Real truth about crime: Breathe easy, you're safer than you think

A lot of what you think about crime, writes John Roman of the Urban Institute, is just not true. Too much television, too many headlines and too much thinking it was better when you were little have made feel unsafe. "Fact: if you are under 40, on average you are safer now than you have ever been," Roman reports. Suburbs are safer than cities, yes, but "The trend is better for cities than suburbs. At the peak of the crime wave in 1991 there were 138 homicides in Prince George's County and 479 in Washington, D.C. Last year, there were 82 homicides in PG (down 40 percent) and 132 in DC (down almost 75 percent)."

Roman notes that the public also likes to believe that "there are two typical types of offenders: One is the brilliant loner psychopath who commits serial crimes and can’t be caught without the aid of large task forces, luck, and equally brilliant loner detectives. Fact: most criminals are far less educated, poorer, and sicker than the average American. Type two is the ruthless, soulless gang-banger who can only be contained (but never defeated) by armies of police. Fact: gang members are typically teenagers, generally in a gang for about a year before voluntarily leaving, and commit as many crimes against their fellow gang members as others. "

In taking apart the statistics, Roman has found astonishing facts that fly in the face of a lot of our perceived fears: "The FBI estimates that in 2008 a total of 155 children were kidnapped by strangers, thus a child is about 5 times more likely to drown than be kidnapped (and) of the almost 15,000 homicides in 2010, perhaps one percent were victims of a serial killer." (Read more)

As prescription drug abuse worsens, America's war on drugs is less a foreign fight than a domestic one

Policeman in Tegulcigalpa, Honduras
(NYT photo by Tomas Munita)

Surprising hardly anyone in rural America, the rest of the country is waking up to the fact that the drugs most likely to land us in emergency rooms cannot be interdicted at a border. Studies show that prescription painkillers, and stimulants to a lesser extent, are the nation’s biggest drug problem.

Of the 36,450 overdose deaths in the United States in 2008, Damien Cave and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times report, 20,044 involved a prescription drug, more than all illegal drugs combined. And while cocaine and heroin have been concentrated in big cities, prescription drug abuse is everywhere. “Today there is drug use in every county in Ohio, and the problem is worse in rural areas,” said Mike DeWine, the attorney general of Ohio.

So far, government and the health care industry response has been slow, Cave and Schmidt write. But momentum for a broader change in domestic drug policy appears to be building. Drug Enforcement Agency officials say they have recently created 37 “tactical diversion squads” focusing on prescription-drug investigations, with 26 more to be added over the next few year. The move has been prompted in part by the realization that drug interdiction in Mexico and Central America not only wasn't working but wasn't the problem, says Morris Panner, a former counternarcotics prosecutor in New York and at the American Embassy in Colombia, who is now an adviser at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The Times reporters note that the decades-old priority shift would have immediate impact throughout Mexico and Central America: "With the drug wars in Mexico inflaming violence, some argue that the money now used for interdiction could be better spent building up the institutions — especially courts and prosecutors’ offices — that would lead to long-term stability in Mexico and elsewhere." (Read more)

Congress continues federal timber payments

Federal payments to counties with national forest land will be extended after Congress voted to approve a transportation bill last week, that will also prevent student loan rates from doubling and save 2.8 million jobs by funding road and bridge projects across the country. The $100 million extension of timber payments will be a boon to rural counties that contain a high percentage of federal forest land and property, the leading example being Oregon.

The timing of the passage was "critical" for Oregon counties that have relied on timber payments, Charles Pope of The Oregonian reports, because most counties' fiscal year ends June 30. Without the extension, they would have been forced to close jails, schools, law off police officers and teachers and cut back essential services, including EMS, Pope writes. Lawmakers will use the year to discuss possible alternatives for the payments, which can be costly. (Read more)

High court says inmates can be counted in home voting districts, which are mostly urban

States can now count prison inmates at their last known address instead of their prison address for election redistricting purposes, according to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The decision upholds a districting map the Maryland General Assembly drew last year, David Hill of The Washington Times reports.

Activists had sued the state claiming the map violated the Constitution because it differed from the U.S. Census Bureau's policy of counting inmates at their prison address. “Critics of the federal policy say it has artificially inflated the populations and voting power of the often-rural districts that contain prisons, while reducing the influence of urban areas where many inmates formerly lived," Hill writes. Critics said prisoners don't use the resources of the prison's district, and should not be counted in those districts as a result. Some argued the map disenfranchised black voters and Republicans.

Maryland is one of four states that counts prisoners at their home addresses. The others are California, Deleware and New York. The ruling is expected to benefit Baltimore most since it has steadily lost residents and legislative seats, Hill reports. But, remote areas of Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore are likely to suffer because they "benefited in redistricting from numbers provided by inmates," Hill writes. (Read more)