as in, a person who actually studys crime and criminology. and knows what's going on.
you'll get no "it's all sheep, wolves and sheepdogs" idiocy from this guy's ilk.
one particular point stood out to my eyes, you could see that other points were leading up to it, and this point was the crux:
(it would be a good idea to read the rest of the interview, since it lead upto this point. points like "there are studied reasons that crime is the way it is, we DO know what's going on".)
i think this is very true. for example, you can't talk about drug reform in politics, it's tying a political noose around your neck.QUESTION: How has crime been politicized of late?
ELIOTT CURRIE: One of the most unfortunate things about the way we talk about crime in the United States today is that in a sense politics has trumped science when it comes to our public debate, so that an awful lot of people who were in positions of some influence and authority no longer talk about what's true when it comes to crime or what our evidence tells us, our research tells us, but what they think the public wants to hear. And they tend to believe, although they're not necessarily right about this, they tend to believe that the public is quite punitive and only wants to hear talk about getting tougher and tougher on crime. They don't think the public will sit still for explanations of the causes of crime. They don't think the public is interested in the prospects for the rehabilitation of criminals or the development of prevention programs. And so we don't have a real debate about those things. Instead we have politicians vying with one another to see who's going to be the toughest. And that extends, of course, all the way up the political ladder to the very top. And I think what that does is really eviscerate the debate about crime in our society today.
If you take my own state of California for example where we have a number of harsh criminal justice policies that have been passed in recent years, including our famous or infamous "three strikes and you're out" law, I don't believe that there is a single criminologist in the United States that I could name who really believed that that law would have a very beneficial impact on our crime problem, and who was not quite worried, in fact, about the negative impact that it would have on our criminal justice system. But virtually none of that concern passed into the level of political debate. And indeed you could go to the halls of the legislature in Sacramento and you could sit legislators down, you could ask them if they had paid any attention to the research on this matter. And they say they knew about the research, but they couldn't possibly talk about it in the political climate today.
One of the things that is part of the myth of crime control in the 1990s is that the public is uniformly punitive about crime. It turns out if you look at the more careful opinion surveys that have been done about crime in the last several years you see that the public is much, much more flexible, much, much more interested in a variety of approaches to crime and its control than we imagine it to be.
is this what we've degraded to as a society? where politics is nothing but a game or SURVIVOR... killing off anyone who stands out.
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