Text 24 crime in america: it is going to get worse

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The average state inmate admits to committing more than a dozen crimes in the year before entering prison.

David Shotkovski had always dreamed of becoming a Major League pitcher. Early this year, he kissed his wife and young daughter good-bye and left home for training with the Atlanta Braves in West Palm Beach, Fla. There he was taking an walk when a gunman demanded his money. Shotkovski refused. Shot twice, he managed to stagger some 300 feet to a busy street before collapsing near the curb.

Indicted for Shotkovski’s murder was Neal Douglas Evans, a career criminal who, despite 13 previous convictions for robberies, burglaries, theft, and drug possession, had slip-slided past forgiving judges for years. Because of the judicial order to relieve alleged overcrowding in Florida prisons, Evans was on his fourth “conditional release” when he was charged with killing Shotkovski. “I just do not understand,” Felicia Shotkovski said when she learned that a habitual felon had been charged with her husband’s murder. I sympathize totally with her. But after more than ten years of studying America’s criminal-justice system, I understand all too well. My research in crime statistics shows the following tendencies.

The declining crime rate is misleading. In reality crime rates are many times higher than they were at least a decade ago. Moreover, a large number of serious crimes today go unreported. The FBI uses a method of “hierarchical” counting in which only the most serious criminal act in one incident is reported. If, for instance, a woman was raped and robbed, the FBI records the rape only. In contrast, The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts a massive, ongoing survey. Their records lead to the estimate that the actual number of felonies is more than three times the FBI’s number.

Criminals are getting more violent. Over the past three decades, your chances of becoming a victim of a violent crime increased by 460%. The new breed of felon is “more terrorist than criminal,” says a veteran robber who has spent most of his last 30 years behind bars. In an alarming number of cases, routine property crimes escalate into violent ones. For instance, recently two robbers who stole about $100 in cash from two car rental agencies shot to death three unarmed men.

The crime problem is bad enough, but demographic evidence indicates that it’s going to get much worse. For the last seven years the murder rate by adults aged 25 and over has dropped by 20 %, it has increased by 65% among 18-year-olds, and soared a horrifying 165 % among 14- to 17-year-olds! The current trend in birth rates makes it certain that a new violent crime wave is just round the corner. Thus, in a few years we can expect at least 30,000 more murders, rapists, robbers and muggers on the street than we have today.

Not long ago, I asked a group of long- and life-term prisoners what was triggering the explosion of violence among these new young criminals. I didn’t hear the conventional explanations such as poverty or joblessness. Instead, these hardened men cited the absence of people – adults, family, teachers, preachers, coaches – who would care enough about young males to discipline them. In the vacuum, drug dealers and “gungsta rappers” serve as role models. “I was a bad-ass street gladiator,” one prisoner told me, “but these kids are stone-cold predators.”

Our criminal-justice system is not handing down sentences to fit the crimes. Most violent crimes go unreported, unprosecuted, and unpunished. For example, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only last year over 6.6 million violent crimes were committed, but just half were reported to the police. About 641,000 led to arrests, 165,000 to convictions, and only 100,000 to prison sentences, which on average ended before the convict had served even half his time behind bars.

Thanks to plea bargaining, hardened criminals are often able to “customize” their sentences. More than 90% of all convicted of felonies had not gone to trial, but pleaded guilty to lesser charges. In Dade County the police detective Evelyn Gort was shot and killed by Wilbur Mitchell. Consider his previous record: despite his nine felony convictions, he had been permitted to plea-bargain a sentence for auto theft down to one year and was released in less than four months. Had he served the full sentence, he would have been in prison the night he killed Gort.

Most adult prisoners are walking icebergs of crime, with the mass of their criminal records hidden beneath the surface. In extensive surveys of inmates in New Jersey and Wisconsin, half the convicts admitted committing 12 or more crimes in the year before they entered prison. Other reliable studies suggest that prisoners commit between 13 and 21 crimes a year when on the loose.

Many dangerous felons are still out on the streets. Almost three quarters of the five million criminals under “correctional supervision” are not sent to prison at all. They are somewhere in the community, getting treatment for drug addiction, doing community service, on parole or probation. Ongoing studies of many jurisdictions show that today most convicted criminals never see the inside of a prison. Instead, they are placed on probation. Then, within three years, nearly half are convicted of a new crime. Up to one in three murderers are “in custody” but in fact out of jail – that is on bail, parole or probation – at the time they commit the murder.

The dividends from handing down proper penalties are huge – in lives preserved, property protected, order maintained. The Santa Monica-based research organization RAND estimated that California’s new three-strikes law (life sentence without parole for thrice-convicted felons) would prevent about 340,000 felonies a year. Such measures will not prevent all crime, but they will bring a sense of order and justice to places where violent criminals prey freely on the innocent. And it will help check the next crime wave tied to the growing number of young predators.

(By John J, DiIulio, Jr.¹, http://www.rd.com)