Potemkin villages were purportedly fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigory Potyomkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story, Potyomkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress' eyes.Allow me to suggest that we may be living in a Potemkin America.
Almost every time a politician speaks, you hear them wax rhapsodic about "hard working American families" and how they need this or that benefit from the government lest they devolve into cannibalizing their children for lack of food / health care / education benefits / cash for their clunkers.
What if the "hard-working American family" struggling to survive is a mythical construct? Here is the evidence that it does not, in fact, exist. Watch the soft-core porn on prime-time TV. Watch the medium-core porn on cable TV. Look at the revenue growth in hard-core porn on the Internet. Check out the rancid profiles of children on MySpace. Look at the growth of single-parent families in the last 50 years. Look at the growth of our prison population over that same period of time and how that population comes from single-parent families.
What if the "hard-working American family struggling to make ends meet" is instead just American households suffering the natural consequences of the societal decay that has come from embracing a libertine moral code? Isn't the expected result of the porn all around you an increase in single-parent families? Isn't the expected result of increased single-parent families massive prison populations and household poverty?
If that's the case, then the entire logical foundation for all of our policy debates is total nonsense. To make the analysis more personal, if your teenage child was engrossed in porn, using drugs and otherwise focused on sating his bodily desires, would you respond by buying him a new car? Would you respond by increasing his teacher's pay? Would you respond by increasing his allowance?
If your little darling did all of those things, but you rewarded him as if he was a hard-working American struggling to make ends meet, what end result would you expect?
Well, maybe. Except:
ReplyDeleteAccording to this, violent crime and property crime have both been trending down rather sharply since about 1993
At the same time, the graph you show here shows ever more people going to prison.
My question is: what are these people being arrested for, if violent and property crimes are both down?
(I suppose it could be that the violent crime rate is down because more of the people who might commit these crimes have been put in jail, but the relative shapes of the curves don't really seem to bear this out).
Tim, my bet would be the drug trade.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a reduction in the number of crimes does not mean a reduction in the number of criminals. If you incarcerate a criminal after fewer crimes, you can see both a reduction in crime and an increase in people in prison.
ReplyDeleteI'd be glad if they'd start putting folks in jail here in Washington... my car has been broken into twice, and both times the SOBs got suspended community service and nothing was ever returned (except for a car tire, which I think was the detective being nice, because he brought it by in a civie car the day they were arrested)
ReplyDeleteAt a guess, since your listing includes probation, a lot of folks are going to jail for violating their probation.
Side note: Mr. Eisele, your link graphs the arrests for violent crime holding pretty steady; referred site says 1995 was the highest since '93 for arrests, at 796,200, and 2004 is the lowest with 590,300 arrests.
ReplyDeleteThis might mean there are fewer unsolved crimes, that the folks who use to be multiple offenders are staying in jail and not having a chance to offend, or the prior numbers were inflated somehow.
There's one fishy bit-- the date of change seems to be 1993, and that's also the year they changed their method of collecting data. Also a year that has double the "actual" crimes as vs "reported."
Thanks for the comments, foxie. Another possible explanation is the increase in sentence lengths. If you're prisoners spend more time in prison you could also see a decrease in crimes, but an increase in the prison population.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, the data suggests something other than the problems our policies are trying to solve.
I don't know, makes perfect sense to me.... criminals in jail is inversely proportional to known criminals out doing crimes....
ReplyDeleteI think I've failed in my blog post. I'm suggesting that the rise in criminal behavior is an indication of societal decay and that it is a much larger problem than whatever besets "hard-working American families."
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with longer prison sentences per se, I'm just suggesting possible mechanisms for a decline in crimes and an increase in criminals.
*looks at 40% bastard birth rate, then thinks of how many marriages break up when the kids are in diapers*
ReplyDeleteI don't think we need to look at crime rates to figure that single parent families are growing. Single parent families are much more likely to be lower class, not middle.
Add in that not ALL middle class families are hard working, OR aren't struggling to survive (my folks worked hard to make ends meet, and we were legally at the poverty line, but very middle class-- survived just fine)...
I think your conclusion is correct, my brain just takes a different path to the same place.
http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/NationalProfile.aspx
ReplyDeleteclaims 33% of kids live in homes were NO parent has year-round, full time employment, and 32% are in single-parent homes.
link
ReplyDeletefoxie, thanks for the link. After reading that, the best policy I can think of would be to give away $4500 for used cars so we can wreck them and help the people go further into debt buying a new car.
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense, doesn't it?
Don't lose all hope.
ReplyDelete