24-year old Brandon Reed mugged a woman fifty years his senior and was apparently so overcome by shame that he allegedly hung himself in a HoCo jail cell, the fourth person to do so since 1999.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
July 29, Evening
Taming a Violent City - The Baltimore Sun asks an "array of experts" on how, exactly, to do that. Interesting, but why no prosecutors or ex-police *cough*Ed*cough* chiefs on the list?
24-year old Brandon Reed mugged a woman fifty years his senior and was apparently so overcome by shame that he allegedly hung himself in a HoCo jail cell, the fourth person to do so since 1999.
24-year old Brandon Reed mugged a woman fifty years his senior and was apparently so overcome by shame that he allegedly hung himself in a HoCo jail cell, the fourth person to do so since 1999.
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8 comments:
the 4th md criminal to feel shame?
Maybe the Howard County jail has a nasty paint scheme that drives people to kill themselves.
According to violentization theory, all violent acts, criminal and otherwise, are the choice of the perp. They decide to use violence unless they form restraining judgements (RJs) RJs are formed by 5 different things, one of the most important being fear of legal sanction. If a perp feels like he will get caught and stiffly punished, they are less likely to choose to commit violent acts.
This fact is why my neighbor, despite being a 5-10 drive from several rough city neighborhood is violent crime free- perps know that county cops catch people and here in Baltimore County, we have the death penalty and we at least try to make use of it.
If criminals were regularly caught and stiffly punished Baltimore City, the crime would plummet.
Approaches to handling criminals fall fairly nicely into one of two categories:
a) that of the Mommy Party, and
b) that of the Daddy Party
The former seeks to identify deep, deep historically distant and commonly nameless sources of causation. 'Society' failed him, so a bank got robbed. (The perp had little to do with it, other than owning the hand which carried the gun, which was manufactured by some large and very negligent corporate entity.)
Fault is thereby diffused and adherents argue for broad social programs designed to provide a cornucopia of resources at the taxpayers' expense.
The latter is simpler, perhaps myopically so. Bob held a gun. Bob robbed a bank. Being capable of telling righ from wrong, he has no one to blame for the consequences of his actions but himself.
The public role is therefore simply to be crystal clear about consequences and penalties and to come down hard on transgressors. Period.
Neither is free. Neither is even cheap.
But the (direct) cost of a Daddy-party solution would be around $750 million a year total plus the incremental cost of maintaining the additional number of inmates at $20,000 a year per inmate.
The total cost of a social work intensive resource-providing strategy would have to be easily 7 times that annually in the intermediate run, with the uncertain prospect of reduction over the course of a generation or two.
The point that is often missed as these two views battle it out is that the municipal government here has done neither and almost nothing.
Consider this: since 1950, both the population and income here have fallen about 35% in real terms. Hence, citywide total income fell about 45%, principally because of the crime and its correlates, including ignorance.
In each year that the municipal government here failed to solve its crime either through strategy a) or through strategy b), it pocketed that money, about equal to the annual city budget, and handed it out in freebies to buy constituencies for its feeble local politicians.
In the private sector, when you take in the money but don't defease your corresponding liabilities, we require that you accrue a liability equal to the monetary value of the service obligation. It's sometimes called billings in excess of fees earned by contractors.
Over the last 57 years, the income of the city's population has decreased by about $11 billion per year. That (times the total tax rate) is the cost of inaction. The 'benefit' of inaction was the availability of maybe $1 billion a year in legitimately public money for diversion to handouts and freebies, as well as a bit of graft.
What it tells you is that all told, this city's leaders (let's avoid particular names and identities) have frittered away billions of dollars a year, made possible through its accession to crime, the costs of which are borne by... the rest of us.
Solution: require that the City accrue the liability of compensating its population for the crime it allows. It will soon figure out that even politicians will be better off dealing with the problem than paying out on its results. That's what economics is about: getting the incentives right.
Until then, they have every incentive to allow the crime to continue, making only token efforts designed merely to deflect criticism.
Sobering thoughts:
43% of Baltimore City's adult population is not in the workforce
Maybe half of the young males in this town are involved in crime.
With a per capita income of $17,000 a year, we certainly cannot fiscally acommodate a resource-provision Mommy party strategy. That money would have to come almost entirely from the state of Maryland.
With a per capita income of $17,000 a year, we can scarcely afford even to incarcerate so many of them at $20,000 a pop. These guys are worth more dead than alive, in strictly economic terms. Capital punishment is extremely burdensome, because of the lengthy appeals process. We need more parsimonious and less economically burdensome means of removing deviants from society.
I tend to look favorably on the notion of a chain gang. It functions as a great deterrent in terms of discomfort yet offers perps little in the way of street creds when they return from jail.
The Sun didn't ask any real experts because those people probably would not speak to the reporters. The Sun has trashed most of the real experts in their opinion rag.
"43% of Baltimore City's adult population is not in the workforce."
No wonder local taxes are so friggin high for those of us who are actually productive members of society. Too many parasites to support.
Given the differences in the Mommy State and the Daddy state, Baltimore needs a 2 parent household.
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