Let's increase the crime rate — dramatically

Faced with a looming budget crisis, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered on his threat to lay off ten thousand temporary and part-time state workers last week. He also reduced the pay of up to 200,000 regular state employees to minimum wage. While the move was dismissed by his critics as a gesture to force legislators to reach a compromise on how to resolve the state's $15 billion budget deficit, it did get everyone’s attention. Money always gets people’s attention.

The primary reason for Cali's budget woes is its bursting-at-the-seams prison system. Years ago the street saying about California was, "go on vacation, leave on probation." If any area of the country has proven the impossibility of preventing the crime caused by deep-seated social problems and family dysfunction via ever-increasing incarceration, it’s the Golden State. With close to 180,000 prisoners behind bars, at a cost in excess of $8 billion (that's billion, with a “b”), the state has built seven new prisons in the last decade but no new universities - it can’t afford both.

Yet the state has failed to make a dent in crime statistics, and the average citizen feels less safe, not more. Indeed, the most recent crime crazies in Southern California are violent graffiti vandals: Try to stop them from spray painting on the side of your business or home and they’re likely to bust a cap in your ass for your perceived effrontery. Always a bellwether, other states in the not-too-distant future can expect to go through similar maddeningly ignorant crime cycles, prison overcrowding, and the resultant financial crunch that California is currently experiencing.

As state corrections officials in California struggle with the severe overcrowding, social scientists there now are attempting to implement strategies that will correct the societal ills which cause so many youth to run afoul of the law in the first place. They are at last being listened to, but not because citizens care about the underclass, they’re being listened to because citizens are growing tired of feeling the aftereffects of crime — expensive incarceration — in their wallets. They’re growing weary of housing and feeding such large numbers of prisoners with no end in sight.

The one important thing the "Lock them up and throw away the key" lobby never talks about is the high costs of our wrongheaded criminal justice policies. Instead of reserving prison cells for people who are truly dangerous, in America we also lock up people we are simply mad at, or who have the medical problem of addiction. So, the takeaway message for me in all of this is quite simple: Until society is hit real hard in the wallet via high taxes, the problems of the underclass will continue to be ignored.

At this juncture gentle reader, you can get out the tar and feathers, and select the pole I'm to be run out of town on ... because I’m going to make a "Modest Proposal" that won't find favor with many of you: We need to increase poverty and crime say ten – no, let's make it twenty – fold. We should give under-aged high school girls fertility drugs so that when they engage in premarital sex they will have two, three and four offspring at a time; and then we do away with Head Start programs all together to ensure that their kids will drop out of school at even earlier ages... which, of course, will allow them to embark on lives of crime much sooner.

Crime will then spill out of our ghettos and spread to suburban areas (something that is already happening, just in case you haven’t noticed) causing taxes to be raised in order to hire more police officers, in addition to the vast increase in spending for more and more prisons and guards. We’re already the world leader in incarceration, and if we really put our minds to it we can lock up so many people that our record-breaking rate will be beyond reach of even the meanest, dumbest, most Draconian and backward nations on the face of the earth. It seems that we Americans just love being "first"... "number one" in anything.

If we take the wise step of insuring these increases right now, in just over a decade and a half our prison population rate will rise to astronomical levels, and so to will be the tax burden we’ll have to shoulder to house, feed guard and provide medical care for all the people we put behind bars. Once we’re on the verge of total, systemic financial collapse, perhaps... just maybe... then we’ll implement programs that work — like the Harlem Children's Zone — on a national level. If it takes clogging up the system with Black and Brown bodies until the nation is on the brink of financial ruin before our political leaders are willing to pay serious attention to the problem... then so be it.

Middleclass America has to be hit where it really hurts... in the pocketbook, otherwise nothing will change... again, so be it. Anything is better than this slow, painful death many inner-city communities are already experiencing due to our lack of national will to once and for all fix the problem. Are we stupid... or what?

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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