Rick Lowe

With drive by shootings, stab victims and armed robberies occurring here on New Providence almost daily, it's not hard to get despondent.

With this in mind many of us search for ideas on how crime might be resolved, and in so doing I stumbled across a forum held by The Independent Institute in 1995 entitled "What to Do About Crime" featuring James Q. Wilson with additional commentary from Robert Higgs, Don B. Kates, Jr., Chris Killough, William I. Koch, Joseph D. McNamara.

Here are a couple snippets that I found interesting:

…It turns out that what many people who have this view mean by “root causes” are those things that they don’t like about society. If they can blame crime on these factors, perhaps they can get more government efforts directed at those things. The difficulty is that though there is some relationship between poverty and crime, it is not a very close one. There is only a very weak relationship between crime and unemployment or the business cycle… James Q. Wilson

…One alternative would be improved adoption laws, making it easier to adopt, even trans-racially. Another alternative would be the use of family shelters or group homes in which the mother and her child would live, so that real adults who really understand how children have to be cared for will be supervising the behavior of young girls who in many cases do not know this. There would be no drugs, no alcohol, and no boyfriends on the premises. James Q. Wilson

…if we are going to see any significant change in crime in America, we are going to have to see some cultural changes, and that doesn’t come from government. It comes from the communities themselves. Joseph D. McNamara

…Probably, the most effective group in fighting gangs around the country has been an organization in Baltimore called Grandmothers Against Gangs. When they sight a bunch of kids selling drugs on street corners, they run out with brooms and chase them away. No bureaucracy, no government grants, no political turf battles. If we can get the government out of our lives, we can make crime control a reality. William I. Koch

…I’d like to just observe that tens of millions of people use drugs, if not regularly, at least episodically. And that the great, great majority of those drug users do not commit crimes, that placing drug users and drug dealers in prison is a kind of prior restraint, which itself should be a crime. Robert Higgs

Read all the remarks at this link…