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I hear this often enough: “Crime is out of control we need more police on the street… or let’s get tougher on crime… or (insert conservative trope here)”

I wonder how much thinking people who say these sorts of  things have actually done about the issues of crime and poverty and how they are interrelated.  Whoops! I just used a 5 syllable word that, like it or not, it cuts me off from speaking to people who often hold this opinion, and relegates me to talking past them instead.   We do not have a common cultural frame of reference and I am written off as a lefty intellectual egg head socialist (Fear not I am neither smart nor witty enough to qualify to be in the liberal intellectual elite) and largely ignored.  Talking past one another is a serious problem for both me and the bumpkins ( My apologies I could not resist) whom I attempt to communicate with.

Crime is a problem. (But then again, criminality is on the decline, we should not let reality intervene… it might force us to reconsider our opinions)

The populist response:  We need more police, more prisons, and more courtrooms to punish these malcontents and n’er do wells.  Society has gone soft on criminals and we need to ‘toughen up’ on crime to fix things.

Okay, so to toughen up on crime we need to spend more public money on jails and police.  Where does the money come from?  The pubic purse of course and along with more police and jails/legal infrastructure comes the necessary bureaucratic/managerial superstructure.  So really, what they are advocating is more government spending and ‘bigger’ government.  Government spending and more government and antithetical to what conservatives and populists claim to believe.

More police and more jails often comes with the rallying cry of cuts to welfare and other methods of social assistance because ‘it makes people lazy’.  Check.  Never mind the facts of the matter.  Only a very small percentage of people who are on social assistance cheat the system, most do not.  Social assistance helps people avoid grinding poverty.  Poverty is the largest cause of our social ills, crime, violence, drug-use are all tied to impoverished people and conditions.  I digress though, as welfare and other forms of wealth distribution are inherently evil and must be abolished.   Charity will “fix” the problems of the poor.

My response:  Crime overall has been on a decline for decades, it certainly should not be ignored as a social issue, but needs to be framed within the proper non-fear based context.  We do not need more police and jail infrastructure.  We need more spending on the front lines of social assistance and welfare that directly combats poverty.  Poverty is the enemy we need to combat, not crime directly.  People who can exist at a modest level within society are less likely to commit crime.  If we went after the root cause of crime (poverty) we could stop so much deviancy before it ever started.  Improving community supports and schools have measurable paybacks toward the positive health of society.

Yet, I am the bad one because social programs mean taxes.   The free ride conservatives give to industry also mean more taxes to pay for the average person as well.  In Alberta, the royalty regime is laughably pathetic, with rates at absurdly low values.  I digress as I’ve already talked about energy royalties in a previous post.

If you feel crime is getting out of hand in your neighbourhood first ask what can you do as a community to fix the problem.  Conservative commentators are forever decrying the lazy welfare state… fine… then lets see these righteous people organizing community watches and ‘take back the night’ campaigns and tackling issues on the community level.   Does this happen?  Occasionally, but more often, we hear ‘we need to be tough on crime’ and ‘more police’ refrain as if this will actually fix the problem.  Forget getting people involved in their community, that smacks of socialism and is a bold assault on self-interest which of course, is at the very core of conservative belief.

So we get more police and build more jails and taxes go up (or more valuable social spending is cut) and government gets bigger.

Populists rarely see this connection and thus are missing out on the sweet irony that laces much of their dogmatism.