What happens when you don't have enough police is that the priority rightfully goes on the serious crimes. Yet most criminals begin their career with the lesser crimes first, the livability crimes (truancy, loitering, selling small amounts of marijuana, prostitution). When they aren't caught for these, they go on to try more serious crimes. Think of it as a simple case of plumbing. The police are spending all their time and effort mopping up the water on the floor. There are no resources available to shut off the faucet. It is not a solvable problem as long as there is a steady flow at the input side (misdemeanor crimes).
But the problem is larger than that. When they go to wring out their mops, they are provided with buckets that have tubes that feed the water right back to the source. In other words, even when they take people off the streets, the courts let them go. When there are 18- and 19- and 20-year-olds who appear before the judges with 30, 40, even 60 prior arrests in the same area for the same offense and the judge once again gives them a 30-day stayed sentence with the condition that they not commit any same or similar crimes, why should they stop? There is no deterrent.
As a parent, most of us know that threatening to ground our children if they don't stop a given behavior has little effect after the 20th time we've said it but never carried it out. That is what is happening here. There have been cases where a young man is arrested twice on the same day for the same offense at a place from which he has been geographically restricted.
We need a total solution here that involves all the players. We need to give our kids the best opportunities to become good, positive young adults who are involved in their community in healthy ways. We need to support the parents by providing those opportunities. In Jordan, 60% of families are single parent families. If that parent works, the kids are not going to get as much supervision as they require. If they are a two-parent family, it's likely that both parents work just to stay solvent. Next, when those young people make negative choices, there needs to be immediate and effective consequences. Those consequences may be a restorative justice option or, when that doesn't work, incarceration. We all learn by experiencing the consequences of our choices. When we shield people from the consequences of their actions, we tell them that they can do anything they want to do without any consideration for the result. We teach them short-term thinking. We also are teaching them that no one cares what they do. And perhaps that's the greatest problem of all. When you don't think anyone cares about you, you don't think much about yourself. When you don't think well of yourself, you gravitate to those people and activities where you are going to feel like you belong, where someone cares. Gangs provide that to our youth if we don't provide it first.
Dottie
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