According to an article by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal, former prison inmates bring their "prison culture" with them to the streets once they leave jail. This prison culture emphasizes "respect," which doesn't mean what I would think it means; and of course disputes are resolved by violence. The article then goes on to claim that because so many individuals in the US are incarcerated at some point in their lives, this prison culture is spreading across our cities and makes a noticeable contribution to violent crime. The City of Chicago experienced a small spike in murders recently, but with a sharp increase in deaths of school-age youth, and Mayor Daley is using this as an excuse to promote his anti-gun campaign.
While this article caught my eye — I began to wonder how disaggregation affects the connection between offender, victim, prison culture, and crimes — I would like to caution that I have to take the article with a huge grain of salt. The Wall Street Journal seems to have a cabal of reporters who promote Hillary Clinton with a stream of articles that read as if they come directly from her campaign headquarters. The most recent example was an extraordinarily poorly-written article on health care in the US, with a heavy emphasis on denigrating the management of non-profit hospitals.
This "prison culture" article carries a tell-tale quote from David Kennedy of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control: "This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration." The notion that the prison population is too high is a common refrain in certain political circles.
While I've spent a while this morning trying to find some statistics on crime, the subtle political slant of this article is so unpersuasive that I think I'll put the entire question aside.
Topics: · government · society
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