Posted on 05/06/2008 11:04:45 AM PDT by reaganaut1
WASHINGTON -- Edward Bedenbaugh III was about to start a job as a youth-violence counselor working in inner-city schools, mediating disputes before they escalated into lethal exchanges. He was celebrating his appointment at a nightspot in an upscale part of the nation's capital when he was shot in the back five times. The 29-year-old man died the next morning, April 17, two days before his oldest daughter's 10th birthday.
He was one of 14 people, all African-Americans, to die in a 13-day spasm of violence. That surge was enough to help make this April, with 18 murders, 20% deadlier than April 2007.
The grim run hasn't been limited to Washington. Several cities around the country, including Chicago and Philadelphia, endured similar mini murder waves during the same period, leading criminologists to worry whether this signifies the beginning of a trend -- or evidence of an unnoticed one.
What is most troubling to people who study crime is that there is no simple explanation for this rise. There are the usual reasons -- the economy, poverty, gangs and crews, and the availability of firearms, but there is one that has been little explored: the migration of the prison culture back to the streets. As nearly 700,000 convicts a year return home, some may be bringing prison culture with them.
"This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration," said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The New York Times recently had a long story on the same problem: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html
The death penalty would take care of part of the problem.
Sooooooooo. hows that total gun ban working out again?
Good thing they have gun control...............
Amish?
High taxes, few jobs, laws against self-defense, etc.
Philadelphia, Washington DC and Chicago have respectively lost 30, 25 and 20 percent of their populations since their peak. These cities were once highly desirable places to live - now only certain neighborhoods are.
I knew it was all George Bush's fault!
This is also wrong: "The homicides occur in neighborhoods where folks don't finish high school," Mr. Owens (O'Dell Owens, Hamilton County, Ohio medical examiner) said. "If you can't make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, you're done." This is a false cause and effect relationship. He's saying that people will not want to be thugs if they learn. But that implies that the action causes the volition. That's untrue. They wanted to be thugs and they learned how to be thugs. If they have no use for school, all the school in the world will only anger them. Volition causes action. Maybe the thugs don't want to educate themselves because they are thugs.
I’d love it if they would say where that young man’s altercation happened. As a DCite, I’d be able to discern the level of BS. Guess that’s too much to ask.
Upscale? I'd be curious to know the address.
“Maybe the problem is letting out some people who should be kept in jail...”
Exactly. The libs periodically get up on their high horse and rant about how we’ve got too many people in jail. They open the doors and let a lot of them out. Then this happens, and they scratch their heads trying to figure out why.
Another cause is all the illegal immigrants.
Twenty years that should have been 30, eh?
I knew they should have gone with the "impaling" plan.
So we shouldn't put murderers and other violent criminals in prison because they may come out worse than when they went in? How about executing them instead of keeping them locked up for a few years at taxpayer expense and then turning them loose so they can kill again? Dead criminals don't commit any more crimes after they assume room temperature.
This story is one of the many reasons why I support wider use of the death penalty.
this is also known as the chickens coming home to roost. And to think, it all happened one night.
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