Take in the following three pieces of information, and see if you can make them fit together. First, violent crime has been dropping precipitously for nearly two decades. At its peak in 1991, according to FBI data, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By 2010 that number had plunged to 425 crimes per 100,000, a drop of more than 44 percent. The decrease covered all varieties of serious crime, from murder to assault to rape to armed robbery. The graphs depicting the decline show a long, steady downswing, one that doesnt jump from year to year but consistently slumps from year to year. Second: although poverty rates largely declined during the 1990s, offering at least one possible explanation for the drop in violent crime, poverty rates rose sharply during the 2000s. At the start of that decade, poverty levels hovered just above 10 percent. By 2008 they were up to 13.2 percent. By 2009 the number was 14.3 percent. by 2010, 15.3 percent. All this squares with what most people who lived in Middle-America knew, and know, instinctively. Despite what were being told about a post 2008 recovery, despite what the rising stock market seems to indicate, the economy is mostly worse, real incomes, are mostly declining, and money is mostly scarcer. But throughout all this time, violent crime has gone down. It continues to decline today. Counterintuitively, more poverty has not created more crime. The third piece of information that makes no sense is that during this same period of time, the prison population in America has exploded. In 1991 there were about one million Americans behind bars. By 2012 the number was over 2.2 million, a more than 100 percent increase. Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalins gulags. For what its worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.See if this syllogism works, then. 1) POVERTY GOES UP; 2)CRIME GOES DOWN; 3)PRISON POPULATION DOUBLES. MIKE TAIBBI - DIVIDE - AMERICAN INJUSTICE IN THE AGE OF THE WEALTH GAP
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 04:45:20 +0000
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