Slouching Towards Gomorrah (27 page)

For those who distrust the states’ response to the welfare problem, there is already a record of how the states behave when they are freed of federal control through a waiver process that has been in place since 1992. Douglas Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, summarizes the most common features of the various state programs.
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These are: requiring recipients to look for work, which reduces welfare caseloads; allowing recipients to keep more of their earnings (the common policy of reducing welfare by one dollar for every dollar earned provides a strong disincentive to work); making it easier for married couples to receive benefits instead of penalizing two-parent families and so providing a disincentive to stable relationships; requiring welfare mothers to take better care of their children by, for example, reducing welfare payments when parents do not send their children to school.

No one can be sure what will and will not work. In fact, no one should be sure that anything will work. Our policies have produced a large class of people, mostly female, who are dependent on welfare and whose lives, perhaps, cannot now be greatly-altered. Proposals to train single mothers for jobs or to require them to take additional schooling have great public appeal, but such programs may produce only meager results. The children will have to be cared for while the mothers are occupied, which probably means an enormous expansion of day care centers. But the
main drawback is that these are mostly young women of substandard intelligence, self-discipline, and motivation; otherwise they would not be in the predicament they are. They will not be easy to train and are unlikely to make good employees. Had welfare not seduced them into the lives they lead, they probably would have entered the job market much earlier in life and by now would have learned the habits and attitudes that employers require.

We may have to accept the fact that welfare has produced more than one lost generation. There is probably nothing society or government can do for existing welfare-dependent unwed mothers except keep them on some form of welfare. The question for public policy is what to do about their children and about women who have not yet become single mothers but are very likely to do so. The urgent problem is keeping future generations out of the welfare-illegitimacy-drugs-crime trap.

Fortunately, approaches are being tried that hold promise. For the most part, such approaches involve bringing a stable relationship with an adult into a child’s life. Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), a not-for-profit corporation, reported on the effects of mentoring programs at the local affiliates of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America (BB/BS).
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BB/BS maintains 75,000 matches between an adult and a youngster. Over an eighteen-month period, P/PV studied 959 10- to 16-year-olds who applied to BB/BS programs, assigning half to a treatment group for which matches with adult volunteers were made or attempted and assigning the other half to a waiting list as a control group. The results showed dramatic differences between the two groups in initiating drug and alcohol use, physical violence, skipping school, the quality of relationships with parents and peers. In all these categories, the treatment group showed superior results. Little Brothers and Little Sisters, for example, were 46 percent less likely than those in the control group to start using drugs. These improvements occurred although the contact between the adult and the child typically consisted of three meetings a month for four hours per meeting.

It is an open question whether programs like BB/BS can be greatly expanded. There is, for instance, the question of whether an adequate supply of suitable adult volunteers can be recruited
and whether the cost (about $1000 per match) can be met. P/PV expresses doubt about funding a greatly expanded program entirely with private funds but does not seem adequately aware of the perils of accepting public funding. If the government decided to help, it is entirely predictable that costs and bureaucratic interference would rise and effectiveness would decline.

An additional promising approach, already underway in a few cities, is the mobilization of black churches to carry out youth and community development plans. John Dilulio has announced that he has decided to give over most of the rest of his professional life to working with a coalition of inner-city black Christian clergy to accomplish such a mobilization. He thinks that empowering these ministers is a key to resolving the nation’s violent crime problem. That empowerment should be accomplished not with government programs and funds but with “voluntary efforts, with private contributions, and with our respect and prayers.“
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The benefits of successful welfare reform will be long-term, but we face an urgent short-term problem. Even if we assume that welfare can be reformed and rates of illegitimacy brought down to levels that do not threaten the stability of the social order, the extremely unpleasant fact remains that, for some years ahead, we are in for high, and probably ever increasing, levels of violent crime. The immediate question is how we can protect ourselves. The dimensions of the crime problem are clearly set out in a report, “The State of Violent Crime in America,“
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in Ben Wattenberg’s book
Values Matter Most
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and in Dilulio’s Bradley Lecture “Violent Crime and Representative Government” at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of the factual material that follows is drawn from those sources.

One reason crime has increased is that the likelihood and severity of punishment has drastically declined. The United States has adopted a system of revolving-door justice for adults and juveniles alike. A distinctive feature of modern liberalism is its unwillingness to deal with crime with the rigor it deserves and that the general public wants. Paul Johnson argues that this unwillingness calls into question our claim to be a working democracy: “In both Britain and the U.S., a permanent working alliance exists between, on the one hand, liberals in academia and the media, and, on the other, their counterparts in government and its agencies,
in private and trade union lobbies, in the courts and in law firms.“
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This alliance opposes severe punishments and opposes, most especially, capital punishment. Stanley Rothman and his colleagues have found that those I have been calling modern liberals see groups, such as criminals, that stand outside society’s moral consensus as not constituting a serious threat.
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The public wants much harder treatment of violent criminals than liberals are willing to give them, in legislation, in court trials and sentencing, and in parole and probation procedures. Our system immediately puts back on the streets 63 percent of all pretrial violent felony defendants, fails to incarcerate 47 percent of those convicted of violent crimes, and releases those convicted of violence and sent to prison before they have served even half their time.

There is, as Dilulio says, an anti-incarceration lobby and as well an antipunishment coalition. These people are difficult to understand. Some years back I met a lawyer who is moderately well known in Washington. He mentioned that he was contemplating a lawsuit to close a nearby prison on the constitutional ground of “cruel and unusual punishment.” I asked if the punishment was cruel and unusual because of overcrowding. He said no, it was because people are imprisoned.

