Is it time to have the conversation yet? The one where everyone acknowledges that crime is the number one toxin weakening economies, creating unemployment, raising the price of living and taxes, blighting education (charter or no charter school movement; Race to the Top/No Child Left Behind, neither, or both), denying property rights, and shearing the vector of life for tens of millions of Americans?
Crime wounds the educated and socially mobile, but it defines life for the lower classes. It creates winning and losing zip codes, feeds resentment, and forces working people to strain their budgets in a dozen different ways. It warps childhoods and corrodes old age. It destroys the value and even the point of owning private property. It forces us to constrain our lives — especially, women must do this. It creates and displaces populations — forget “white flight” — it never was just white, but now more than ever it’s about just getting out if you can. I recently talked to a young Puerto Rican woman who got out of St. Petersburg, Florida because of the violence (after getting out of Puerto Rico for the same reason) and is now terrified of gang violence in her new, previous rural, inland town, where a multiple shooting left two dead and 22 wounded last year. ...
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