Showing posts with label the sixties. Show all posts

In Our Hands: Why Crime Hasn't Gone Up As the Economy Has Gone Down


James Q Wilson looks at a phenomenon that has surprised many people: crime rates have not gone up appreciably during the Little Depression. In fact, they continue to fall. Wilson sorts through a number of factors, (including a reduction in lead poisoning. give me a break), but concludes that a "change in culture" is what really lies behind this trend.
At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society's cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.
I'll agree that American society and popular culture is much improved from the loose and tacky Sixties and Seventies when the Great Crime Wave swept the nation. Just as an example, try to find some old World Series footage from Yankee Stadium. People were storming the field, scrambling around wildly, and looking generally like an out-of-control mob. Or look at the infamous "Disco Demolition" at Comisky Park. People laugh about it now, but what you are seeing is a thuggish, depressing riot.

By contrast, when a city-wide blackout hit NYC in 2003 (I think that was to year), nobody rioted, or smashed windows, or looted stores. Everybody quietly and calmly walked across the bridges to get home, or stayed put, but otherwise behaved themselves. The contrast with the Murder City of two decades earlier was stark, albeit in a good way.

Wilson identifies a Sixties-era social dynamic of self-expression uber alles as being part of the crime wave. And, yeah, people were expressing themselves, but more important, society's guardians failed to lay down a fundamental rule: stay off my lawn. This found expression in a myriad of ways. The most obvious were the Warren Court's criminal procedure reforms, which were widely seen at the time by liberals as being part of the civil rights movement, and widely panned by "right wingers" and other normal people as giving the criminal class too many undeserved rights. Well the wingnuts were right about that one. Reading a Miranda warning to low-lifes had very little to with Rosa Parks. It only placed her and her neighbors in greater jeopardy (since most crimes, then and now, were committed in poor neighborhoods). Nixon was running as a tough on crime candidate as early as 1972. As late as 1988, Republicans could tag a Democrat as "soft on crime" and torpedo his slim chances for winning the presidency.

As important, there was an explosion of drug use at all levels of society. While narcotics have never been legal, there was a de facto decriminalization back in those days. The quintessential event of the era was Woodstock, where celebrations of LSD and marijuana were as important as the music. Much of the crime of the era was related to drug use, from selling and distributing to collateral crimes like stealing TV's to score some dope. Setting the crime part aside, drug use contributed to a breakdown in society because the drugs themselves caused their users to break down in one way over another.

Mostly, though, there was a failure of leadership, especially in urban areas. Liberals were in charge of the most crime ridden areas of the country, whether NYC, Detroit, DC, or what have you. No matter how many innocent people were victimized, they never seemed comfortable with the idea of sending the police into a crime zone to knock heads, make some arrests, and send people to prison. Instead, they preferred to lecture us about poverty and "root causes" and how legitimate fears about crime were a figment of suburbanites' racist imaginations (that's the Bowling For Columbine theory).

And, liberals still don't get it. Just this week, the liberal wing of the Supreme Court ordered California to release tens of thousands of prisoners from its "overcrowded" prisons, a back door way of eviscerating California's effective and popular 3-Strikes initiative, which is based on the crazy theory that if you lock up criminals, you will have less crime.

The liberal approach to crime prevention, then and now, has been twofold: first, give us a ton of money so we can attack the "root causes" of crime by redistributing wealth downward. Second, restrain the police so they can no longer unfairly "target" minority communities. Unsurprisingly, this did not result in any reduction in crime, but rather to a disastrous increase. It took decades to dig ourselves out, but liberals seem hellbent to throw us back down.




Blows Against Empire: A Sixties Obituary


Here's a reminder that not everybody emerged from the "idealistic" Sixties with his ideals and dignity intact. Dwight Armstrong was a college kid in Wisconsin who bombed a campus building, killed some poor researcher (who was anti-war, naturally), and spent 7 years on the run. Armstrong has now died. Are we having fun, yet? Dwight Armstrong Dies At 58
Dwight Armstrong, one of four young men who in 1970 bombed a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, killing one person and injuring several others — a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism — died on June 20 in Madison. He was 58.

The cause was lung cancer, said Susan Lampert Smith, a spokeswoman for the University of Wisconsin Hospital, where he died.

The bombing took place on Aug. 24, 1970, during a time of intense agitation against the Vietnam War. At 3:42 a.m., an explosion tore through Sterling Hall, a building that housed both the university physics department and the ArmyMathematics Research Center. The center, which operated under a contract with the United States Army, had been the target of many nonviolent protests since it opened in the 1950s.

Though the bombers said afterward that they had not intended to hurt anyone, the explosion killed Robert Fassnacht, a physics researcher who was working late. Mr. Fassnacht, 33, a father of three, was, his family said afterward, against the war.

On Sept. 2, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a nationwide hunt for four men charged with the bombing: Dwight Armstrong, who had turned 19 five days after the explosion; his brother, Karleton, 22; David S. Fine, 18; and Leo F. Burt, 22.

Placed on the bureau’s most-wanted list, the four lived separate, fugitive lives, in some cases for years. Of the three who were eventually apprehended, Dwight Armstrong remained underground the longest, for nearly seven years. Mr. Armstrong, who had driven the getaway car after the bombing, was arrested in Toronto in April 1977.

That May, he pleaded no contest to a state charge of second-degree murder and guilty to federal charges including conspiracy. In June, in a plea agreement, he was sentenced to seven years on the state charges and seven on the federal, to be served concurrently. He was paroled in 1980.

Unlike a lot of Sixties left-overs, Armstrong was under no illusions about his misspent youth or the long-term effects it had on the rest of his life:

In 1987, he was arrested in Indiana on charges of helping operate a methamphetamine lab there. Sentenced to 10 years, he was released in 1991. Afterward, he returned to Madison, where he drove a cab and helped take care of his mother.

“My life,” Dwight Armstrong told The Capital Times, a Madison newspaper, in 1992, “has not been something to write home about.”

For every Tom Hayden or Bill Ayers who came out of The Sixties with tenure and backstage passes to the CSN&Y reunion concert, there were dozens of Dwight Armstrongs; people who blew their minds on drugs, bad music, and revolutionary ideology. Armstrong was a troubled soul who probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway, but the Baby Boomer culture of his day gave him a Cause to fight and kill for. This is the same culture that is endlessly celebrated in PBS documentaries and Woodstock at 40 retrospectives which the rest of us have to suffer through, all so the New Left can tell us why they were right and the rest of us were/are wrong.

The funny thing - and I love little historic ironies like this - is that the New Left was and is a rigidly hierarchical movement despite its noisy professions to be fighting for equal rights. Look at a guy like Bill Ayers, a rich kid who was a movement leader with all of the traditional trappings of power, including sex with all of the hot babes in the room, and the power to tell his followers to start building bombs and blow people up. He was able to emerge legally and physically unscathed while many of his "comrades" were killed or sent to prison. Then look at Armstrong, a foot soldier who did what people like Ayers told him to do - and ruined his life. Somehow, I doubt Armstrong was the sort of guy that all of those hippie girls would have gotten tingly over; but he was goaded to perform acts of violence in order to prove himself worthy of the Cause, whatever that was. A sad story all around, and one that you are not likely to hear.


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