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"Poverty is the mother of crime." --Marcus Aurelius
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Violent crime is the most profound expression of the social crisis in America and it is the most damning indictment of the American economic and political system. This inhumane system has already led to the moral bankruptcy of American society, a bankruptcy which breeds the alienation of people, the breakdown of families, and an enormous crime epidemic.
Crime exists everywhere but it predominates in the United States more than in any other country, especially violent crime. While there are killings and other crimes of violence elsewhere in the world, their depth and scope do not compare to that of the United States. There is no question that for a country which is not beset by widespread civil unrest or insurrection, the United States of America today is one of the most violent, most crime-ridden societies on earth. This is not occasional terrorist violence as it happens in other countries but the terror of everyday life as it is lived by millions of Americans today.
Violence is as much a part of the American way of life as Coca-Cola or Big Mac hamburgers. In no other developed nation are the people held hostage to such an unrestrained and seemingly unrestrainable amount of violent crime. As the Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Art Carey wrote:
"How far is far? Nearly twenty times that of most other nations," says Carey. According to a recent international survey, among males fifteen to twenty-four, the U.S. homicide rate is 21.9 per 100,000. Compare that to 1.4 per 100,000 in France, or 1.2 per 100,000 in England, or 0.5 per 100,000 in Japan. Homicide rates among young adults in the United States are twenty-nine times as high as in Japan and thirty-six times as high as in Great Britain. The risk of being robbed is 208 times greater in the U.S. than in Japan! More people are murdered in Los Angeles in an average month than in Great Britain during the course of a year. The United States far outpaces all other developed countries in homicide deaths. It's ten times higher than neighboring Canada's.
think it goes without saying that widespread poverty, homelessness, and hopelessness can produce a variety of ugly social pathologies, such as violent crime. Despite the efforts of American criminology to place the motivating factors of crime elsewhere -- in psychology, physiology, or addictive, class or ethnic behavioral syndromes -- the greater part of the crime that we are witnessing in America today is, in my view, a direct result of misery plus despair.
"We pride ourselves on being an advanced, civilized society. But how civilized are we when children in New York City have begun wearing bulletproof clothing for protection on their way to and from school? How civilized are we when in the nation's largest city, there were a record twenty-two hundred killings -- an average of more than six a day -- in 1990? How civilized are we when our nation's capital has the highest homicide rate of any city in America? How civilized are we when the United States has the highest homicide rate -- by far -- in the industrialized world?"
Americans live in a society dominated by many various forms of violence. They experience it everywhere -- on their streets, in their neighborhoods and homes, their schools and workplaces, on their subways and highways. As Jan and Marcia Chaiken, experts on crime for the Rand Corporation, write:
In one way or another, Americans are all victims of this violent culture. If they are lucky enough, they only experience violence secondhand... In fact, the risk of being victimized by violent crime in America exceeds many other significant life risks. An American today is more than twice as likely to be a violent crime victim -- to be assaulted, robbed at the point of a gun, raped or abducted -- as injured in a car accident. The risk of being the victim of a violent crime is much higher for an American than the risk of being divorced or dying of cancer. According to reliable estimates, the rate at which Americans are victimized by violent crime is ten times the rate at which they die from heart attacks.
This is why the majority of Americans say that crime is this nation's worst problem and their own greatest fear. A 1997 Gallup poll shows the American public ranks crime as the most important problem facing their country. A 1994 Associated Press poll found that fifty-two percent of men and sixty-eight percent of women in the United States are constantly afraid of becoming victims of a violent crime. In a Time/CNN poll (January 1995), as much as eighty-nine percent of those surveyed said that crime in America is getting worse, and fifty-five percent said they worry about becoming crime victims themselves.
Even when danger may be remote, it seems ever present. Americans, in general, are much less free from fear of violence than citizens of any other advanced nation. Can a country be called "the best of the best" if its citizens cannot safely walk the streets of its cities at night? In fact, Americans spend ninety-seven percent of their time indoors. Many do so because they are simply afraid to go outside. I have heard of elderly people who died inside their homes in very hot weather simply because they were afraid to open windows or go outside.
