By the time they’re old enough to vote, roughly one in three Americans has had at least one criminal arrest. Does that mean a rotten youth here? Or is it cops that are out of control?
By age 23, an estimated 33 percent — and perhaps as many as 41 percent of young adults — have been arrested at least once, excluding traffic violations. If you are wondering: arson topped the list, followed by vandalism, disorderly conduct, robbery, burglary and car theft.
Of course, arrest does not mean guilt. Many of those arrested are not even charged. But it’s still an exceptional statistic and nowhere else comes close, not even communist China or the old Soviet Union.
Given that young adults are but lately children, pediatricians have a role in preventing violent or unsafe behaviors in young at-risk patients. It is obvious that kids don’t get arrested in isolation, but there will be other issues are going on in their lives.
The new study appears online Dec. 12 and in the January 2012 print issue of Pediatrics. The researchers used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1997 to 2008 for 7,335 young people aged 8 to 23.
Having lived here for over 8 years, I can tell you it true that the US criminal justice system is more punitive than in most countries. In the years since 1972, the proportion of jailed citizens has gone up fivefold. They are still building more and more jails. None of it is working but that doesn’t stop what is, essentially, a very cruel, stupid and revengeful society from dealing harshly with its misfits.
It’s a kind of hypocrisy, of course.
[SOURCE: January 2012, Pediatrics]
I generally agree with your post but I would say we have what Sam Francis calls “Anarcho-Tyranny.” Where the generally peaceful and law abiding citizens of the US are constantly harassed and intimidated by federal, state, county and city law enforcement (who are all becoming highly militarized.) The US Dept. of Education, for example, has a SWAT team! The Gibson guitar company gets raided by heavily armed Fish and Wildlife agents with their weapons drawn, a guitar company for Christs sake! While many urban and rural parts of the US are completely chaotic and lawless with no law enforcement to be seen. Victor Davis Hansen, a writer and farmer who lives in Central California has written extensively about this. An example from my city of Seattle is apt, a group of black teens beat to death a classically trained musician, the “Tuba Man” who played outside of Mariner and Seahawk games for years. These excitable “youths” were given a few months in juvenile lock up for this senseless and brutal murder of a beloved musician. Every few months one of these cretins is arrested for another violent crime, yet they’re still on the street wreaking chaos. It’s only a matter of time before they murder again. Now conversely if you smoke a cigarette in a city park-which is illegal in Seattle- the police and prosecutors will be all over you. Why, because you are a law abiding citizen, who’ll pay his ticket, go to court and provide grist and most importantly money for the quasi police state we have in the US.
The following is Samuel Francis’ definition of “Anarcho-Tyranny:” “What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny. […]”