The View From 1776

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Washington Post columnist William Raspberry writes in his October 17th article:

“In one recent year, just under half of all young black men in the District of Columbia were in prison, on parole or probation, awaiting trial or sentencing, or being sought on a warrant. In Baltimore, one in five black men aged 20 to 30 was in custody. Numbers like these no longer surprise.

“This may: “High levels of incarceration concentrated in impoverished communities have a destabilizing effect on community life, so that the most basic underpinnings of informal social control are damaged. This, in turn, reproduces the very dynamics that sustain crime.” The quote, from Todd Clear, a professor of criminal justice at the City University of New York, was called to my attention by Eric Lotke, who has expanded on Clear’s work....”

This is nothing less than lunacy, whether the criminals are black, white or Hispanic.

First, fact vs. Marxian-liberal theory, which is the basis for Mr. Raspberry’s preposterous suggestion.

Theory:  Putting hordes of petty criminals back on the streets would shore up the “basic underpinnings of informal social control.”

Fact: The “basic underpinnings of informal social control” that result from the presence of large numbers of criminals is a Mafia-style, silent terror in which people stay off the streets at night and fear to go to neighborhood stores in the daylight.

Theory: Keeping criminals in jails “reproduces the very dynamics that sustain crime.”

Fact: Crime rates have declined in recent years.  Statistics suggest a strong correlation between fewer crimes and getting criminals off the streets and into jails.

Theory: Mr. Raspberry believes that non-prison rehabilitation would be a better way to deal with criminals other than “gangbangers, street thugs and killers,” so that they could remain stabilizing parts of the community structure.

Fact:  It was precisely the presence of those criminals, who mugged, burgled, and dealt in drugs, that destabilized, in fact terrorized, decent, hard working people who tried to raise their families in accordance with the Judeo-Christian morality so sneeringly despised by liberals. 

Theory: Mr. Raspberry writes: “We are not inherently good or bad, law-abiding or criminal, but are nudged by forces both within and outside us into becoming what we become.” It is fundamental socialistic religious dogma that criminals are the victims of society.  Private ownership of property, liberals say, forces people into lives of crime, the theory being that, in a just, socialistic society, everyone would have free access to whatever he needs, so there would be no incentive to criminal behavior.

Fact: The Great Society institution of no-questions-asked entitlements, a class-based version of socialism’s “to each according to need,” correlated directly with the explosion of crime, from mugging to murder, with drug dealing in between.  Precisely what Marxian liberals prescribe to perfect society, in fact, tore it apart in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Raspberry doesn’t mention a favorite dogma of the liberal feminist community: single-parent families, which overwhelmingly means unmarried women, are just as good for children as traditional families in which the mother and father were married before children were born, and the father works to provide the family’s living.

If liberals are correct that conservative family values are outmoded ignorance, how can it be that “High levels of incarceration concentrated in impoverished communities have a destabilizing effect on community life, so that the most basic underpinnings of informal social control are damaged”?  If single mothers can do as well as two-parent families, why do we need criminal young males loose in the community?  In the highly unlikely event that such young men let loose from prison would remain with their families, what positive role might we expect them to play?  If they are in the non-prison punishment or rehabilitation that Mr. Raspberry prefers, how does their limited presence stabilize the community?

It’s one thing to hope that, after paying their debts to society, young criminals might find new and better directions for their lives.  But that’s very different from asserting that their absence destabilizes community life.

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Thanks to Mudville Gazette