Crime

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- "Three-strikes" sentencing laws actually increase homicide rates, a study by University of Alabama criminologists shows.

Although it might seem that such "tough-on-crime" legislation would increase public safety, the opposite has been found to be true. Felons who calculate they will receive the same punishment for murder as they would for having a third strike, kill their victims to avoid detection and police officers to avoid apprehension.

Many police organizations oppose "three-strikes" laws for this reason, said senior author John Sloan III, an associate professor of Justice Studies at the Birmingham campus.

Bernard Harcourt, Professor in the Law School, does not believe in simplistic formulas to ýfixý the problem of crime. He does believe broader questions and more in-depth discussions about gun violence, punishment and criminal justice are critical to stabilizing the lives of American citizens and the neighborhoods where they live. Harcourt draws on criminal law and procedure, police and punishment practices, political and social theory, and criminology to seek answers and solutions to crime. He has challenged the validity of an accepted policing method called ýbroken windowsý and has found that public policy interventions used to decrease youth gun violence have had troublesome repercussions.

The Houston Police Department may lose access to the FBI's national DNA database by the end of the week, depending on the outcome of a federal review of the law enforcement agency's crime laboratory. "We are concerned about what's going on there," said John Behun, chief of the FBI Laboratory's Forensic Science Systems in Quantico, Va. "We're going to have a make a decision in the next couple of days."

The Oscar ceremony, Hollywood's annual spectacular of self-adulation by the chronically self- adulatory, is over. (This was written before the ceremonies.) None of the venerated movies will ever have the impact of 'The Godfather'. Marlon Brando reportedly sought the role of Don Vito Corleone because of the similarities between American business and organized crime exemplified by the line, 'It's not personal. It's just business.' I was impressed more by the symbiosis between organized crime and government.

Two Australian teenage girls were shot and wounded with a crossbow at their school on Thursday, with the arrow passing through the chest of one of the victims and into the legs of the other, an ambulance official said. The girls were attacked by a teenage boy who was tackled as he then tried to light a petrol bomb, a witness told a Sydney radio station.

Ban the guns, and the criminals use crossbows. What next? Ban crossbows? knives? Sharply pointed sticks?

The number of people in U.S. prisons and jails last year topped 2 million for the first time, driven by get-tough sentencing policies that mandate long terms for drug offenders and other criminals, the government reported Sunday. The federal government accounted for more inmates than any state, with almost 162,000, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department. That number includes the transfer of about 8,900 District of Columbia prisoners to the federal system.

An estimated 12 percent of African-American men ages 20 to 34 are in jail or rison, according to a report released yesterday by the Justice Department. The proportion of young black men who are incarcerated has been rising in recent years, and this is the highest rate ever measured, said Allen J. Beck, the chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Department. By comparison, 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated.

With incarceration rates this high, it's clear something is wrong. It's less clear what exactly is broken.

Preliminary data for 2002 released today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program indicate a 0.2-percent decrease in the Nation's Crime Index from the 2001 figure. The Crime Index is calculated using the seven UCR Part I offenses: four violent crimes that include murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault and the three property crimes that include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.

It seems crime is down. This should make it harder to argue for more gun control.

EVERY day, the nation's prisons release a walking crime wave: 70 percent of state con victs are re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of their release. A Justice Department study found that convicts let out from the prisons of 15 states in 1994 had been charged by 1997 with 2,900 homicides, 2,400 kidnappings, 2,400 rapes, 3,200 other sexual assaults, 21,200 robberies, 54,600 assaults and 13,900 other violent crimes, not to mention over 200,000 car thefts, burglaries and drugs and weapons offenses. Add in crimes they didn't get caught for, and the total is undoubtedly far higher.

One of the few things we know about crime is that past predation is a reasonably reliable earmark of prospective criminality; and, that while career criminals are incarcerated countless gruesome crimes are prevented. From this wisdom was born three-strikes laws that punish incorrigible felons with life imprisonment. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Ewing vs. California (March 5, 2003) that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments is undisturbed by terms of imprisonment that put an end to careers in criminality. What astonishes is not the majority decision, but that four justices dissented and that the case sparked controversy.

Research shows that teenagers who commit violent acts such as homicide or assaults often showed signs of aggressive behaviors while in elementary school, such as hitting, kicking and using verbal insults and threats. Two school-based violence prevention programs that recognize this are finding success at the elementary school level, according to two studies published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).

For once, jointogether.org has something sensible featured on their site. This study claims to link violent behavior as teenagers with violent behavior in elementary school, which only makes sense, and indicates some programs to address violent behavior early on have had some success.

It's the people who are violent, not the tools they use.

Americans should be thankful they live in a country that takes crime seriously and is fighting it with growing success. Not so long ago, one source of anti-Americanism in Europe was the belief that crime was out of control in the U.S. But things have changed significantly: U.S. crime rates now compare favorably with Europe's--and unlike Europe's, they are going down, not up.

If the United States had a federal law requiring so-called "ballistic fingerprinting" of every firearm in the country, could police have already caught the murderer coming to be known as the "Beltway sniper"?

That is the assertion in a message sent to supporters of the group formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc.

Under the Democratic leadership of Gov. Parris Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the State of Maryland has notched the second highest violent crime rate in the nation according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report for 2001.

According to the FBI report, there were 783 violent criminal acts committed per every 100,000 citizens in Maryland during the course of the 2001 calendar year. Florida topped the category with 797.2 per 100,000.

