Hopelessness causes crime

By Ellen Ratner
Sen. Mary Landrieu spent the greater part of last week fighting for increased funding for victims of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans has turned into the Wild West. Red tape has stopped real rebuilding and community development in the Gulf Coast. Sen. Landrieu also came up with an initiative to combat crime in the New Orleans region. She had some great ideas to address the crime rate in New Orleans, which has skyrocketed. If it were only in New Orleans it may be a relatively easy fix, but we also heard this week that the murder rate is up across cities in the United States for two years in a row.

On Friday, the Police Executive Research Forum released a study on Violent Crime in the United States. The statistics are alarming. With 56 jurisdictions reporting, "Violent Crime in America: 24 Months of Alarming Trends" covers the percentage change in violent crime from the years 2004 to 2006. Homicide increased 10.21 percent, and robbery increased 12.27 percent. Aggravated assault increased 3.12 percent, and aggravated assault with a firearm increased 9.98 percent.

Why the increase in crime? What we do know is that people commit crimes when they have nothing to lose and when there is no hope, or when there is noticeable disparity between a person and his/her neighbor. We have seen this in Iraq with a Sunni population that now feels disenfranchised by the governing Shiites. We are seeing this in New Orleans and Mississippi when entire families are living in spaces that Mississippi Gov. Barbour says would land him in federal court if he had state prisoners housed in them.

Every parent knows that when Johnny has a big red truck and little Ricky doesn’t, it causes jealousy and fights. It is the same with glaring income disparity and the inability to get ahead. The Bush administration financial team’s schedule is released weekly to the Washington press corps, and they make speeches and provide dog and pony shows touting the health of the economy. The overall economy may have some healthy signs of growth, but it is clear that the Bush dog and pony shows are not addressing income disparity, which is at the root of increased crime.

The income gap is looking more like an income gulf. Jared Bernstein of the Washington, D.C., Economic Policy Institute says, "If you go back to 1979, prior to the period when the growth in inequality really took off in the United States, the top 5 percent on average had 11 times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. If you fast-forward to the year 2000, the most recent economic peak, you find that that ratio increased to 19 times. So over the course of those two decades, the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times."

The trend continues, especially in minority communities. Sen. Chuck Schumer held hearings this week on the African-American employment rates, which dropped from 75 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 1999, always remaining 3 to 4 percentage points behind white males. (The numbers were 71.5 percent for African-American males and 76.5 for white males in February of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Why? Many African-American males took part in the manufacturing part of our economy. Those jobs simply are not there, having moved across the border. The problem is not just minorities; 16 million Americans now live in deep and severe poverty, and some of this is rural poverty.

Programs to help workers learn to work have been cut. The Job Corps has had an increase in its budget, but other job-training programs suffered decreases, making funding about even. Professor Ronald Miney of Columbia University said that the Welfare-to-Work Program, funded under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1997, provided funds for states to enroll fathers in employment and training services. Unfortunately, funding for this program was discontinued in 2004. Today, stringent work requirements remain without the training.

Entry-level job openings in retail stores in New York and elsewhere have been known to have lines hundreds and sometimes thousands of people long. If there is no hope, and there is the stress of providing for your family, there is going to be an increase in crime. To use my favorite expression, "This is not rocket science." To reduce crime there needs to be hope. For there to be hope there needs to be jobs and job training, or else we will all be living like third-world countries with extreme poverty in the cities and rural areas, with the wealthy living in gated communities. That is not America, nor should it be.