The entirely predictable crime rise

COVER STORY: “Cities see crime surge as threat to their revival: Louisville, Trenton, N.J., and other metros whose downtowns are booming once again fear nationwide jump in violent crime may hurt prosperity,” by Haya El Nasser, USA Today, 25 January 2007, p. 1A.

Police chief of Providence came to me after PNM was published and we talked urban crime as the analogy of Gap violence.

This was his revelation: the three-strikes and other harsh-penalty laws of the previous decade had surged the prison population, but soon the number of ex-cons being released (about 600k, if I remember) would surpass the number of new cons going in (about 500k). A simple prediction: urban crime was going to go up all across America.

The bulk of these guys are functionally illiterate and go right back to the same broken communities and neighborhoods where they previously failed, except now where those areas are gentrified, we’ve got a “new” problem “out of nowhere.”

Jobs are the “exit strategy” there too, along with “broken windows” community policing.

Very similar to the Gap.

For how this phenomenon can get cast in real estate, see this post from Coming Anarchy's Chirol (always intriguing and here with perfect timing for my purposes) on gated communities.

Comments

[zenpundit]

Sean,

Can't access my email so I'm leaving this here forTom:

Interview with LTC John Nagl

http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll13&CISOPTR=331

[Lexington Green]

Here is the intro to Nagl's book, a supplement to what Zenpundit posted:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/567702.html

[TM Lutas]

From the USA Today article, this year's uptick is the largest in 14 years but it's also the first uptick since 2001. So over the past 5 years, we've had 4 downticks in crime and 1 uptick. On net, are we safer now than we were in 2001? One data point does not a trend reversal make. It's a cause for watchful concern but I wouldn't get too excited about it until more data points show up.

While it's reasonable to predict release rates, why is the incarceration rate of 500k set as a constant. Why isn't it considered a variable that will rise as crime goes up and find some new balance?

[Mark in Texas]

Relating the LTC Nagl interview to the issue of crime rising there is the point that Nagl makes saying that the Sunni insurgents can be dealt with using counterinsurgency methods but that al Qaeda has to be killed.

In viewing inner cities as our gap areas, jobs is the answer to some, maybe most of the crime, but there are some others who do not respond to that sort of incentive.

Years ago, even before I had first seen Dr.Barnett there, I saw Ruben Greenberg on C-SPAN. He was explaining that his success in reducing crime in his city was a result of three things that he had learned.

1) Most crime is committed by a small group of people. Most serious crime is committed by a small subset of that group.

2) While it may be possible to rehabilitate people, so far nobody has been able to demonstrate that they know how to do it.

3) A significant number of people who commit serious crimes stop or slow down their criminal activity after age 45.

The answer would seem to be to keep the people who commit serious crimes locked up in prison until they are middle aged. Since prison space is a valuable resource, it should probably not be squandered on less valuable uses than keeping the most serious criminals incapacitated through their twenties and thirties.

For example, a seventeen year old who had sex with a fifteen year old is probably not the best possible use of a prison cell for ten years. Similarly, district attorneys who conceal exculpatory DNA evidence in order to send innocent students to prison for rape are attempting to waste the valuable prison resource. Unless we are going to go on another prison building boom, we should probably be more selective of who we lock up.

As with an insurgency, differentiate between those who can be won over and those who have to be gotten rid of.

[clancy]

In every society there are those whom I refer to as pirates. They prey on the strong as well as the unprepared and weak. They are generally not subject to rehabilitation, their profession is piracy. they weaken the connectedness wherever they operate. Examples include the so called terrorists in the middle east such as Yaser Arafat who needed fear to fuel cash flow. This applies to most of the violence in Iraq.It also applies to the inner-city so called 'disconnected' in the US. None of them have any interest in peace, since it is the chaos which they feed which keeps them in business.

We might just want to consider a business model for this problem, so how do we outcompete their business?

[Management Consulting]

Very interesting stuff here.

I also wonder why the incarceration rate is set at 500k--seems reasonable to believe that number would fluctuate each year and hopefully fall below that number most years. What am I missing?