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War on Crime Anyone? How to respond and not respond to January's heavy toll of outrageous murders and attempted murders

By Jonathan Simor

In case anyone has been hiking in desert for the month of January, we are the midst of a wave of frightening murders and attempted murders including the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson, and in the same incident the murder of a federal judge and three other victims (including a 9 year old girl) and of quite a number of police officers in Detroit, Miami, Indiana, and Oregon. It seems inevitable that despite the gravity of the economic and environmental threats facing us (if anything, underplayed in the President's state of the union speech) fear of violent crime seems poised to jump again to a high position on the agenda of Americans. As any reader of this blog will know, a reversion to the national obsession about crime strikes me as the worst possible thing we could do at this moment when we are still trying to wind down a disastrous and expensive war on crime (the prison population went down last year for the first time in 30+ years) that we cannot sustain even if we weren't in such dire straights...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 26, 2011 (boomark / email).