The definition of insanity, Harris County style (Off the Kuff)
Charles Kuffner laments the "insanity" of Harris County wanting to expand its space to lock up bad guys (Off the Kuff).
In their provocative book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argue persuasively that the significant reduction of crime in America in the 1990s can be attributed to three significant factors: 1) the impact of abortion, 2) higher rates of imprisonment, and 3) increased number of police.
Their abortion linkage, while interesting, is not very instructive to policymakers.
Locally, however, the other two factors are extremely important for crime policy. HPD's manpower shortage is a significant problem for area crimefighting, a direct result of of former Mayor Brown's policies and the seeming indifference of current Mayor Bill White, so significantly boosting HPD manpower almost certainly will fall to Bill White's successor.
Compounding HPD's manpower issues by undoing the positive effects of higher rates of punishment (and the prison capacity for the same) would be a big mistake, though. We hope more sensible thinking will prevail at the county level.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/15/08 05:12 PM | Print |
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