Glazek’s article is a really interesting read, even if you’re well versed in hypothetical causation for the reduction in the crime rate in the US. It’s been covered, and factors as diverse as legalization of abortion, to inexpensive domestic production of Methamphetamine replacing Columbian Cocaine as the addictive substance of choice.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble. What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall during the recession. On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?
The blind cynic in me says they went into finance, but that’s certainly not true. If it were, wall street would be as Black and Hispanic as Harlem. But then again, this has more to do with how we count crimes and what constitutes a crime. For the most part, sub-prime mortgage lending schemes were completely legal, though highly predatory, unjust, unjustifiable, and malicious.
What has been an open secret, yet one no one wants to talk about, is the rate of crime within the prison system. Prisoner rape is so common, Glazek charges, that the US is has more incidents of rape of males than females, the vast majority of them perpetrated within the state’s own correction walls. Vastly under-reported and rarely persecuted, ass is a commodity.
news of Johnson’s physical availability had spread throughout the complex—after you’re raped once, you’re marked—and he was soon enslaved by a gang. In addition to passing Johnson around among themselves, Johnson’s new overseers sold his ass and mouth to a variety of clients for $3 to $7, a competitive enough price that it resulted in multiple rapes every day for the eighteen months that Johnson spent in prison. When he went to the authorities, they laughed and told him to “fight or fuck.”
Sigh.
Collusion of “tough on crime” politicians and embedded masculinity within American culture is bankrupting governments, willfully harming and incarcerating citizens, and producing more hardened criminals (both through social learning within prison and through social barriers to social mobility once out of prison).
