c. 1996 Religion News Service
(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)
(UNDATED) President Clinton is fighting crime by calling for curfews and an unprecedented use of wiretaps. Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole wants to build more prisons, appoint tougher judges, and, it appears, drop his promise to lift the ban on assault weapons.
When the time is right, perhaps one of the candidates will unleash an expanded list of crimes for which the death penalty will be mandatory, with the other upping the ante by making the list retroactive to 1955.
Crime and possible acts of terrorism _ the recent crash of the TWA jetliner in New York, for instance, and the crude pipe bomb at the Olympic Games in Atlanta _ are making everybody jumpy about the question of security. And politicians are responding to the fear.
The troubling aspect of the bidding war now underway is that it all too often leads to crackdowns restricting the civil liberties of non-criminals. Not that Americans aren’t ready to give up freedom for security as reflected in the incredibly high (90 percent in one poll) support for another totalitarian idea,”random”roadblocks to detect drunken drivers.
Before this surrender of personal liberties gets too far out of hand, however, a round of cold showers and sober consideration is in order about some anti-crime plans that are actually working _ and not at the cost of liberty.
Look, for example, at the progress being made in New York City, which is wrongly considered by many Americans to be the Carnegie Hall of crime.
New York is not fighting crime by calling out the paratroopers. Quite the opposite. The authorities are thinking and acting small. City police, who once ignored”petty”crimes such as turnstile-jumping and loitering, are finding that by enforcing laws against those minor menaces they can cut the crime picture across the board. The results are stunning. Car thefts are down by more than half in the past five years. The same is true for homicide.
A recent issue of The New Yorker magazine told of great changes going on in the 75th Precinct, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The 5.6 square miles of the 75th are home to many of New York’s poorest residents. In 1993, there were 126 homicides in that precinct. Last year, there were 44.
What has changed? Police stop more cars, confiscate more guns, and have cracked down on loitering and drug-selling. These small changes in policy have reaped enormous benefits.
Crime specialist James Q. Wilson made a similar observation years ago with his now-famous”broken window”theory. Wilson discovered that if you don’t repair a broken window, more windows will be smashed.
Jonathan Crane of the University of Illinois found that teen pregnancy and school dropout rates remain manageable in neighborhoods where 5 percent or more of the residents fall into the category the Census Bureau calls”high-status workers,”i.e., professionals, managers and teachers.
But when the number of high achievers drops below 5 percent, these rates rise. Crane’s point is not just that social problems are contagious. It’s that they’re contagious in the same way epidemics are.”At the 5 percent tipping point,”he writes,”neighborhoods go from relatively functional to wildly dysfunctional virtually overnight.” In my prison ministry, I have noted the immense difference small steps toward order can make. In cells and cellblocks where there is an emphasis on personal hygiene and keeping cells in order _ beds made, magazines and books stacked neatly, floors swept _ morale is much higher than in unkempt areas. The more disheveled the prisoners and cells, the greater their mental despair.
Wilson’s”broken window theory”and New York’s crackdown on”petty”crimes are both secular examples of a Christian understanding of life, best articulated by St. Augustine in his”City of God.” Augustine pointed out that once the”right order”of the community _ God’s plan _ was disturbed, it must be corrected. Otherwise, more chaos would inevitably follow.
Keeping that right order becomes vital. By attending to the small loose threads, the sweater is kept from unraveling. We should all celebrate the fact that New York has shown that even when the sweater is unraveled, the right ordering of society can be re-established _ and not through massive state intervention.
New York has suffered a bad reputation over the years, and in light of Gotham’s renaissance I offer this little pop quiz: Where does New York rank among American cities in violent crime? First? Tenth?
Try 136th, the same ranking as Boise, Idaho.
MJP END COLSON