This whole nation is basically paralyzed by crime. An ever-present fear and anxiety distorts and constrains the way most Americans think and live. As Ronald White of the Washington Post described such a life: "Every time I realize that I have not enjoyed the cool night air nor marveled at a full moon, I know that one does not have to be robbed at gunpoint to be a victim of a crime."
Senseless savagery occurs every day in America, providing rich justification for these fears. Most people in America have been victims of serious crime or have a family member who has. For example, forty-two percent (nearly three million!) of New Yorkers said they had been the victims of a crime in 1993. According to the Council on Crime in America, a bipartisan national commission chaired by former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell and former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, over 400,000 Americans have been murdered since 1977 -- almost seven times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The Council on Crime in America is a special program of the New Citizenship Project, a Washington-based public policy organization. It was established in November 1995 to examine violent crime situation in the United States and is comprised of leading experts on fighting crime at the federal, state and local levels. Its first report, The State of Violent Crime in America, which was released in January 1996, is an attempt to provide a rigorous, empirical, real-world analysis of the current state of crime and punishment.
In the past decade alone, 200,000 U.S. residents have been killed and millions wounded. Overall, the United States has the highest homicide rate in the industrial world. Since 1960, violent crimes increased by 500 percent. During the same time period, the population increased by only forty-one percent. The rate of violent crime -- defined by the FBI and National Institute of Justice as the reports of homicides, rapes, aggravated assaults, and robberies per 100,000 of the total population -- has more than tripled since 1965. And it keeps increasing! In 1960, there were 160 violent crimes for every 100,000 Americans. By 1975, this rate had climbed to 487 violent crimes for every 100,000 Americans. And by 1995, it had climbed to 684 violent crimes for every 100,000 American. For example, there were a reported 21,600 murders, 97,460 rapes, 580,550 robberies, and 1,099,180 aggravated assaults in the United States in 1995. As of 1997, there were an estimated thirty-nine violent victimizations per 1,000 U.S. residents twelve years old and older. From 1985 to 1994, violent crimes rose 28.6 percent: murder, 13.9 percent; rape, 5.7 percent; robbery, fourteen percent; and aggravated (serious) assault, forty-two percent. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a crime in America occurs every two seconds. One violent crime every seventeen seconds: one murder every twenty-one minutes, one forcible rape every five minutes, one robbery every forty-eight seconds, and an aggravated assault every twenty-eight seconds.
Over a lifetime, the average man in American society has an eighty-nine percent probability of being a victim of an attempted crime of violence and the average woman has a seventy-three percent probability. Several years ago the Department of Justice estimated that eighty-three percent of all Americans would be victims of violent crime at least once in their lives. About a quarter would be victims of three or more violent crimes. "We are progressing steadily toward the fulfillment of that prediction," says Adam Walinsky, a well-known expert in a field of law and former legislative assistant to Robert Kennedy.
"Interesting enough, as a society, we treat violence as an inevitable, natural problem that just happens," said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Assistant Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. For example, nearly eighteen percent of women in the United States have been raped or the victim of attempted rape at some point during their lives. That amounts to 17.7 million American women. More than half of the rape victims said they were under seventeen when first raped, according to data released in 1998 by the U.S. Justice Department. Sixteen percent were under 12-years-old! There were seventy-one forcible rapes per 100,000 females reported to United States law enforcement agencies in 1996. The National Crime Victimization Survey estimates that annually 172,400 American women were victims of rape. On the other hand, the data from the National Women's Study, a longitudinal telephone survey of a national household probability sample of women at least eighteen years of age, show 683,000 women forcibly raped each year and that eighty-four percent of rape victims did not even report the offense to the police. ...
"Crime, like television, has come into the living room -- and into the church, the lobbies of public buildings, the parks, the shopping malls, the bus stations, the airport parking lots, the subways, the schools ... Crime and the fear of crime have spread from 'traditional' high crime areas into once-serene urban neighborhoods, from the central city to outlying suburbs and towns, and into summer resorts and college campuses."
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