As the new Conservative Government announced its plans to toughen up sentencing, Canadian newspapers were filled with editorials, columns, and letters to the editor all claiming that longer jail terms don’t deter crime. In the following chapters you can see for yourself what the truth is.
And not just about crime. Anyone who removes the blinders and looks around at other serious problems we are confronted with can clearly see, for example, that despite the tens of millions of dollars we are spending on native reserves, the residents are actually worse off than they were 20 years ago. Ditto the homeless, the street people, and the drug addicts. But we keep doing the same thing, over and over again. More money thrown at the problem, more social workers, more lenient sentencing, more committee meetings, more studies, all resulting in more problems, and more crime.
On the other hand, all around us are perfect examples of how to successfully deal with these issues, but sadly, what actually works just doesn’t fit the socialist and very often the antiAmerican ideology that is rampant in this country and is thus ignored. In many cases what actually works is bitterly attacked.
Opinion is one thing, but it’s time to have a close look at some facts which should prove to even the most obtuse skeptic that what’s really needed to solve many of our most pressing problems is just a little common sense!
Let’s start with crime and the facts involving two fairly major miracles…
SIX
The Miracle of New York
In September 1990, Time Magazine ran a cover story headlined “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” The story described how New York City had become the crime and welfare capital of the United States. Violence was out of control. Businesses were fleeing the city by the thousands, the infrastructure was crumbling, and the city was bankrupt despite constantly soaring taxes. The New York Post carried a headline one day that filled the entire front page asking desperately “WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE DO SOMETHING?” It was a legacy of decades of left-wing liberal policies in a left-wing liberal city run by left-wing liberal mayors and administrations.
On January 1, 1994, staunch right-wing conservative Rudy Giuliani, good friend of very right-wing conservative Ronald Reagan, was sworn in as mayor. He immediately answered the Post’s cry and began to do something.
On January 2, Giuliani summoned Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to his office. “We’ve got to show New Yorkers some hope, some reason to believe that their city can be saved,” said the mayor. “We can’t reduce 2,000 murders a year to none overnight, we need to tackle something we can accomplish quickly, something visible enough so that people can see the difference right away.” He raised the issue of the squeegee people who had been harassing motorists for years.
“The law doesn’t allow us to touch them,” said Bratton, “unless they become threatening or actually attack someone.” “Wait a minute,” said the Mayor. “We have jaywalking laws, don’t we? Let’s see if we can’t ticket them for that.”
The Police Commissioner was skeptical but returned a few days later excited. “We can do it,” he said. “Not only that, we thought there were thousands of these guys, but it turns out there are only 180 in the entire city. We’ll put an officer on each one of them and the moment they step off the curb with a bucket we’ll ticket them!” And so they did.
Within a few days the squeegee people were gone. As a bonus, police discovered that a number of them were wanted for much more serious crimes and were hauled off to jail. It is now believed that several murders were prevented by this simple act. Rudy and New York had their first victory, small as it was. There were many more!
The following is a brief list of some of the miracles accomplished by eight years of conservative common sense administration in New York City:
•In 1993 there were 1,946 homicides in New York; in 1994, the year Rudy came to power and instituted his broken windows policy, the number declined almost 20 percent to 1,561;
•By 2001, the last year of Rudy’s administration, there were 642 murders in New York City, a reduction of 67 percent in eight years;
•Overall crime was reduced 57 percent in the eight years;
•Shootings dropped 75 percent;
•There were almost 1,200 fewer rapes in 2000 compared to 1993;
•Robberies declined from more than 85,000 to just over 36,000;
•Auto theft plummeted from almost 112,000 to fewer than 36,000;
•Burglary dropped from nearly 101,000 to just over
•38,000.
One of the most dramatic declines was in the number of violent assaults at the city’s Rikers Island Prison—from more than 2,500 violent incidents in 1993 to just 70 in 2001. Until Rudy came along, those who committed violent offences at Rikers, even those who caused serious injury, were hardly ever charged. Rudy insisted that offenders behind bars be charged and sentenced just as they would be in the outside world. The only difference was, the additional sentence was tacked onto the one already being served. As soon as the inmates realized that Rudy meant what he said, the terrible violence slowed dramatically, then virtually stopped.
Amazing, isn’t it, how even the behaviour of hardened criminals can be changed with fear? But we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was fear of our parents that kept most of us on the more or less straight and narrow when we were kids. Today, fearing your parents, or anyone else, is pretty well outlawed, but it’s obvious that fear of getting caught and doing some serious jail time is the most effective crime prevention program available.
One of the contributing causes of crime is the knowledge it will not be seriously punished. Evidence abounds in any jurisdiction you care to examine.
Here are two rules you can take to the bank:
•The incidence of crime escalates in direct proportion to the lack of consequences;
•The more crime that goes unpunished, the more crime you will have.
Rudy Giuliani knew it. Today New Yorkers, even the most liberal among them, know it. And well they should because today New York has the lowest crime rate of all major American cities! From the worst, the most dangerous, to the safest. And all it took was eight years of wisdom and common sense!
I won’t go into all the other accomplishments of eight years of conservative polices, other than to say it wasn’t just the diminution of crime that revolutionized New York. The teacher-pupil ratio was greatly improved. The administration built or renovated more than 73,000 subsidized housing units and acquired more than 2,000 acres of new parkland.
All of this was accomplished while reducing the city payroll by more than 20,000 positions despite greatly increasing the number of police and teachers and substantially lowering taxes!
When Rudy took over New York, the city was bankrupt, pleading for help from other cities. When Rudy moved on, he had a budget surplus of almost $3 billion. The “Big Apple” isn’t rotten anymore.
It’s much the same story in several other cities. Cleveland, for example, pretty well followed New York’s example and is experiencing revitalization akin to that of New York and for the same reasons. On the other hand, cities such as Detroit, where the thug-hugging Left is still firmly in control, things are almost as bad as they ever were. It’s not only in Canada where the Left is blinded by ideology!
Here in Canada we’re doing things pretty much the way they were in New