Comment 43984

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted July 24, 2010 at 12:01:43

UrbanRenaissance and South Park are right on the ball. Parents kill several more kids at home in an average weekend in America than school shootings do in an average year. Rapes and child molestation, abductions (usually related to custody battles) and all sorts of other crimes prove that "playing outside" is much more safe than sitting at home - statistically. And if your child is killed

Crime statistics going back more than a few decades need to be met with skepticism because we live in a fundamentally different environment. Crime's always more serious in densely populated cities than small towns, and a lot more people live in cities now. Since this wave of extreme urbanization really took hold, though, it's clear that we've found a lot of solutions that work, as crime has been dropping for decades, despite even more urbanization.

Perhaps the public perception of fear has something to do with the massive increase of cops on our streets, especially downtown, ticketing everyone they can see for everything they can think of. I saw them ticket the ice-cream truck at Bayfront one day. Despite dropping crime, police budgets and prison populations continue to explode, and politicians, papers and pundits continue to support policies which have been shown over and over again not to work. Academics in the field have been showing the numerous faults of "tough-on-crime" measures for decades, and yet we never hear about it.

Harper may be building many more prisons, but he's cut the country's crime prevention budget in half. If it's really about stopping crime and not just hurting "criminals", why slash programs like the prison farms which have been shown so often to work?

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