Since Glendening and Townsend, who assumed the role of crime czar, took office in 1995, Maryland's violent crime ranking has jumped ahead of six states to achieve its current standing.

"A passenger in an automobile is generally not perceived to have the kind of control over the contents of the vehicle as does a driver," Judge Dale Cathell wrote.

Defense lawyers in the case stemming from a 1999 drug arrest said they believe the ruling increases the protection of individual citizens.

Attorneys for a South Florida distributor held liable for selling the gun used to kill a Lake Worth teacher asked a judge Tuesday for permission to interview a juror to find out if she improperly influenced fellow jurors in reaching a $1.2 million verdict. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jorge Labarga said no.

They began walking out of the Fayette County Jail here this afternoon, the first of 567 Kentucky state prison inmates that Gov. Paul E. Patton abruptly ordered released this week in a step to reduce a $500 million budget deficit.

Governor Patton said only nonviolent offenders were being given the early mass commutation. But those let out today included men convicted of burglary, theft, arson and drug possession, some of them chronic criminals.

For all I care, they can release everyone in prison on drug convictions alone. If they did that it would probably reduce costs enough to prevent the need for any more releases!

Police have been ordered not to bother investigating crimes such as burglary, vandalism and assaults unless evidence pointing to the culprits is easily available, The Telegraph can reveal.

Under new guidelines, officers have been informed that only "serious" crimes, such as murder, rape or so-called hate crimes, should be investigated as a matter of course.

In all other cases, unless there is immediate and compelling evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA material, the crime will be listed for no further action.

So... in the country which has made self-defense illegal, the police are also forbidden to spend resources investigating "minor" crimes like burglary, vandalism, and assault? That must be so comforting for the subjects.

Police in Los Angeles have settled on a new way of handling those pesky burglar alarms that take up so much of their time. They will now ignore them -- unless someone can prove that there is a genuine emergency.

But security companies have vowed to challenge the move, saying that burglars would be emboldened if they discovered that police would ignore alarms and that the costs of verifying automated calls with guards or video cameras were too great to be practical.

America's alleged excessive gun ownership results from an inordinate, unfair and implicitly racist fear of blacks. Michael Moore, producer of the anti-gun documentary, "Bowling For Columbine," so argued in his appearance late last year on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Volokh posted a link on a firearms-related mailing list to a study on gun availability, drug use, and crime in juveniles. There are a number of obvious flaws that are worth pointing out.

"No support is found for the hypothesis that gun availability decreases the likelihood of being victimized": this should not surprise anyone, since they are working with a sample of high-school students for whom "having access to a gun at home" does not indicate that the gun is available for self-defense, whether inside or outside the home.

"In fact, the results show that having access to guns increases the probability of being cut or stabbed by someone and of someone pulling a knife or gun on the juvenile.": Again, this should not be surprising; juveniles in high-crime areas are probably highly correlated with juveniles in economically-depressed familys or regions. Families in high-crime areas are presumably more likely to have a gun around the house for self-defense and definitely more likely to store the gun in such a manner that it is readily accessible to a juvenile (as the cost of a secure gun safe is not trivial). Families composed of criminals owning illegal firearms are even more highly correlated with lack of safe storage methods and gun availability.

"gun availability at home increases the propensity to commit crime by about two percentage points for juveniles but has no impact on damaging property.": It's unclear what crimes they refer to or why they chose to exclude damaging property. Regardless, this is another unsurprising result: *Access* to firearms is likely to be highly correlated with living in a high-crime area and with being raised by criminals. Being raised by criminals will presumably have a fairly obvious crime-increasing effect on the juveniles so raised.

Why do I emphasize access? Because having a gun at home for most juveniles is not the same as either owning a gun or being able to use the gun. The juvenile cannot legally carry the gun, and will as a practical matter be prevented from doing so by the owner, regardless of the juvenile's perceived "access".

Additionally, in most cases, being "victimized" occurs whether or not you have a gun to protect you. If you are accosted by a criminal in a dark alley demanding your wallet (or your lunch money), you have been victimized, whether you use or display a firearm in self-defense or not. To properly analyze the benefits of gun ownership, an unbiased scientist cannot seek to use juvenile data and must distinguish between 1) events occurring inside or outside the home; 2) whether the victim had access to the firearm; 3) whether the firearm was legal or illegal.

Why must "illegal" guns (ie, guns possessed by prohibited persons, such as felons, as distinct from "banned guns" eg assault weapons) be distinguished? Because those illegal guns are highly correlated with a criminal upbringing, unsafe storage methods, and high-crime areas.

Failing to distinguish those factors will produce misleading results, as the people reading academic analyses of gun control and crime issues are presumably highly negatively correlated with illegal guns.

It's also interesting, given the expected dichotomy between illegal and legal guns, to question whether prohibitive gun control measures (ie, a ban on all firearms, or on handguns) would effectively turn "legal" guns into "illegal" guns; that is, once the gun is made illegal, do the negative traits correlated with (but not, I think, caused by!) the "availability" of those firearms become associated with the guns newly made illegal?

The hypothesized causes of the effect in that case are a criminal upbringing, unsafe storage methods, and a high-crime environment. By living in a house with an illegal firearm, even one in which the owners were otherwise perfectly responsible, could produce similar effects: a firearm concealed from the police is not stored in a gun safe; and a parent who commits a crime and conceals it from the police with the knowledge of his children is, to some degree, damaging their respect for the law.

Thus, we can speculate that banning firearms might actually have negative results. But there is as yet no evidence -- just a chain of hypotheticals.