Crime rates in a number of areas have stopped rising and in some places have begun to decline. It is possible that the rate of violent crimes has gone down in the nation as a whole. This appears to be partially due to better policing, slightly higher rates of incarceration, and a decline in the number of young males, who are almost entirely responsible for violent crime though more and more women are taking up the practice. But, as the Council on Crime report puts it: “Recent drops in serious crime are but the lull before the coming crime storm.“
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That is because the population of young males in the age groups that commit violent crime is about to increase rapidly, producing more violence than we know at present. It is also likely that the coming young felons will commit more serious crimes than today’s juvenile offenders do. According to the report, the literature indicates that “each generation of crime-prone boys is several times more dangerous than the one before it, and that over 80 percent of the most serious and frequent offenders escape detection and arrest.“

As for the coming storm, Wattenberg reproduces charts showing
that the violent crime rate went up sixfold from 1957 to 1993 and that the punishment expected by criminals for crimes of violence and burglary declined precipitously from 1950 to 1970. The criminals’ expectations reflected the reality. The Council on Crime report notes that the American justice system imprisons barely one criminal for every one hundred violent crimes, and that millions of convicted criminals with histories of violence end up on probation and parole rather than behind bars. That holds true even for the most violent repeat offenders. There are far more persons convicted of violent crimes who are on probation and parole than in prison. Many of those “under supervision” commit even more violent crimes.

As the carnage continues, the public is offered such false panaceas as “midnight basketball”—that is, providing nighttime sports facilities to keep young men off the streets—and gun control. Neither is a serious response. Both may be seen as following from the egalitarians’ unwillingness to punish. Hence alternatives are sought that must be tried before or in lieu of punishment. Midnight basketball is so obviously a frivolous notion that it need not be discussed. Gun control, though advanced with religious fervor and harrowing tales of loved ones shot to death, is no less frivolous. The real argument against severe gun control is one of policy, not constitutionality.
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As law professor Daniel Polsby demonstrates, “the conventional wisdom about guns and violence is mistaken. Guns don’t increase national rates of crime and violence—but the continued proliferation of gun control laws almost certainly does.“
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Gun
control laws raise the cost of obtaining a firearm. This is a cost the criminal will willingly pay because a gun is essential to the business he is in. He probably will not have to pay the increased cost, because illicit markets adapt to overcome difficulties. There are, moreover, nearly 200,000,000 firearms in the United States now, many of them unregistered, and it is easy to smuggle guns in or to make them in basements and garages. A gun need not be state of the art to serve a criminals purpose. Criminals will never have difficulty getting guns. The citizen who wants a firearm for self-defense will not have access to illicit markets and will be deterred by the higher costs charged in legal transactions. The result is a steady supply of guns for criminal aggression and a diminished supply for self-defense.

“It is easy to count the bodies of those who have been killed or wounded with guns,” Polsby remarks, “but not easy to count the people who have avoided harm because they had access to weapons…. [P]eople who are armed make comparatively unattractive victims. A criminal might not know if any one civilian is armed, but if it becomes known that a large number of civilians do carry weapons, criminals will become warier.“
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Gun control shifts the equation in favor of the criminal. Gun control proposals are nothing more than a modern liberal suggestion that government, which is unable to protect its citizens, make sure those citizens cannot defend themselves.

Like gun control, the idea of life imprisonment for criminals convicted of three crimes of physical violence is probably a false panacea. “Three strikes and you’re out” may sound like baseball, and hence be congenial to the American mind, but as a prescription for crime control it is seriously overrated. Washington State adopted such a law in 1993 and reported murders down 10 percent, rapes down 18 percent, and assaults down 4 percent in the first six months.
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This a hopeful sign, though experience with the law has been too short to be sure. Some offenders are said to be leaving the state, which is good for Washington but may not be so happy for other states. Washington may be enjoying a drop in crime rates because it is exporting its criminals. We would have a better understanding of the policy’s effects if every state adopted it.

But there is a more serious problem with “three strikes and you’re out “Violent crimes are almost entirely committed by young
men. (This may be changing. In an unexpected development, the rate of growth of violent crime perpetrated by women now exceeds that of men.) When a male reaches the age of, say, forty, he almost always ceases to be dangerous. The implications are clear: by the time we have arrested and convicted a violent felon three times and sentenced him to life imprisonment, we may be accomplishing nothing more than warehousing men who have, in all probability, ceased to be a threat.

A problem still more serious is that crimes will be committed by those who are caught and convicted one or two times but not caught for subsequent violence, or who are convicted three times but are free much of the time between their first and third convictions. The problem is even worse than that because in most jurisdictions juveniles who commit violent crimes are not even fingerprinted and their records as juveniles are not available to prosecutors or courts when they commit further crimes as adults. Thus, the third offense as an adult may in fact be the fourth, fifth, or sixth violent crime.

Quite aside from these issues, inadequate prison terms have become a major problem. A Brookings Institution study finds that, on average, the serious criminal commits twelve serious crimes a year.
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That means that a criminal sentenced to ten years and let out in four will, on average, commit seventy-two violent crimes during the time he should have been in prison. Other studies put the number of violent crimes per year per criminal even higher. Newspapers routinely tell of murders committed by men out on probation, parole, or released early for good behavior. According to John Dilulio, “About three of every four convicted criminals (more than three million people) are on the streets without meaningful probation or parole supervision.“
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