate to them what their actions and consequences should be. This may be an overgeneralization, but it feels like eventually we will run out of thinkers because everyone will be trained to be followers.