Poverty always leads to crime. It always has, and probably always will, in every land and in every time. The reasons are easy to see. As the song goes, “…if you ain’t got nuthin’, you got nuthin’ to lose.” It is much easier to behave “morally” if one is comfortable. Apparently, it gets harder the poorer or richer one gets (rich people, of course, seldom pay for their crimes). It is therefore not surprising that the poorest state in the Union has the highest incarceration rate.
Most of the candidates in our state proclaim themselves to be “tough on crime,” especially the Republican ones. Frankly, I see no positive side to such “toughness.” We already imprison an absurd percentage of our population, and the cost of so doing is crushing our budget. Mississippi spends considerably more on our prison system than on our educational system. The budgetary shortfalls, in an ironic twist, reduce the number and quality of our law enforcement officers.
Historically, punishment — imprisonment, execution, mutilation, and so on — has been shown to have limited deterrence power. The punishment of others works better as a reward for upright behavior among people who might be tempted to break the law, but resist — usually comfortably well-off people tempted to shoplift or the like — as opposed to people who shoplift groceries in order to eat. Prisons are really very little use for reducing crime. Let our prisons be reserved for sequestering our actual monsters.
The best way to reduce crime is to reduce poverty. Since desperate people do desperate things, the best approach is to remove that desperation. Every time we let TANF funds get diverted, we increase the crime rate. Every time we refuse federal funds intended for our poor, we increase the crime rate. Every time we enact a top-heavy tax cut — or really, any tax cut — we increase the crime rate.
None of Mississippi’s political office-holders who campaigned on crime reduction have done anything to reduce the crime rate. They have imprisoned yet more people. They have mandated harsher penalties. Some have tried to enlarge our police forces (without more money to pay them). But Mississippi crime is like the Crimson Tide: unstoppable. So maybe it is time to try poverty reduction.
One of our big problems is that our poorest people are generally Black, and getting our state government to do anything that might help Black people is like asking the Heritage Academy football team to beat the Crimson Tide, even this year’s suspect version. But if crime reduction is anything but an empty promise, we have to turn our efforts to poverty reduction. Less crime is less crime, regardless of who benefits.
Bill Gillmore, Columbus
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