Criminals Should Be Held Responsible for Crime

Country Living in the City

Like Social Do-Gooders, We Dance Around Issue Of Who Is Responsible For Wanton Violence

by Woody Jenkins, editor

CENTRAL — We’ve lived in our current home for 28 years.  It is located on a heavily-travelled road, and we have about 200 feet of frontage.  Over the past 28 years, the traffic count on that road hasn’t changed much, but one thing has.

When we first bought the property, once a month I’d take a small white kitchen garbage bag and walk across the front of the property to pick up trash.  It would take about 10 minutes, and I would fill the bag with litter, mostly cigarette butts, napkins, and sandwich wrappers.  It angered me to think that people would have so little regard for our parish and for property owners like us that they would mindlessly throw trash out their car window, as though the world were their garbage pit and they were “just passing through.”

How I yearn for those days!

Nowadays, I walk the front of the property once a week and take with me a large black garbage bag.  It sometimes takes me an hour to pick up what’s out there.

What’s out there is pretty amazing — used sanitary napkins, dirty diapers, condoms, whisky bottles, beer bottles, tires, shoes, half-eaten boxes of fried chicken, school work, contents of wallets, and anything and everything else you can possibly imagine.  Oh, except cash.  I’ve never found any cash out there!

When I’m finished, I drag the bag down to where I leave the garbage.  It’s often too heavy for me to pick up.  Spending an hour once a week picking up garbage that people have thrown in your front yard gives you time to think.  Last Sunday, I was thinking about something Rudy Giuliani said about how he drastically cut the crime rate in New York City.  He said the mistake many cities make is focusing all their attention on the “major” crimes like murder, rape, and armed robbery.   He said that as long as he focused on that, he failed to make progress in his fight against crime.

He let the little things go — such as littering, painting graffiti on walls, jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, and “minor” acts of vandalism.  He said he didn’t realize it at the time but he and his administration were sending a subtle message that “anything goes.”  The

broken window that goes unrepaired and the litter that isn’t picked up send the message that no one is in charge and no one is paying attention.

Then one day, Giuliani  said he suddenly realized that paying attention to the little things in the city was in fact the key to bringing law and order to the Big Apple.

The NYPD started arresting people who jumped over turnstiles in the subway and found that, lo and behold, some of them were wanted for murder!  They starting arresting people for vandalism and littering and found that a lot of them were wanted for crimes such as theft and burglary.

Ironically, the same mentality that allows someone to throw whisky bottles out a car window often overlaps with the mentality that allows an individual to commit serious crimes.  In other words, it’s pretty much the same people doing crime, whether major or minor.

People in our society have been conditioned to talk about the “crime problem,” “the murder rate,” “the rate of incarceration,” and other such statistical labels which explain little and solve nothing.

The reality is we have a lot of criminals here, and they should be held responsible for their actions.

It’s not about drugs, broken homes, poverty, or other social ills.  The entire history of America is about poor, downtrodden, illiterate people who achieved great things — and who didn’t become criminals!  People engage in criminal behavior by choice, and when they do, they deserve to be treated as criminals.  In many cases, that means sending them away where they will no longer be able to hurt the non-criminal population.

Isn’t it time we stop blaming everybody and everything except criminals for the crimes they commit?  And isn’t it time we pay attention to the “little” things that are symptous of things that are much worse?