Some Ideas About Crime

I found this essay about crime, and why it remains so high is some communities.

Apparently, the reasons for it have less to do with color or ethnicity (or sex/gender), than the degree of impulsivity of the perps (and, to some degree, their victims).

One major difference in our society is that there are fewer restraints on impulsive behavior. Homes used to actively admonish children to think before they acted. Churches put great emphasis in not giving into impulses that ran contrary to the 10 Commandments and other guides to proper behavior with others.

Schools were well known for their efforts to corral the impulsive, give them physical tasks or activities that wore out the excess energy, and generally turned out graduates able to function in the adult world without causing havoc.

Not so today. Our society is often helpless to impose those values on their citizens/residents, and the coarsening of the culture reflects that change.

The book I was reading, “Ghettoside”, by Jill Leovy, turned out to be engrossing. I finished it this morning. It contains some intriguing ideas about how to improve inner city policing.

I’m on a non-fiction reading roll lately. It’s been too hot here along the North Coast to do much of anything. So, I’m reading books I can access on Kindle Unlimited, or through my public library’s online checkout.