South Africa gets a bad rap

Regarding “Facing Risks in Johannesburg” [Letters, Nov. 30]: My mother is very astute, and from her I picked up many pearls of wisdom. One adage she taught me was “clean up your own backyard.” What this saying suggests is, before criticizing another’s situation, critically examine your own.

When reading comments like letter writer B. Chris Brewster’s, the first thing that comes to mind is clean up your own backyard. If tourists from most of the world’s industrialized nations were to employ his calculus when making travel plans, the travel and tourism sector of the U.S. economy would crumble. For example, Chicago, a great city and premier tourist destination, has a murder rate nearly 10 times that of London (20.6 per 100,000 compared to 2.1 per 100,000). The murder rate of Washington, D.C., is 42.9 per 100,000, more than 20 times that of London and more than 2.5 times greater than Johannesburg’s. Also, 2002 FBI statistics indicate that about 1 in every 200 people in the U.S. was the victim of violent crime last year; 1 in 24 was the victim of crime in general.

The U.S. also boasts the highest incarceration rates in the world with 1 in every 37 adults having served time behind bars. Currently, we house about 2 million citizens in our jails and prisons, and upward of 6 million Americans are under correctional supervision.

By extension of Brewster’s reasoning, when making vacation plans, residents of other industrialized nations should not even consider visiting the U.S. The U.S. has much to safely offer visitors from around the globe, as does South Africa, Russia, Australia or any country with a relatively high rate of crime.

A. Rafik Mohamed

Professor of sociology and criminology

University of San Diego