San Diego Crime

The response of top San Diego officials to the record increase in the city’s homicide rate will do nothing to reduce crime. Spending an extra $1 million for an additional 60 cops, the upholding of Proposition A (funding more jails and courtrooms), accelerating the opening of new jails, and the cooperation of the Mexican government in prosecuting crimes by illegal aliens against San Diegans will only serve to placate a voting public in an election year. The crime rate itself will continue to fluctuate in response to causes that have nothing to do with political pronouncements and criminal justice system policies.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor tells us that the increase in violent crime is due to the recession and its attendant stress (unemployment), our proximity to an impoverished Mexico and the profitability of the illegal drug market. While I agree that these are some of the factors that cause crime, what do they have to do with more cops, judges and jails? The answer is nothing.

In fact, a number of criminologists have recently concluded that the policies adopted by the criminal justice system to fight crime at all levels have virtually no impact on overall rates of crime. This is true for a number of reasons:

1) The American criminal justice system was not established to reduce crime. It was ensconced to protect the rights of the accused.

2) The programs proposed by conservatives (mandatory prison sentences, elimination of the exclusionary rule, abolition of parole, ending the insanity defense, wider use of capital punishment) and liberals (gun control, rehabilitation, decriminalization-legalization of “victimless” crimes) are mere theology. They are based on a profound ignorance of the actual workings of the justice system and the actual causes of crime.

3) American justice already incarcerates more people per capita than all other advanced industrial nations, save Russia and South Africa. Our prison sentences are among the toughest in the industrialized world, and, contrary to popular belief, a very high percentage of serious felony (i.e., stranger-on-stranger) cases do result in incarceration.

The question of what will work to reduce crime has never been addressed by our politicians, who prefer to provide simplistic and fantasy-based solutions in order to win votes. The actual causes of crime in America are rooted in economics and politics and in cultural values that approve of violence as a solution to personal and social problems, the degradation of women and an ideological mystification which teaches us that crime is caused, not by social conditions, but by abnormal personalities. How all these abnormal personalities just happen to reside in the one nation whose rate of violent crime is 10 times higher than the entire continent of Europe is never explained.

Until blue-ribbon commissions begin to investigate causes of crimes at all levels of American society, begin to realize that all types of crime are interrelated, and are an integral part of both our GNP and our political arrangements, America’s crime problem will remain beyond America’s control.

DAVID R. SIMON, SDSU Professor, Criminal Justice Administration