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Introduction: How Violent Is America?
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11446 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1994 |
465 Words |
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Violence seems to rule America. A gunman kills 6 and wounds 17 in a Long Island commuter train. A 12-year-old California girl is abducted and murdered. Tourists are routinely robbed and killed in Florida. Some 24,000 Americans were murdered in 1992--the highest total in the world.
There are paradoxes. The chances of an American being robbed or burglarized were greater in the mid-1970s than today. But while crime rates in general have declined, violent crime has increased dramatically, particularly in the inner cities. As a result, more than half the nation's households now have a gun, and Americans say that crime is the single biggest problem facing the nation.
Politicians are scrambling to come up with solutions. President Clinton is pushing an "anticrime" package that would tighten gun control and put as many as 100,000 new police on the streets. Republicans are urging harsher sentences, including the death penalty for major drug pushers.
Is there increasing violence because the criminal knows he will go unpunished? Or does the violence flow from a breakdown in the family and the local community? Is the federal government the only institution that can bring violent crime under control?
The number of Americans altering their behavior, staying away from downtown areas even if it means missing a play, a movie, or a baseball game, is at an all-time high, according to Michael Hedges of the Washington Times. More than 4 in 10 citizens feel violent crime has worsened in their city in the past year.
President Clinton has responded to the crisis by calling for mandatory life sentences for three-time violent offenders--the "three strikes and you're out" rule. Some skeptics point out that the number of prisoners in this country has doubled to 1.4 million in the last 10 years, the highest rate per population of any nation.
A major problem, argues David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research, is that the U.S. justice system is so clogged that it relies too heavily on plea bargaining. As a result, many habitual offenders are soon back on the street after having pleaded guilty to lesser crimes. One useful deterrent, Ridenour suggests, would be to eliminate bail for the most violent crimes.
Laurin A. Wollan of Florida State University proposes a two-track approach to control violent
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